Armed with this new information, I bring you stories of commencement ridiculousness at schools with student bodies mature enough to take a little scrutiny.
Graduation has come and gone at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School. And while most Yale and Harvard graduates have jobs lined up for this fall, the transition from student to graduate did not go as smoothly as possible. At one school, a Supreme Court justice essentially had to crash the ceremonies. At another school, it seems the smart people organizing the event were totally flummoxed by the naturally occurring phenomenon of rain.
You’d think that with 380-plus years of combined experience, these two law schools could figure out how to run a graduation ceremony. But apparently there’s no accounting for common sense….
Yesterday I wrote about the Emory Law School commencement address delivered by Professor Sara Stadler. In it, she told graduating law student that their own “sense of entitlement” was standing in the way of their happiness.
I’ve got nothing against Professor Stadler or Emory Law, but I personally thought this was the wrong note to strike at a commencement address — and so did some Emory Law students, who contacted us about this in the first place.
But other Emory Law students disagreed. And after yesterday’s post went up, some students emailed Above the Law to express support for Professor Stadler and her message. They stated that she is an excellent teacher and was speaking at commencement by popular demand — Emory students voted on which faculty member they wanted to hear from.
Nobody raised a factual issue about what she said, and you can experience the full speech on YouTube. It’s just that some of the students really liked her address.
Fair enough. Professor Stadler’s critics have already had their say. Now let’s hear from some readers who appreciated and enjoyed her graduation remarks…
Honestly, I think it’s time to feel sorry for the Emory Law class of 2011. Things are tough for a lot of graduating law students, but the way the Emory administration and faculty have treated the class of ’11 is simply shocking. If you ranked ABA-accredited law schools based on how the administration reacts to student concerns, Emory would have to rate near the bottom.
We can’t know how Emory has been treating the class of ’11 internally, but the ridiculous public behavior started when U.S. News released its most recent law school rankings. Emory plummeted eight spots, one of the biggest drops within the first tier. Since then, the Emory administration has gone to such lengths to cover its ass that there’s been a run on butt plugs in Georgia.
All of the self-serving rhetoric and “blame the students” mentality crested during commencement, where the class of 2011 couldn’t even receive their diplomas without being scolded and condescended to…
Is it really that hard to make a commencement speech? I wrote one in high school. It was basically about seizing the day. My friend made one in college. Same theme, only in Latin. You can also make commencement speeches about giving back to your community, the importance of education, or how your generation is the most awesome generation ever to be generated. It’s not hard, people.
And yet people consistently screw it up. Today we have two different ways that people can screw up a commencement speech — one example from an old person, one example from a young person. One example from a very good law school, one example from a school that isn’t ranked that highly.
Apparently, anybody can screw up a commencement address if they try hard enough….
Are tickets to law school commencement like organs? Or babies?
They’re not as necessary as organs, and they’re not as adorable as babies. But are graduation tickets, like organs and babies, so sacred that we should not allow them to be distributed through the free market?
(Some folks, like certain Chicago School law-and-economics types, think that we should be allowed to sell organs and/or babies. For better or worse, however, the rest of society hasn’t gone along with them.)
Let’s take a look at the commencement controversy brewing at one noteworthy law school….
Oh, I kid the grammar nazis because I’m really bad at it and making jokes is easier than contemplating my own shortcomings. But even I can acknowledge that some typos are distracting. Give me another sentence and I’ll show you — or maybe I have already (that’s an honest question: I’ve got no damn clue just at the moment).
Luckily, I write on the internet, and I have a legion of free copy editors who are happy to help me correct mistakes in real time. If I worked in a more permanent medium… well, let’s just say that I hope that never happens.
Let’s just pray that I’m never in charge of writing copy for people’s graduation ceremonies. Those memories are supposed to last a lifetime and you just wouldn’t want administrative carelessness to ruin anything. You simply don’t want mistakes like this invitation to a law school commencement…
We told you yesterday that Michigan Law has decided to invite Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) to speak to its 3L class for senior day. We told you that many Michigan Law students have objected to the choice of Senator Portman, because of his strong anti-gay rhetoric on the issue of gay marriage.
We told you that Michigan Law Dean Evan Caminker — the hottest law school dean in America, by the way — didn’t respond to our request for comment. We wondered, though, if he would dig in his heels against the LGBT community at his school, or if he would try to be sensitive to the concerns of minorities at his school who would like to enjoy basic civil rights.
Well, Dean Caminker decided to dig in, and in so doing kind of totally missed the point…
What’s more strange about that headline? That Michigan Law would invite a guy who stands against the civil rights of certain members of the Michigan Law community, or that Michigan Law would invite a representative from Ohio to speak to its outgoing students?
I’m going with the latter. Rob Portman graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1984, but he has gone on to become the junior senator from Ohio. Ohio! In related news, Bo Schembechler was born in Ohio and went to college at Miami of Ohio, but I don’t think he was ever the keynote speaker during an Ohio athletics Hall of Fame ceremony.
Sadly, the fact that Michigan invited a guy who has taken a strong stance against the civil rights of gay people probably isn’t that out of the ordinary. Sure, at some point these anti-gay-marriage people will look as tolerant as pre-conversion George Wallace in front of a desegregated schoolhouse. But right now these enemies of love get to walk among us as regular people.
Guys at my high school used to have ignorant and flawed views about gay people all the time. It was no big deal.
But some students at Michigan Law are trying to make it a big deal. And that’s pretty exciting….
There’s poor, there’s broke, and then there’s whatever you would call the economic state of current law students. They are up against it, and they know it.
It’s particularly tough on 3Ls. We’re in March, so graduating law students without jobs lined up are about to get kicked out of school and on to the street (or “mother’s basement” or “youth hostel” or whatever). So right now is about the time when these kids really start to freak out.
At one law school, fear and angst are reaching a fever pitch, over the most trivial of things. The soon-to-be graduates are having a conniption over having to pay $136 to rent a cap and gown for graduation.
Yep, some of these kids took on tens of thousands of dollars in order to go to law school, but now — at the end — they’re making a stand over a hundred bucks…
Grumpy old editor here. In my day, commencement was a simple affair. You showed up massively hung over and baked in the hot sun for a few hours. Eventually someone begrudgingly called your name, and you received your diploma.
It was a simpler time. A time when you didn’t have to worry about whether or not the very venue of your graduation was unconstitutional. You didn’t have to worry about protesting your commencement speaker.
Ah, those were the days. But now it’s a different world. In Arizona, they are up in arms over racial profiling.
At Cardozo, new Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance will be giving the commencement address. You’d think that wouldn’t be a controversial choice, but oh you’d be wrong…
It’s May. Soon it will be June. The class of 2010 is about to graduate. And sure, everything will suck for them, but let’s give them their due:
Ahh, that’s the good stuff.
But sometime after that song is played, and before the students become acquainted with the nutritional properties of mayonnaise sandwiches, somebody will try to stand up and put their aborted legal careers in some sort of context.
Who will be doing the commencement address at your law school this year? More importantly, are any of the speakers hiring?
How much would you pay to go see graduation at New York Law School? Nothing? Don’t be so sure. What if I asked: how much would you pay to go see a very slow moving trainwreck where you had no moral or ethical duty to save any of the passengers?
Ah ha, see, you’d pay something to see that. And one New York Law Student wants to know how much. From Craigslist:
COME SEE 300 OR SO UNEMPLOYED LAW GRADS SWEAT OUT PAYING BACK THEIR LAW SCHOOL LOANS!
Graduation is tomorrow and tickets are still available! Let’s check out all the details…
As a denizen of New York City, I find that I have to deal with people who could be cast members on The Jersey Shore all the time. They clog up my 4 train when the Yankees are playing. They bounce at bars and clubs. Here in the city, you can even see them in their natural habitat, Gold’s Gym.
That’s why I was surprised when students at NYU Law School offered $2,000 in an unsuccessful attempt to get Snooki to come out and party with them. Why buy the landfill when you can get trash for free?
But in the hearty Midwest, it’s a little easier to understand why the cast from Jersey Shore can be so compelling. I mean, from the perspective of a Midwesterner, the cast of Jersey Shore must look like an alien species. I bet a Midwesterner would look at J-WOWW with the same level of fascination I’d regard Michele Bachmann. “What does it eat?” “Can I pet it?” “If I use a sentence comprised entirely of polysyllabic words, will its head explode?”
So, I have a modicum of understanding for the underground movement happening at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Here’s part of a letter that Above the Law received yesterday:
Dear AbovetheLaw,
I am a third-year law student at the University of Wisconsin Law School. My graduation is fast approaching and so far we (my classmates and I) have not heard who is going to be our guest speaker. However, the last thing I want to hear during my graduation is how great we are for becoming young lawyers, and that we have such a promising future ahead, especially considering our employment options currently. Instead a couple of classmates and I have come up with this great idea. If our futures are going to dissolve following graduation, we want to go down “guns blazing.” We want to raise money in order to bring the cast of Jersey Shore to come as our guest speakers.
Wasn’t this the setup for The Simple Life?
Are the Wisconsin students serious? More details after the jump.
As was evident last year, I kind of get giddy around the time colleges and law schools start picking their commencement speakers. I don’t know why. You remember graduation for the rest of your life and it’s interesting to me to see the people your school picks to give you a proper send-off.
And you never know when commencement will put you in the prime seat for history changing news. Remember, the Marshall Plan was unveiled at Harvard Commencement, 1947.
The highlight of last year’s law school commencement speaker circuit was Columbia’s choice of former California Governor Gray Davis. Obviously, I’m talking about “highlight” in terms of comedic value. I mean, any time you can invite a (failed) Governor to speak at your school, it’s an opportunity you have to take.
It’s a little bit early to start a full tally of law school commencement speakers. But one of the early entries is pretty exciting.
Check out who is coming to Brooklyn Law School this spring, after the jump.
Ed. note: This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past five years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com
Happy Chinese New Year! We were extremely busy the past few months, including most of our US based team working from our Hong Kong offices during November and December.
As a follow up from our recent post, which listed our 62 US associate and counsel placements in Asia last year (vast majority in HK / China), please note that thus far in January ’12, we have already made seven US associate and counsel placements in Asia. This is an especially impressive number, considering the biglaw lateral hiring market in Asia is down right now (see state of the market brief overview below). These new placements are of new hires in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, who were interviewing with their new firm for a month or more and they are spread out among different practice areas, including project finance, litigation, fund formation, M&A and cap markets. We are close on four additional new associate placements, in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai, that we expect to close soon. We do not discuss partner placements in these articles, but the pace of partner recruitment in Asia (a large part of our business) has continued.
Hedge Fund In-House Openings in Hong Kong
We are seeing a small run of new in-house openings in Hong Kong at hedge funds. We are currently filling three different in-house positions at three different hedge funds in Hong Kong, two of these searches we are handling on an exclusive basis. All three will most likely be filled by a US associate, with about 4 to 6 years of experience. Mandarin not required. Candidates from NYC and London will be considered, but at one of these funds the new hire will likely come from Hong Kong / China or Singapore (with HK being the strong preference).
Please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com if you are interested in these hedge fund openings. As you probably would expect, the competition for these spots will be fierce and the funds will be very selective when choosing which candidates to interview.
In 2009, a small group of Harvard Law School students noticed an absurd monopoly in the bar prep space, held by an unchallenged leader with a non-evolving product. In response, these students teamed up with Harvard Law alumni to launch BarMax on January 14, 2010.
The mission: democratize bar prep by embracing new technologies to provide the very best bar exam review courses at a fraction of the cost normally associated with these courses.
Since then, with the encouragement of thousands of students and an unwavering commitment to their success, BarMax has established itself as a comprehensive alternative to the stagnant, over-priced status quo.
As we continue to expand, we do not want to lose sight of the basic premises that led us to create BarMax in the first place. If you are a law student who believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with being forced to take out yet another loan to pay for a $4,000 bar exam prep course, you are not alone.
Here are a couple of things I learned last week:
Continue reading “Even Harvard and Yale Couldn’t Pull Off Flawless Commencements”
