How to be a hated Professor

How a Law Professor can guarantee that he/she will be hated.

1) Try as hard as you can to focus on background material and abstract theory. The less likely something is to be on a test, or be useful later on in life, the more time you should spend on it.

2) Try to avoid anything that could appear on the bar. Just because your students have accrued tens of thousands of dollars of crippling debt in the hopes that they will be able to pass the bar exam is no reason for you to try and help them with that. It's far more important to have intellectually stimulating conversation.

3) Make sure your intellectual conversation is liberally biased and any conservative or moderate thought is reviled. Take extra care to point out that anything written by Scalia is wrong and must be dismissed simply because he wrote it. Try and underline as often as you can that he doesn't belong on the court and that law professors hate him.

4) When discussing a case, try and drag the case out as long as you can. Sure, Brown v. Bd. of Education is only 4 pages long, but make sure you spend several class periods on it. Repeat yourself endlessly and make sure to waste a lot of time analyzing the case from different viewpoints.

5) Pay close attention to minute unimportant details of a case. Torture students for several minutes as to why a name in the case might be misspelled, then tell them the answer. Whatever you do, obscure the important law in the case. The class should leave the room wondering, "Why did we read that?"

6) Randomly triple your students' workload. Make sure to act like yours is the only class the students have. If you have to cancel a class, make sure that you schedule a makeup class at an inconvenient time and add an extra writing assignment. You should make sure that the students pay for any of your mistakes.

7) Waste student time with writing assignments. Since you don't actually teach your students anything, there's no real reason for them to do the reading. In order to make sure they do the reading, add writing assignments and other wastes of time.

8) Do not, for any reason, prepare your students for the final. The final is close to 100% of their grades, so you should try to make them as nervous as possible about it. Make sure that all questions are overly broad and could not possibly be answered. Try to test on vague and unimportant things.

9) If at all possible, make sure most of the final covers a topic not introduced until the final week of class.

10) Schedule a review session, but make sure it's unproductive. Don't give any help that could relate in any way to the final.

11) Turn in your grades late. Remember, rankings, scholarships, law review, and a whole host of other things are dependent on grades, so try to hold everyone up as much as you can. Try to aim for the lowest justifiable curve. Try to ruin the greatest number of lives with as much casual indifference as you possibly can.