Florida law school follies continued

I forwarded this story (gift link) to a law professor friend, who replied that it had achieved the seemingly impossible task of making her sympathize with Ben Sasse.

Sasse, it turns out, may have gotten sort-of-fired from his job as president of the University of Florida not for profligate spending on administrative gee gaws/featherbedding for cronies, but for the far more serious crime of not caring enough about the US News rankings:

Before Dr. Sasse took over the school, the University of Florida had been proudly ranked among the country’s top five public universities. Just months into Dr. Sasse’s tenure, though, the school fell to No. 6, prompting the removal of the No. 5 banners that had hung from lampposts throughout campus.

I’m kind of starting to root for that asteroid.

Mori Hosseini, a large residential builder in the state and a major DeSantis benefactor, has been the chairman of the University of Florida’s board of trustees since 2018. It pained him, he wrote in a newspaper essay, that his oldest daughter had selected the University of Michigan for college because she thought no Florida school was good enough.

If you can’t trust the judgments of Florida Real Estate Man, whose can you trust?

“We needed someone to take this university to the next level,” Mr. Hosseini said in a meeting last year, breaking into tears according to a public recording of the meeting, which was held nearly a year after Dr. Sasse joined the university. “And I think we have that person here,” he added, referring to Dr. Sasse.

And how was this dizzying ascent into the Genuine Elite going to be accomplished?

Nowhere has the university’s quest for higher rankings been more obvious than at its Levin College of Law, which had risen to No. 21 on the U.S. News law school rankings from No. 48 in less than 10 years.

But the law school also faced trouble. Its ranking had dropped to No. 22 in 2023 from No. 21.

Ponder that last sentence for a moment. I know I have.

For years, the former law school dean, Laura Rosenbury, had worked to lift the school’s standing. Among other tactics, the school used tuition discounts to lure students with higher LSAT scores, a factor in the rankings.

LSAT scores jumped, but Paul Campos, a University of Colorado law professor who analyzed the school’s strategy, found that “massive tuition discounts” resulted in an inflation-adjusted tuition revenue decline to $8 million a year from $36 million a year in seven or eight years.

“All of this was driven by a kind of obsessive attempt to jack up the school’s rankings,” Mr. Campos said.

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When I was interviewed by Stephanie Saul for this story I learned from her that the way the University of Florida’s law school had managed to go from having 37 to 335 part time faculty was (I swear I am not making this up) this way: If a professor had a local judge or DA or other lawyer come in and give a talk to the professor’s class one day, the law school would count the class visitor as a part time faculty member!

Look, the truth is that there are only two elite universities in this country, Harvard and Yale, and everybody else that tries to be elite, including pretenders like Princeton and Stanford and especially the University of Chicago (LOL plz) are just deluding themselves.

Also the people who take academic rankings of any kind seriously, even or especially in order to make them “better,” are the most pathetic dorks in the entire known universe, and you should go back to ranking Star Trek The Original Series episodes, or whatever you were doing before US News came along.