Con Law by Mark Gimenez Read Free Book Online Page B

at his younger and untenured colleague as if he were a homeless person urinating at the corner of Eleventh and Congress downtown.
    ‘Have you lost your mind? Twenty-five percent, that’s a hundred tuition-payers—’
    ‘
Tuition-payers?
You mean, students?’
    ‘Yes. Them. And that’s over three million dollars in lost tuition revenue. You know what that would mean? Pay cuts. No summer stipends. No research funds. Maybe no secretaries or interns. You want that? Besides, these tuition-payers—excuse me, these students—aren’t here to save mankind. They’re here to get a law degree and hire on with those corporate law firms and get rich. Just this morning, I posed a hypothetical fact situation to my class and asked a student which side he wanted to represent. He said, “Whichever side can pay more.” We didn’t teach them that. The world did. These kids are capitalists through and through.’
    ‘And we’re not? Fifty-one of us in this room make more than two hundred thousand and nineteen more than three hundred thousand, for teaching, what, six hours a week for twenty-eight weeks? We’re paid summer stipends of sixty, seventy, even eighty thousand dollars to write on a beach. This public lawschool paid the seventy-two full-time professors in this room a total of eighteen million dollars in compensation last year—not including those forgivable loans some of you got—for part-time work.’
    ‘
Part-time?
My God, man, we’re in class six hours each week. At Harvard, they’re in class only three hours. Besides, we’re a top-tier law school—we shouldn’t have to teach.’
    ‘Someone’s got to, Jonah. It’s a school, which implies teachers. So the school has to hire twenty lecturers and one hundred thirty-five adjuncts to teach for us. And it’s all paid for by increasing tuition on middle-class students who borrow to pay it. Total student debt now exceeds one trillion dollars, more than credit card debt, and it can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. It’s a huge drag on the economy. Even the employed grads can’t qualify for home mortgages.’
    ‘They need forgivable loans,’ Professor Manfried said.
    ‘They’ve got them,’ Professor Goldman said. ‘I hear Obama’s going to forgive all that student debt—it’s all owed to the federal government anyway, so we’re just passing the cost on to the taxpayers, like the General Motors bailout.’
    Henry whispered to Book, ‘And the public thinks we spend our time teaching contracts and torts.’
    Professor Goldman turned back to Professor Stone. ‘Why shouldn’t we be well paid? My Harvard classmates sitting atop those corporate law firms in New York are making millions.’
    ‘They’re real lawyers, Jonah, working for real clients paying real money. That has value in the marketplace. Most of us don’t have a clue what real lawyers do.’
    ‘I don’t want a clue. We’re not practitioners, Bob. We’re not a trade school. It’s not our job to teach students how to practice law. We’re here to teach the theory of law. And we do have value—we’re the only path to the legal profession. If you want to be a real lawyer, you’ve got to go to law school. That gives us value.’
    ‘A hundred-thousand-dollar value?’
    ProfessorGoldman addressed Professor Stone as if he were a 1L who hadn’t answered a question correctly.
    ‘Tell you what, Bob, let’s take a quick vote. A show of hands from those in favor of Professor Stone’s proposal to reduce enrollment, tuition, and our salaries.’
    Book raised his hand. Henry couldn’t; without tenure, he had no academic freedom. No other professor raised a hand.
    ‘Yes, we know you would be in favor of something like that, Professor Bookman.’
    Professor Stone sat and slumped in his chair. His regular economic analyses of law school finances over the last few years of the Great Recession had always proven unpopular with the faculty. Denial was far more popular; in fact, denial defined the Academy,