Email from the Dean, Annotated [and shortened]

Many of you will have learned that while UT Law held its own in the annual reputational survey conducted by U.S. News [What ever happened to the “and World Reports” in the name?] among lawyers, judges and law professors, we slipped in that journal_s [I hate it when the cut-and-paste function changes ‘ to _ ] overall ranking of Law Schools. Our scores in the reputational survey placed us at 14th, in a cluster with Duke, Georgetown, Northwestern and several other leading law schools. Our overall ranking, however, was 18th. I am writing to assure you that this is wholly the result of a reporting anomaly that will affect us in no future year. [So, pretty please, don’t fire me the way U of H fired their Dean over rankings. After all, it’s only been a year.]

Last February, the Law School reported its graduate employment data to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP)… [The short version of this is that Law Schools manipulated their data in a way different from how we chose to manipulate our data.]

This will not happen again [damn it!]. Leslie Oster [I’m glad it’s not my name in this sentence], our Assistant Dean for Strategic Planning, has become an expert in the U.S. News process [so suck on that, Brian Leiter]. In the future, we will conform [read: manipulate] our reporting practices to those of our peer schools [since we now know how they do it]. And, faced with the unfairness and confusion caused by the studying-for-the-bar category, NALP, the ABA and U.S. News are seriously contemplating abandoning that category altogether. [After all, Law School itself, with, among other things, its forced and arbitrary grading system, is completely fair.]

All this is very annoying, of course [as is this email]. But it is a one-time [*fingers crossed*] hiccup. [I hope.]

I will not be satisfied until UT Law is comfortably in the top 10 [ya hear that, Duke, I ain’t satisfied]. But, in the meantime, we can confidently [hopefully] expect measurably better results next year. [In order to help us fulfill this goal, we plan on losing some great faculty members, reduce the offerings of popular classes, and keep our most prominent and distinguished professors teaching first year classes and no upper level classes. We will also ensure that the food in George’s Café remains putrid and overpriced. I’m not sure how that will help us, but food quality is not measured by USNWR. But most importantly, before any decision is made, we will think twice, then think twice again, for a total of four times we will think about it.]

[So again, please don’t fire me. After all, you like President Dean Powers, don’t you? I’m his friend, and he picked me to be Dean. Isn’t that enough?]

--Larry Sager