Welcome Back To Law School!

A message from university administration to students and faculty (oh, and staff!).

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We here at LPB University are very pleased to have an official in-person return to school! We all recognize that distance education, once touted as amazing and wonderful and awesome, is not the same as in-person instruction. Wow, did we learn that quickly over 20 years!

We want to assure you we will make your classroom experience as safe as can be. No, we cannot require masks or vaccinations because of legislation and executive orders, but there are still ways we can keep you safe all while still making you pay for parking.

Speaking of parking, parking permits must be paid in advance and will no longer be available via payroll deduction. We learned last year that deceased faculty and staff no longer get paid and thus deviously skip out on final payments.

Your professors can keep your classrooms less than full. In other words, if the densities get too big, they can rotate some of you to Zoom. It’s important that all of you get one in-classroom exposure to education. Oops. Sorry.  Experience. Not exposure. Forgot to read my talking points!

Your professors may also make the nonmasking people sit in the back while the masked people sit up front. Or vice versa.  Sure, you are all breathing the same air, but it gives the professor the optics of doing something to mitigate COVID-19 risk while realizing all this time the university is doing … its best. And, it’s like when the male profs were in gym class and teams were “shirts” and “skins.” So won’t that be fun?

Of course, if you have serious health issues, you may request accommodations from the university. I should warn you that, given the surprising spike in requests, it may take more than one semester to approve your request. In the meantime, please continue to proceed with live instruction. We are sorry if this causes any hardship. We cannot approve any overtime.

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Regardless, if some of you are online and others are in class, it just means twice the work for professors (who we think are grossly overpaid — we need more adjuncts) all the while someone will complain about the experience.  Sure, it’s the worst of all possible worlds, but I think when you deliberate for as long as your administrators have, you’ll see this is the best solution. “Hybrid” is Latin for compromise!

A shout-out to the staff of LPB University, who were required to return to campus months ago. These devoted servants, all at-will employees, were much less complaining about policies than entitled and tenured faculty members. I think we can all learn a lesson from this.

This is probably a good time to discuss faculty and staff time-off policies. No, you may not have time off to attend funerals for faculty, staff, and students who may have succumbed to the COVID-19 virus. While administrators discussed this, we realized that it would, when combined with other university policies, cause a massive employee shortage, starting approximately two weeks after everyone is back on campus.

Faculty may continue to hold office hours online. Once you pay for parking one time — sorry, forgot to check talking points again — once you have one classroom experience, we’re kind of indifferent about how learning takes place after that.

Some of you have asked why university administrators did not fight the legislation and executive orders issued that ban masks and vaccines. Quite frankly, we did it to protect you! If we whine, they will just take away budgetary resources, forcing us to make hard decisions between the salaries of everyone in the English department, or one football coach. And let’s not forget there is a quest to kill tenure. BTW, this is a good time to remind you all to please forward this message to the nontenure track and adjuncts who teach more than 90% of all courses.

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I think you’ll agree that this carefully thought-out planning by campus administration will pay off. You will receive an invaluable educational experience, particularly those of you who are studying pre-med.

I look forward to messaging you all again in two weeks, when completely unpredictable events cause us to change course. We did not see that coming at all!


LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings hereHe is way funnier on social media, he claims. Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg). Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.