Law School Botches Graduation, Just Starts Handing Out Honors At Random
Straight C student? Don't let that get in the way of graduating summa!
A couple weeks ago, the announcer at Thomas Jefferson University hideously mangled the names of graduate after graduate as though someone had turned the job over to the phone tree for your local utility. While that will likely take the cake as the most embarrassing screw-up of graduation season, the most humiliating botch job of the LAW SCHOOL graduation season may end up going to the University of Florida College of Law, after the Top 30 school just started handing out honors willy-nilly.
A tipster informed us that, “They somehow jumbled everyone’s honors, so students who had summa were announced as either having nothing or cum laude, same for those with magna.” It’s less than Excel-lent. [Groan]. From another tipster:
Apparently a column in the spreadsheet was misssorted. Students were identified as summa cum laude who were not; those who were were not acknowledged. And on and on.
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Looks like someone will be missing out on this summer’s Excel World Championship. How many Excel SEC Championships do they have?
But hey, if you’re a Florida grad who mistakenly earned high honors, try submitting for a federal clerkship before anyone figures this out. There are some judges out there looking for clerks in different places.
Worse yet, the school has sent out no mea culpas to the graduates or their families. A video of the ceremony was posted online, publicly reinforcing the mistakes. They’ve since taken it down and are “actively reviewing,” whatever that means.
“Actively reviewing” is what a school says when it’s trying to figure out how they held a charity auction to date a professor who was simultaneously the subject of a sexual harassment investigation. In this case, the “active review” consists of “were these columns mixed up?” and if the answer is yes… thus ends the review. If it takes more than 15 minutes, it’s very much “passively reviewing.”
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But the lack of an immediate apology is the most egregious. It’s one thing to investigate the error fully, but graduates and families shouldn’t have to wait for the school to figure out which “Associate Assistant Dean of Financial What-Have-You” managed to screw up the document while making four times the salary of the highest paid professor.
Perhaps they’re taking the lesson of the ceremony’s soundtrack too literally: Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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