I don't get really angry at a lot of things. I certainly don't get angry at people who make mistakes. I believe that people should be allowed to make mistakes and then correct them. The only time mistakes make me angry is when the people who make them refuse to correct their mistakes and continue to engage in the same kind of behavior that led them to the mistakes in the first place.
That is why Boyd Law School makes me angry. I cannot recall hearing of an institution so stupidly and recklessly mismanaged as this law school. Not only does Boyd continue to get things wrong, but it obstinately refuses to change its behavior. It's Standard Operation Procedure has increasingly been one of callous indifference to the students it should be serving. Boyd has lost its way and with every slip up it has been the students who have been asked to take the consequences. Here are but a few ways in which Boyd law has failed its students.
Diversity
Most of us agree that diversity is a good thing, especially in higher education. Exposure to diverse viewpoints helps students contemplate a problem in different ways and see how people with different ideas might view a situation. This kind of diversity helps students in the legal profession by enabling them to develop broader, richer, and more far reaching arguments. Recently, Boyd has struggled greatly to increase ethnic diversity in its faculty. However, striving for this kind of diversity, and only this kind of diversity has cost Boyd to lose sight of a different kind of diversity: Academic diversity. The whole point of diversity is to expose students to different ideas, but the faculty at Boyd as more and more become ideologically homogeneous. They all look at the law the same way and have the same political ideals. There is only one professor at the school who will admit to being ideologically conservative, and he has been relegated to teaching night classes. Because almost all of the professors look at the law in the same way, students are not being exposed to the full spectrum of ideas. It is as if the legal world is a piano and all of the professors play the same note. There is a rich symphony of other notes that the students are not hearing. My favorite class this past year was one in which Prof. Shoben and Prof. Pollman introduced many different ways at looking at the law, even some they admittedly disagreed with or were not entirely sold on. It opened my eyes and it changed the way I thought and argued. However, this class has been the sad exception to the rule. Most classes are taught by professors who all look at the law the same way. Priests to the dogmatic legal religion approved by the administration.
I do not argue that racial diversity is a bad thing or that we shouldn't be trying to increase minority presence at Boyd. On the contrary, an increase in racial diversity, in the student body particularly, would be a good thing. However, we should also be striving to increase academic diversity. Professors with backgrounds in many different types of law, with many different political and academic beliefs would enhance the education at Boyd. However, the school has gone completely the other way. We have a multi-ethnic faculty who all say pretty much the same thing no matter who you ask.
Bar Prep
If the recent schedule is any indication, Boyd's new educational philosophy is "Thank God For BarBri." The small number of classes taught on Bar subjects can generously be described as embarrassing. Too many of the Bar classes that have been featured cover precious little that could actually be tested on the bar. Too often the class has been used as a pulpit for a professor to spout narrow political ideology and proselyte for their cause. A number of my friends have privately related that they just tune out in class during the political stump speeches, planning on learning the subject in their bar prep. This kind of thing is a disgrace. Boyd students go thousands of dollars into debt to get a legal education that they will have a very hard time paying for if they do not pass the bar. You would think that the institutions first priority would be to teach the students everything it possibly could to get them through the bar. However my experience has shown that the bar is most often an afterthought in too many classes.
Serving the Students
There has been a lot of controversy with the latest schedule and the administration has taken a lot of flak because of it. All of it has been deserved. This schedule amounts to nothing less than a slap in the face to students. However, the surprising thing is not that the school would put out a schedule which basically spits in the face of its students, or that it would obstinately refuse to do anything to fix the schedule. The surprising thing is that any of the students were surprised by the school's actions. The school's has never listened to students and any requests for input were merely token gestures at best. One need look no farther than the Professor Burnham debacle, in which a highly qualified and popular professor was dumped by the administration for spurious reasons, to see how the administration regards its students. Professor Burnham wanted to stay, the students loved him, the administration told him to take a hike. This is merely one example of the lengthy list of times that the administration chose its own wishes over the students. Far too often the Boyd response to student wishes has been "We don't care what you think. Deal with it." Thus, it should have come as a surprise to no one that Boyd Law would put out a schedule making life rough for working students. It certainly came as no surprise to me that the administration refused to eliminate the ten minute overlaps between morning classes that currently make it impossible for a student to take all of his or her classes in the morning. Personally, I laughed when the administration response was that any change in the schedule, even an obvious problem solver like pushing classes back ten minutes, would simply be unmanageable. It does cause me to wonder how the administration can deliver such a pathetic lie and then imagine it has any shred of credibility left with its students. I also can't help but wonder why the administration would make a schedule that requires students to come in the morning, and then not offer any more classes at night. Students who have jobs will have to spend extra gas making the trip back to Boyd every night. Students who simply don't have a job but don't wish to remain at the law school where the temperature in studying facilities is always unbearable will also have to shell out for extra gas to leave and come back. But hey, no problem, it's not like gas has dramatically increased in price lately, right?
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So once again, the student are given the short end of the stick and told to lump it. That's fine. I'd expect nothing less from an institution that doubles its tuition and then cuts its services. I'm fine with all of it. I've looked into transferring to other schools for the final year, if I could find one I liked and could get through the bureaucratic nightmare of transferring , I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I know I probably won't. I'll probably stick it out and suffer one more year of Boyd. That's fine, I'll live. One thing I will never do though, is be happy about it. I will not give glowing reviews of this school if asked. I will certainly never, ever, give one more dime to this school than is required to get a diploma. Boyd, don't bother calling me and asking for Alumni donations, you won't get them. You've made it pretty clear that you don't care about me, so don't think that I will ever care about you. I will never donate, I will not attend alumni functions, I may even skip graduation. I have to live with you until May, but after that, you are dead to me and you will never see me again.
Sincerely,
Brad Sims, 3L
