Thursday, November 23, 2006

2006 BIGGEST TURKEY AWARDS



Yes, Turkey Day means turkeys and there are many to go around. So, the ten worse privilege protecting decisions, people, or programs for 2006:

1. The Sloan Foundation Grant Program designed to increase job flexibility for university professors. (Not kidding. It's like growth hormones for Yao Ming.) The is easily number 1.

2. Appointment Committees that pass on candidates who graduated in the top ten from non elite schools in favor of "honors" grads of elite law schools.

3. Initiating a summer program in a western European country. (The supply already exceeds any possible measure of demand by students.)

4. Publishing yet another symposium issue composed of members of one choir or another preaching to each other.

5. Initiating (or electing not to discontinue) an IP program or Review. That bandwagon is completely full.

6. Initiating another specialty journal that is not refereed. Why would you do this???

7. Any Dean who views him or herself as an "agent for the faculty."

8. Allowing anyone to teach a 9 hour or lower teaching load who is not publishing the equivalent of a major (and new, not recycled) article a year.

9. Allowing paranoid tenure candidates to influence or complain about the selection of their reviewers without being swatted. This does not mean that they should not be permitted to reply to unfair reviews (if any actually exist).

10. You, if you let personal gain or social considerations (positive or negative) influence your vote on anything taken up in a faculty meeting.

11. Tax and other non public interest LLM programs charging less than full cost tuition.

12. Choosing Dante over Drew. Ok, so there are 12 and this has nothing to do with legal education. Get used to it. In the "Law Professor and Law Dean Actual Code of Professional Conduct" it actually says: "Professors and Deans are entitled to 100 Truth Mulligans per year or as many as necessary which ever is higher." That's section 203.11 (or so).

Yum!!

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