It’s not like she was emailing the President of the United States or someone genuinely important or busy. These are professors, and not professors of astrophysics or bioengineering. They are law professors. We take long vacations, eat out a lot, and study the insides of our eyelids frequently.
— Professor Michele Dauber of Stanford Law School, defending yesterday’s overzealous Yale Law networker (in a comment on my Facebook page).
(A collection of possible reactions to the story, plus a reader poll, after the jump.)
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Reader responses to the story could be grouped under the following broad categories:
1. The prospective law student acted like a tool:
“What kind of advice could she possibly have been asking for? Sounds like she was trying to brag her way into YLS — which can be done, but you can’t be such an impertinent twit about it.”
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“What an idiot.”
2. The Yale professors acted like tools:
“Yale looks like douches for this. And they are.”
“I don’t really get this. What was she doing? E-mailing? You can ignore or even block those.”
3. Yale responded reasonably:
“I just don’t see the problem here with Yale’s response. They were polite about it. Who knows how many times she bugged each prof individually, but I also don’t see that it’s out of line for them to forward her email to the admissions office to at least find out if she’s an admitted student or enrolling in the fall before deciding to answer her. Admissions probably took it from there.”
4. “[W]ho the f**k would hire someone to clerk for them a year before they even begin law school?”
Readers, what do you think?
[poll id=”231″]
Earlier: Prospective Student Pesters And Annoys Yale Faculty