It started with a whiny post about a law student who blew off her summer job as a research assistant when she got a gig as a summer associated.  She sent NYU lawprof  Roderick Hills an email apologizing, but this wasn’t nearly enough for Rick.  She should have genuflected.

Rick Hills complained about the student leaving him high and dry, failing to make an act of sufficient contrition, and asked the crowd at PrawfsBlawg whether the student’s failing reflect a lack of “professional ethics,” or whether he was being an oversensitive curmudgeon.  For this, he got a universal smack down, and subsequently removed the post for his lack of discretion in posting the content of the student’s email.

At first, he apologized, though not for his inappropriate smear of the good name of curmudgeons.  But that was only the first step.  Rick Hills took matters a step further, and a step sideways, by taking an introspective look at how and why he could have been so utterly clueless.

“Privileged cluelessness” is the state of being oblivious about how one’s words or acts might affect others because of some privilege that one enjoys even as one forgets that one enjoys it. At its core, it is one’s loss of social empathy as a result of some advantage enjoyed over one’s audience.

It is no big surprise that professors are often guilty of privileged cluelessness. We hold the proverbial conch shell for so long in the classroom that we can easily forget that our position of perceived authority and actual power deprives us of useful feedback about the effects of our words and actions. Our “provocative” comments come off as pompous or arrogant; our lectures, riveting in our own minds, are, in reality, an opportunity for our students’ e-mailing checking or web browsing. Students are understandably cowed at providing feedback to such an authority figure, and professors can easily overlook how students’ sense of self-worth can be disrupted by the professors’ questions intended as provocative but coming across as humiliating.

Significantly, Hills also recognized that privileged cluelessness affects the dynamic of the Academy when it’s challenged.

Closer to law school home, Brian Tamanaha’s new book, Failing Law Schools, is a tough and coldly clinical examination of how law schools have become insulated from their students’ economic and professional reality.

His sidestep comes in addressing the anonymous commentary at Campos’ blog harshly criticizing him.  Regardless of the merit of his analogy, that mean anon commenters are the same as privileged clueless professors (which I found fairly unpersuasive), he would have done better not to try to dilute a post about academic cluelessness by shifting focus and, perhaps, blame.

Still, Hills’ post, taken in conjunction with the many other things happening in and around academia, may be a breakthrough.  Rick Hill is old guard, the establishment.  While others from Paul Campos who has been branded a turncoat and marginalized despite his becoming beloved by the miserable children, and  Brian Tamanaha and Bill Henderson, who are leading the charge for change, Hills is firmly planted in inertia.  He was so far from the edge that he couldn’t see it with a telescope.  And yet, with this post, he admits to his epiphany.

As the legal profession is faced with a multitude of problems, some of which come from the law school end of things while many others from the practice side, one of the most intractable problems is the refusal of academics to become part of the larger discussion and, hopefully, a better solution. They hide in their ivory towers so their delicate ears don’t hear the cries of law students or trench lawyers alike. If I was to call them privileged clueless, they would harrumph and whisper about how mean and vulgar I am to attack them. Even the ones who agree with me would complain that I was insulting to my natural allies.

But Rick Hills said it.  Rick Hills is beginning to see it. Maybe this is the crack in the door that will allow others to realize they too live in a world of privileged cluelessness that has allowed them to rationalize ignoring their contribution to a failing profession. Maybe this is the start of a discussion where lawprofs will stop behaving like prissy spinsters and recognize that we’re all in this together.

The comments to Hills’ post are more than forgiving for his trespasses. Likely too forgiving, as on introspective post does not a saint make.  But it’s a start.  Some comments by lawprofs applauding Hill’s condemnation of the inherent pomposity and arrogance of the privileged class are themselves so pompous and arrogant as to remind us that there is a very long way to go.  The problem with cluelessness is that it’s clueless, and cluelessness runs deep.

This isn’t going to be an easy transition, assuming that Hills’ post generate further discussion and maybe some sincere self-reflection within the academy.  So many have spent their lives hiding behind the mantle of scholar that they will never be able to admit that they aren’t so very special, so superior, that they can concede their role in a failing system. They’ve spent so much effort turning up their nose at grumbling of the groundlings, the stench of the trench, that any concession now will be brutally painful.

And yet, without this recognition, they will never be part of the larger conversation, and whatever changes occur in legal education will happen without recognition of how it integrates into the profession as a whole, and how the consequences of ill-conceived changes designed by committees of the privileged clueless don’t fix the problems.

Rick Hills’ post may signal the beginning of a change in legal academia.  If it serves as such a breakthrough, maybe we have a chance at shoring up the crumbling foundations of law schools, and consequently the legal profession.  I certainly hope so.  And if it will help, I promise never to call the lawprofs a “circle jerk” again (I know how much they hate that phrase). 

If Rick Hills and the other lawprofs comes down from the ivory tower, we can come out of the trench. Perhaps we can find a nice place where we can all meet, with neither privilege nor cluelessness, and do something useful to help our profession.

Update:  It appears that my words cut so sharply that Rick ran back to the  bosom of the professoriate seeking succor from his own kind.  What’s interesting is that while his self-assessment doesn’t jibe with the information I was told about him, he doesn’t question why others may not see him in quite the same way as he sees himself.

No matter, since it wasn’t meant to hurt his fragile feelings. Sadly, though, it appears that the end of privileged cluelessness may be farther away than I thought.  Wishful thinking that lawprofs could move beyond their effete world and join the larger one, even though they pretend amongst themself that lawyers seek their approval for legitimacy. You can’t make this stuff up.

What is sad, however, is that we need our delicate friends in academia to join the mainstream so they don’t cause more trouble than they’ve already done, but it’s not going to be easy to get them to put on big boy pants and come out and play.