Law School Transparency Petition

In my earlier postings about Paul Campos's blog, I said that although I had many disagreements with both what he had said and how he had said it (more on that below), we should welcome rather than disdain his willingness to write about the need for reform in legal education and about the plight of jobless law students.  If he had useful things to say, more power to him, I wrote.  I pledged that I would continue reading his blog and would happily link to any useful information or suggestions.  It required a good deal of wading through unbelievably self-serving writing, and a comments section that ranges from the genuinely useful and touching to almost absurd heights of vicious invective.  (Welcome to the blogosphere, as they say.)  I'm currently reading Alex Ross's book The Rest is Noise, a history of twentieth-century music, and the blog kept putting me in mind of Ross's descriptions of fin-de-siecle society in Vienna, in which "revolutionary gestures betray a reactionary mind-set."  

That said, I think Campos's latest post is worth looking at and considering.  In it, Campos, building on work performed by his commenters, proposes a petition for law professors to sign.  It reads:

"We, the undersigned,  believe it is imperative that all law schools provide prospective law school students with information  that will allow them to accurately assess their prospects for finding appropriate employment within the legal profession upon graduation from the schools they are considering attending. We therefore call upon the American Bar Association to require all schools it has accredited to release clear, accurate, and reasonably comprehensive information regarding graduate employment, by for example implementing the proposals outlined in Part III of the Law School Transparency Project's white paper "A Way Forward: Improving Transparency in Employment Reporting at American Law Schools" ( http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528862 ), so that prospective students may obtain adequate information regarding their likely future employment prospects."

It provides an email address for those interested in signing the petition: [email protected].

I have not yet read the white paper, so I can't comment on it yet.  But it seems to me that pretty well everyone I have seen discussing these issues agrees at a minimum that law schools ought to provide clear and transparent employment data to prospective students.  Rather supporting my initial point about Campos's blog many weeks ago--that the more revolutionary one's aims, the less likely it is that anything at all will get done--some of his commenters have insisted that anything short of a total revolution in legal education is a capitulation.  But I think Campos quite rightly confines the petition to the one thing that, in general, everyone seems to agree upon.  Even those, like me, who think that students rely on a variety of sources of information besides employment statistics in brochures--including bad information, like the general cultural assumption, certainly long since outdated, that law school is a path to a guaranteed financially successful career--still believe that the information law schools provide ought to be clear and accurate.  So I think Campos has a decent shot at getting signatories for this petition, and I certainly encourage my colleagues to think about signing it.  If commenters have any useful points about the white paper or the petition in general, I welcome them.

I am not above adding that folks who visit Campos's site to look at the petition should look, while they're there, at the two posts immediately preceding that.  In one, he uses the story of a student at his school who, according to the story, committed suicide.  It's a tragic story, but Campos admits that, at best, the reasons the student committed suicide were far more complicated than anything relating to his failure to find the kind of work he wanted.  Given that, it strikes me as a pretty exploitative post--heart-felt, no doubt, but still one that trades on someone's death for the sake of a blog post.  ("But for Wales, Richard?")  Remarkably, in the comments section Campos criticizes a purported law professor for commenting anonymously on the blog.  I don't care for anonymous comments from law professors either, but of all the people in the world entitled to make this point, Campos is surely the last.  I pray it was an attempt at humor, but I found it galling no matter what.  

The other, titled "The first rule of Fight Club," is remarkable but quite characteristic of Campos's blogging.  I've argued before on this site that what's so unfortunate about Campos's blog is that what he has to say that is valuable has already been said elsewhere, and what he has to say that's attention-grabbing is often crudely exaggerated and rhetorically inflamed.  There's nothing wrong with repeating what's been said elsewhere--many people feel that the problems with legal education haven't been talked about enough or gotten enough attention--but I think there's something deeply wrong with using cheap tricks to get attention, especially when the author then repeatedly and vaguely disclaims those cheap tricks, while still employing them, leaving a residue of disgust over everything he touches.  

This post is characteristic of these tendencies.  In it, Campos casually walks back many of the silliest claims he's made, as if he weren't responsible for making them and doesn't understand why they attracted so much attention in the first place; just a poor honest workman doing his job, sadly misunderstood and attacked by his adversaries.  Compare, for instance, the Inside Higher Ed story in which he describes himself as taking a "whistle-blowing approach," and earlier posts in which he implies that his blog has led other law professors finally to pay attention to legal education issues, with his current version, in which he writes: "[I]t seems rather odd to characterize this blog as involved in any sort of real whistle blowing.  Almost everything I've said has been a matter of very public knowledge, after all."  A simple "I was wrong" would have done quite nicely, thank you.  I have read just about every word of the blog, and it is all pretty well of this character.  I understand why he has loyal followers, but as they pride themselves on their skepticism, I hope they are not afraid to cast a critical light on what he has done and continues to do, the self-serving and self-contradictory as well as the commendable.  

I consider myself entitled to raise these criticisms because, one, they're true and they're pretty well what I've been saying all along, and, two, I've kept my promise to keep reading and take seriously anything worthwhile he has to say.  I think the petition post is worthwhile; I certainly welcome substantive comments about the proposal and encourage professors to make up their own minds about signing it, as I will.  Even a wildly distasteful messenger can sometimes produce a useful message.