Sinverguenzas

Spanish has a useful word, sinverguenza, which is often employed to mean something like “someone so utterly without shame to an extent that cries out for public condemnation.” (In addition to not being a noun, “shameless” in English doesn’t have anything like the same force).

This word has come to mind a couple of times in the last few days. The law school has a small kitchen area on the fourth floor, where all the tenure track faculty offices are located. Somebody set up a little fundraiser for the local high school orchestra, which consisted of 15 chocolate bars, and a piece of paper that asked people to put a dollar for each bar they took, in a coffee cup that had provided for the purpose. The next day there were three chocolate bars left, and five dollars in the cup.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has published some letters in response to its editorial on the law graduate debt loads. Here’s one from the dean of George Washington and president of the AALS, the former dean of Georgetown and executive director of the AALS, and the dean of the University of Washington and president-elect of the AALS. In other words, these people are the official representatives, to the extent there is such a thing of American legal academia:

The New York Times fails to make its case on law school debt. Law students borrow more than undergrads, but most are able to repay, and do. The graduate student default rate is 7 percent versus 22 percent for undergrads.

Many law schools are downsizing to maintain standards. Since 2010, first-year enrollment has dropped from 52,500 to 37,900, a level last seen in 1973 — much smaller and the rule of law may begin to fray. Our country needs lawyers, prosecutors, defenders and judges, not only lawyers in big cities and big law firms.

If you pay attention to this kind of thing, it’s difficult not to end up comfortably numb to the sheer dishonesty of people who are supposed to be actual academics, as opposed to PR hacks or K Street prostitutes. Still:

(1) The Times editorial was addressing the problem of law schools, and especially for-profit schools, raising prices and cutting admissions standards, to the point where lots of their graduates wouldn’t be able to repay their federal educational loans. Citing default rates as evidence that “most” recent and soon to be law graduates are repaying their loans is “very disingenuous” (polite collegial version) or really sleazy bullshitting (Harry Frankfurt version). “Most” federal educational loans aren’t in timely repayment at the moment. What percentage of recent law graduates are in timely repayment, on either the standard ten or 25-year extended repayment plan? The answer is that nobody knows outside of the DOE, and they won’t reveal this information. It seems probable that large percentages of recent grads, given the massive disparity between their loan balances and their salaries, are in various soft default income-based repayement plans, that will result in them not paying back much or in some cases all of the money they’ve borrowed.

But again, my distinguished colleagues are simply bullshtting: they don’t know that “most” recent and soon-to-be law graduates (the focus of the editorial) are able to repay their loans, because they don’t have the necessary data to make this claim. Academics, it’s apparently necessary to repeat constantly, are people whose entire job is resist the temptation to just throw out halfway plausible sounding but unverified claims when it’s convenient to their self-interest to do so. And again, the authors of this letter are the formal face of the American legal academy.

(2) “Many law schools are downsizing to maintain standards.” Unlike the claim regarding repayment rates, which is in Frankfurt school terms bullshit, this is just an outright lie, assuming for the moment that the authors cared enough to check. The number of schools that have downsized to maintain standards can be ascertained, and unless the term “many” is defined to mean “none,” the statement is false.

Plenty of law schools have downsized in the last five years, plenty have slashed their admissions standards, but no school has cut its class size and maintained admissions standards. This is easy to check, and to be fair to the letter writers I have to admit it’s quite possible that they may again be simply bullshitting as opposed to lying, in that they didn’t bother to check, because they just don’t care whether their statements are true or not. (This is a nice example of Frankfurt’s point of how the will to bullshit is in some ways more inimical to truth than actual lying, since a liar has to care enough about the truth to bother to determine whether his statements are in fact false, otherwise he wouldn’t know he was lying, which is a necessary prerequisite to the act).

(3) As for the threat that the “rule of law may begin to fray” if only 37,000 people are enrolling in law school each year, there are about 1.5 million Americans with law degrees, of which around 1.2 million have law licenses, while maybe 750,000 are actually practicing law. The American legal system is at present generating around 20,000 jobs for new lawyers per year for those 37,000 matrics, counting both outflow and (cough) “growth,” so a collapse into a post-apocalyptic lawyer-free landscape does not seem imminent.