Having written of the ugly underbelly of legal academia, and leaving that nasty taste in one’s mouth, Louisville Law School Dean Jim Chen provides the MoneyLaw pepto bismol to sooth the burn.  His inspiration comes from the movie Breaking Away.

It’s the thirtieth anniversary of one of my all-time favorite movies, Breaking Away. As this musical tribute suggests, it’s an extremely sentimental movie about growing up, intergenerational conflict, class warfare, and an underdog who (in the parlance of European pop music) ultimately gets everything but the girl — and doesn’t crash and burn over that outcome. F. Scott Fitzgerald, eat your heart out. Even though I now run the asylum after having served several unhappy sentences in American higher education, and even though the pickup line par excellence has shifted from Posso ofrirti qualcosa da bere, signorina? to Σ’αγαπώ πολύ, κορίτσι μού, I still love Breaking Away. Always did, always will.

Jim confront’s the retort to Jeffrey Harrison’s challenge that was earlier posted by Co-Op’s own Dave Hoffman, itself in response to Jim’s post about Shane Battier :

The problem with the Moneylaw approach to faculty rewards is that it has failed to fully define what universities are designed to maximize. That’s not an easy question to answer, obviously, and I don’t think there’s just one approach. For a few law schools, like Florida-Coastal, that answer is obvious: to make money. For others, law school’s function as a profit center within a larger university umbrella. . . . But for most law schools, the ultimate criterion of faculty success is just unclear. Giving students a return on their investment is much of it, but it’s not the whole story, since tuition doesn’t pay nearly all the bills. We’ve responsibilities to alumni donors, to the State, to the Bar, etc. Shane Battier just needs to help his team win games. We don’t know what winning is. We don’t know what game we’re playing. And who’s our team again?

Hard questions?  Indeed.  But true to his beliefs and inspiration, Jim provides an answer:

In a MoneyLaw world, law schools win if their students — at graduation, five years out, whenever — don’t ask for a refund. Here’s the thought experiment that explains what I mean: Imagine that every law student, upon matriculation, gets a magic button. At any moment, before and after graduation, if a student wishes that she or he had done anything but go to law school, that student can mash the magic button and thereby get a refund. Of course, the legal education and everything it confers — the degree, the subsequent bar passage (if any), the eventual career (again, if any) — will vaporize in that instance.

For every student who would elect this option, MoneyLaw regards this choice as a devastating loss for the school in question. This is what it means to “win” in higher education: running your school so that your students and graduates never regret having set foot on your campus.

This is not merely a matter of remembering why they erected all those ivy covered buildings, but revolutionary.  It’s all about the students.  That’s what law schools, deans and lawprofs need to worry about.  You make them lawyers and we’ll take it from there.

But I offer a few caveats to put some flesh on those bones.  Stop taking on students because they mean another tuition payment, and start admitting only those kids who truly want to be lawyers, who have a clue what being a lawyer means and what a lawyer does.  You sow the seeds of your own discontent by allowing the law to become the profession of last resort, merely to glom up the student loan loot.

Cut your numbers.  By half.  One factor that brings enormous disrepute, and disappointment, is that we have far more lawyers coming out of law schools than our society can absorb.  When law students emerge from your halls into ours, they will be smacked in the face with this reality and demand that refund.  There won’t be enough high-paying jobs for them.  The jobs won’t be fun.  Their future won’t be secure.  Their loan debt won’t be easily paid off.  They won’t be happy with their choice. You know it.  We know it. They need to know it too.

End the stranglehold of “publish or perish.”  Let’s talk honestly here.  Can anyone really justify law review articles on due process at the Ministry of Magic?  But force lawprofs to write for their meal ticket, and write they will.  It’s not merely embarrassing, but diverts attention and the perks of performance from their now-forgotten purpose, teaching students to be lawyers.  Law schools have long since eschewed the Socratic Method (it hurts students’ feelings) and law taught by lawyers with experience (they aren’t sufficiently scholarly), because they don’t play well at US News and World Reports. 

It’s been made painfully plain to me by a number of my lawprof “pals” in the blawgosphere that you don’t appreciate hearing from real lawyers, telling you how to run your shop or what’s wrong with the Academy.  Tough.  We live with the results of your mess, and the fact that you would prefer to hide in the Ivory Tower than confront the criticism doesn’t mean that the dissatisfaction isn’t happening and isn’t real. 

Instead of sending me “private” emails asking me to tone down the criticism, and that I don’t get it because I can’t possibly understand the pressures of academia, make your case in the comments and see if it can withstand “peer” scrutiny.   If you’ve got the guts.