Professor Brian Leiter's response to my posts on the Whittier Law School closure

This week I published two posts related to the sad Whittier Law School story. The first laid out the argument that Whittier's closing could have been avoided had other law schools responded appropriately to market demands in the years following the application decline after 2010. The second responded to one professor's suggestion that a prominent law school dean had a secret motivation to destroy Whittier, and instead laid the blame on other law schools for eroding Whittier's applicant base. 

Today, Professor Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago Law School took to his blog to call me "ignorant," "egregious," "presumptuous," "blowhard," "guilty," "bloviating," and "audacious," all in two short paragraphs. Unfortunately, once you strip out the name calling, the small substantive part of Leiter's argument showed that he didn't understand the relatively simple point I was making. Here's Professor Leiter's assertion:

But far more egregious is the presumptuous intervention of Robert Anderson, Associate Professor of Law at Pepperdine.  Faculty members at Whittier are going to lose their jobs, and some may never work again as law teachers or work again at all.  Yet Anderson has the audacity to scold them for not having taken an early retirement in the financial interest of the school.  Seriously?  ... I'm sure Anderson doesn't know any of these things, he's just another blogging blowhard who has decided to use someone else's misery as an opportunity to attract some attention to himself.  Anderson is guilty of far worse than unknowing hubris.

I'm sorry to have to say that Professor Leiter has completely mischaracterized the two posts I wrote. The point of my original post was that Whittier should not have needed to close, and to lament the fact that faculty and students were left out in the cold. Indeed, the entire point of my post was that the Whittier Law School demise was "unnecessary" and not the fault of Whittier or its faculty.

Contrary to Professor Leiter's assertion I did not blame the Whittier faculty for the school's demise; I blamed the faculty and administration of other California law schools that have eroded Whittier's applicant base as they lowered the admissions standards of their own schools. I wrote:

The story could have turned out differently. When the contraction began, law schools should have reduced class sizes to maintain their traditional standards for admission ... If the law schools had simply maintained existing admission requirements, all schools could have contracted in size in response to market pressures. This would have prevented the cascading degradation of admissions that tumbled down the hierarchy of law schools.

I think it's obvious that when I say "all schools" and "cascading degradation of admissions that tumbled down the hierarchy of law schools," I am referring to problems caused by schools other than Whittier that "tumbled down" to Whittier. In case there was any doubt about where Whittier's problems came from, I was crystal clear that the mechanism that brought Whittier down was external to Whittier:

As applications to more competitive (but not elite) schools began to decline around 2010, the number of applicants in Whittier's traditional applicant pool remained relatively strong. The response of these more competitive schools to the decline in applications was to lower admission standards and enroll weaker and weaker classes, enrolling the students who would have otherwise chosen a school like Whittier. This caused a cascade downstream that left less competitive schools with too few applicants to operate sustainably as they traditionally had.

Furthermore, I do not "scold" faculty members at Whittier as Professor Leiter asserted. Indeed, in the post I specifically wrote "And the culprits are not even at Whittier specifically ... the insatiable appetite for tuition of vulture professors up the food chain from Whittier is what scavenged Whittier's applicants and picked its bones clean." I then wrote, "It is the fault of the rest of us in California law schools who have not responded responsibly to the decline in law school applications, decreased employment prospects for our students, and increased debt. "

The use of "up the food chain" and "us" make it perfectly clear that I was not blaming the Whittier faculty for the calamity that befell the school. Indeed, it is obvious that I am lamenting the fact that other law schools "scavenged" Whittier's applicants. I think this is sufficient for any objective reader to determine that Professor Leiter mischaracterized my argument. I don't know why he would do that, but I will assume that it was just the time crunch of the end of the year.

As for Professor Leiter's name calling, I will let readers determine what relevance that has, if any, to the relative merits of our arguments.

Comments

[Steve Diamond]

How do you propose to solve this collective action problem short of social planning?

[Concerned_Citizen]

"Faculty members at Whittier are going to lose their jobs, and some may never work again as law teachers or work again at all."

Now that's just plain crazy talk, there. We all know that any law prof can walk off campus and directly into a BigLaw partnership.

At least, that's the common wisdom.

[Noah O.]

If they don't go into a partnership directly, they could always go into legal consulting. Many former teachers I know of have taken the consultation path, to great success. Of course, it's not an easy proposition, but if they have a built reputation, offering their services for legal consultation through networking could help them greatly!

[D]

Leiter has long disparaged scambloggers for correctly pointing out that the recent problems in legal academia have been caused by legal academia itself. Apparently even when a fellow professor takes to web to engage in honest, thoughtful reflection on what went wrong at Whittier, a contention that anything but uncontrollable external forces to which there was no possible response was the cause of the school's decline is tantamount to scamblogging. I believe his ad homonym attacks reflect a cognitively dissonant and increasingly stubborn conviction that in spite of all the dis-confirming evidence, the realities of the last decade should have no lasting impact on legal education. On the contrary, he seems to believe that legal academia could and should more or less return to its pre-recession incarnation any day now.

When the next Whittier comes down the pike (and it will), I would like to see it adapt, instead of closing. I would like to see it shrink its faculty size, have professors completely eschew legal research in favor of a major increase in teaching load, and have the associated decrease in fixed costs passed on to the students in the form of greatly reduced tuition. Instead of trying to vainly emulate an elite law school, I would like to see it own the mission of training the next generation of competent working attorneys without saddling them with massive amounts of debt. Would such an experiment work? I don't know. But I would like to see it try since the existing system has not been kind to the fourth tier. And it sure beats going out of business.