Ignorant bloviating about Whittier

I could not agree more with Northwestern Dean Dan Rodriguez:

Whittier's sudden closing is obviously a tough thing for current students and faculty.  Perhaps the decision will be unraveled in the face of public pressure or via littigation.  Yet there seems precious little basis to jump into a matter whose complex issues are essentially private, despite the efforts of many in and around the school to make this into a public spectacle.  Perhaps bloggers should neither aid nor abet these efforts.

The hubris of the unknowing. 

Sometimes Stephen Diamond (Santa Clara) has been a voice of reason amidst the mindless blather about law schools in most of cyberspace (and I have linked to him on a number of occasions over the years), but here he has completely missed the boat:  the general legal market has been improving, true, but it is hardly mysterious why an institution would close a law school where far fewer than half the graduates even pass the bar.  Diamond just politely ignores all the relevant facts about how this school's graduates have been faring, and, of course, is ignorant of the actual finances of the school.

But far more egregious is the presumptuous intervention of Robert Anderson, Associate Professor of Law at Pepperdine.  Faculty members at Whittier are going to lose their jobs, and some may never work again as law teachers or work again at all.  Yet Anderson has the audacity to scold them for not having taken an early retirement in the financial interest of the school.   Seriously?  Does Prof. Anderson pay the bills for any members of that faculty, does he know about their college-age children or their elderly parents or their chronic medical conditions that require a salary and a health insurance plan?  Does he know that a job is not just a paycheck for many people (maybe not Robert Anderson), but a focal point of purpose and meaning in a life?  Does he know that many did take early retirement a few years ago, and that others might have quite reasonably believed that the school's fortunes, now that both its faculty and student body were smaller, would rebound?

I'm sure Anderson doesn't know any of these things, he's just another blogging blowhard who has decided to use someone else's misery as an opportunity to attract some attention to himself.  Anderson is guilty of far worse than unknowing hubris.

UPDATE:  Some choice quotes from Prof. Anderson's posts:

"The reason Whittier is closing is because of intransigent, highly paid, unproductive law professors hang around for decades even when they haven't published anything or updated their courses since they were doing the Macarena."

 

"The unfortunate truth of this story [about Whitter] is that none of this needed to happen..... The number of retirement-age faculty was (and is) enormous, likely larger than it has ever been. If faculties had looked beyond their own personal financial self interest they could have easily contracted to meet the market demand and avoided the disastrous effects that have afflicted law students and now law schools. Sadly, the very faculty members whose institution provided them an outrageously rewarding career over many decades seemed the least likely to 'pay it forward' by helping to reduce expenses....Thus, the story of Whittier is a story of generational wealth shifting that is seen throughout tuition dependent law schools, and indeed throughout our country."