"It's My Class and I'll Cry If I Want To"
In the wake of the 8-0 Supreme Court decision in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, some people are framing the event in terms of “How could so many law professors be so wrong?”
Apparently quite easily.
Because here’s Exhibit B: A professor at the University of Miami Law School is forcing his students to meet off-campus for their regularly scheduled seminar because he refuses to cross a picket line of striking janitors.
Some students (i.e., those who didn’t sleep through Contracts) are understandably indignant about being required to share in the professor’s preferred form of protest.
The law professor is confused:
What’s perhaps been the most surprising to me is the extent to which those students who have been the most outspoken critics of what I’ve done have no qualms or hesitation about their entitlement — their right — to dictate to me the terms of my job.
Huh? Who’s dictating what to whom here? Who is the employee, who is the employer and who is the customer? (And this professor doesn’t even have tenure — imagine what he’ll be like if he ever does.)
This is not about “entitlements,” but about tuition checks and paychecks. This pompous professor was hired to do a job — (as were, incidentally, the striking janitors). How can he be surprised when the people paying for his services become annoyed that he’s not doing so?
He can live up to his so-called “principles” on his own time and his own dime. The students paid for a seminar to be held at a fixed time in a fixed place. He has a contractual, and a moral, obligation to teach it at that fixed time and fixed place.
How can this possibly be in any way unclear to a law professor?
Where does this professor get off dismissing the entirely proper (indeed, the entirely noble) indignation of his students as a somehow false sense of “entitlement”? He claims a preposterous prerogative to do his job not as he was hired to do it, but in whichever way gives him the warmest fuzziest feeling — and then turns around and whines about how the students claim an “entitlement”?
It’s quite simple really: Willful, discretionary breach of contract is not a “principle.” It’s a moral failure worthy of contempt by and remedy for the victims of the breach.
Let’s hope this professor’s deans, or trustees, understand this rudimentary concept as well as his students do.
(Via Concurring Opinions.)
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Uh, Kip, this is Maine we're talking about.
All that snow can't be good for the mind. Just look at lobstermen.
[Kip replies: It's Miami, not Maine.]
Wow.
Sorry about that.
How did I read Maine for Miami?
Too much booze…
Is there any chance that the wording of the contracts between the student and the school, or the school and the professor, would give him enough leeway to change venue like this?
That kind of power is not given to the professors at the universities that I am familiar with, but I am trying really hard to think of a way that this concept could be in any way unclear to a law professor.
[shrug] I am at a loss.
[Kip replies: I am confident that if the professor had discussed the situation in advance with the administration and they had sanctioned his actions, then he would have mentioned it quite clearly -- and the students would then be upset at the dean rather than at him.]
Kip,
1. It is Miami Law School.
2. Was it your experience in your studies that you paid for a specific classroom – i.e., that the school wrote you a letter, signed by the President or other officer, that promised to teach you at place X at time Z? Isn't this much more like an airline ticket – we'll get you educated, but it might not be exactly in the time and place that you expected.
3. What do you imagine a law professor's "contract" looks like? At the least, don't you think it as at least as flexible as a client service agreement, including clauses about the exercise of professional judgment? (Most contracts I've seen are significantly less restrictive than that.)
[Kip replies: It was my experience in law school that there were rules, and that the rules and the exceptions to the rules came from the people who ran the place, not the rank-and-file employees (which a first-year professor is). The professors understood this, and the students really understood it.
No one demands a refund if a fire alarm clears out a classroom or if a professor is sick for a few classes. But on the other hand no airline allows its pilots to say to its passengers, "Oh gee, I feel like going to Maine instead of Miami today -- hope you all don't mind."
Stated differently, one of the concepts I learned in law school was "abuse of discretion."]