This will probably get me in trouble, but I wanted to respond to one of the comments to UM Promises to Be Good About Something, which actually seems to be responding to something I said in Class Warfare. There I wrote,
I’d expect that most of the faculty see students as junior versions of themselves and their friends. After all, we were (almost) all law students once. What the current fracas reveals is that many students not only don’t see the faculty as senior versions of themselves, but seem quite unaware that even when it doesn’t feel their pain, the faculty wants them to learn, and to go out into the world prepared to do good and to do well.
The commentator disagreed,
Your students see you and your colleagues as the Havard/Stanford/Yale elites that you and they are. When a Miami student looks around, they do not see senior versions of themselves because you are not that. Miami students do not see themselves as attorneys in the top DC/NY law firms, as federal clerks (and certainly not federal judges), as US/DOJ attorneys, and certainly not as law professors. How are you a senior version of the students that you teach? Almost none of them will be a tenured professor at a law school. You know that.
To which a former student replied, “Shoot higher…people in other UM Law classes certainly saw themselves in those roles…and are currently in those roles.”
I think that’s absolutely the right answer, and that the first commentator has let his reverse elitism get the better of him.
It’s true that the odds of getting a teaching job coming from UM are low compared to a top 10 law school, although it has been done. But most of the students in any law school other than Yale, which is both small and a bit of teacher factory, are not going to be professors either, so this is hardly unusual. (If you want to teach, write publishable stuff: get on a law journal, publish a note and also write something else for publication in a non-UM journal — something a number of my students have done while in law school. After graduation, work a bit, then get a pre-teaching fellowship from one of the schools that offer them. It can be done.)
OK. Here’s where I get myself in trouble:
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