Welcome to the Asylum.

I honestly can't remember which path led me to this professor's blog. But it's a blog by one of my favorite professors (who I must REALLY like, since I still recommend him to friends and am taking another class with him even though I didn't get the grade I had hoped for in my first class with him). His posts, or at least those I've had time to read from the last few months, revolve around hiring practices, tenure, and class bias in the law school world. I find it fascinating, and agree with so much of what he says. The posts about tenure and the need to publish affecting the quality of teaching is right on point (to my naive, law student mind). I suggest it to anyone interested in class bias or law school at all, it's a great perspective. I also would like to share the following comments to one of his posts:

Anonymous said...

Taken together, your UF anecdotes lead me to conclude that the place is an absolute insane asylum.

10:53 AM

Jeff Harrison said...

Maybe but remember not all anecdotes are from UF. In fact, I am told by some readers that it sounds like I am describing their schools. Frankly, I wonder why any law school should be different. I have concluded, for what it's worth, that it just takes a small number of people at the margin to change the entire personality of a school. As you may know I often describe the problem as destruction of the commons. How many of the partipants in the commons does it take to destroy it? The answer is far less than a majority. So if you have a few advantage-taking faculty and a majority that that look away, healty norms are not established and the common suffers. The real question is can it recover?

3:44 PM

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I'm a big fan of the asylum analysis. Levin High is so often crazy, underneath a very thin veneer of excellence and responsibility. And it doesn't seem like the "common" is recovering from the madness any time soon.

I wonder if it's something the students could affect at all, or if those changes would have to come through the faculty and administration? If we demanded a better education and insisted that our professors spent more time teaching and less time writing useless articles, would we be learning the basic legal concepts that get skipped in deference to conferences and publishing deadlines? If we refused to allow incompetent and offensive professors "teach" us (when they bother to show up) and insisted that our professors prepare adequately for class and adopt teaching styles that work, would anyone listen?

Student evaluations handed in at the end of the semester are useless, as everyone knows. But the power of speech is powerful outside those "evaluations." If current law students let prospective students know that the quality of professors is sketchy at best at the "flagship" law school in the state university system, would that light a fire in the right offices? Change can only come from within- but can transient students, who are halfway through their legal education before they know they've been cheated, do anything to change their school for the better?

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Florida. This has been a great choice for me and I'm happy here. But I recognize that the education I'm getting has room for improvement, and I'd like to think that UF is always getting better.