Illinois Faculty Respond to the Tribune:
Larry Ribstein has posted a copy of a lengthy open letter from several prominent members of the University of Illinois School of Law faculty responding to the Chicago Tribune's breathless coverage and editorializing on the University's response to political pressure to admit unqualified applicants. It concludes:
The Tribune’s “clout goes to college” stories have all been about the abuse of power of University administrators and politicians. Newspapers also wield a great deal of power, and like all power, theirs too can be abused. Such is the case here. The Tribune should publicly apologize to those whom it has unjustifiably demonized. We are not so naïve as to expect this. Criticism such as this more often evokes anger than it does guilt. Indeed, we were advised against publishing this letter – “the Tribune has more ink than you do,” we were told. Yet “ink” is only as good as its content. What say you, Tribune? Can you own up to your mistakes and at least express remorse for unjustifiably damaging the distinguished careers that took lifetimes to build?[Note: If you're going to comment on the substance of the letter, please read the whole thing before posting a comment.]
As I noted in my prior post, many of those commenting on this story seem shocked that a state-funded educational institution is subject to political pressure from state officials -- surely this cannot be news to folks at the Tribune! Yet there has been more criticism of the U. of I. than of the politicians who sought special treatment. Why is that?
Related Posts (on one page):
- Illinois Faculty Respond to the Tribune:
- University of Illinois Admissions
- Political Privilege & U. of Illinois Admissions:
Honest question.
You'd think distinguished law professors could tell a compelling story. In writing.
Criticizing politicians for seeking special treatment is like criticizing the sun for rising in the east?
What is their counter-narrative? They don't have one. They're just quibbling with some discreet aspects of the coverage.
What remains: The Dean of the University of Illinois College of Law accepted unqualified applicants into the law program. What's worse is that law school admission is often a zero-sum gain. No doubt, some people who earned their place at U of I were squeezed out by the Fortunate Sons.
Ribstein's 4-page letter doesn't change any of that.
If I'm a politician in Illinois, I'd spend my bribe money somewhere else, at a place with professors who might be worth it.
Yep. That letter is terrible advocacy. It's revealing of the law prof pathology. You know that almost everyone who signed that had to insert his or her "point" in there. Thus, the letter is crappy.
The University of Illinois legal writing professor should hand that letter out to her students as an example of bad-legal-writing-via-committee. "This, kids, is what happens when you let everyone have a say in the legal-writing process."
Yes, why pay attention to the substance of anything, so long as we can dismiss the tone?
Not to defend the school, of course, but your question is ridiculous.
Not at all. Read what Aristotle had to say about ethos and writing.
I'd rather take my lumps, get people upset about the issue and try to get the system changed, than just throw my hands up like the professors and complain that there's nothing that can be done about these types of corrupt practices.
Because the UofI might be fixed, but IL's government is quite permanently broken.
The problem is that you take your lumps and disappear and someone more pliant replaces you. For every dean that wants to play Don Quixote, there are 10 others willing to fall in line for a 3% annual funding boost from the legislature.
You might feel better that you were principled, but if you didn't change anything (and torched your career in the process) then it's what, a hill of beans?
Because they've had months and months of criticism of the same state politicians for corruption and special treatment, and the new angle here is the UIUC law school?
The letter to the editor is extremely unpersuasive, and several times makes exactly the argument that it protests it is not making (such as about "everybody does it so it's not news.")
The law professors do not at all limit themselves to complaining that UIUC received more criticism than that state officials. They complain that the article itself was given prominent space at all, saying that it occurs everywhere.
Perhaps. But if the professors and the university really found the political pressure so distasteful, then why would they have such a problem with the Tribune front paging it? After all, it seems to me that publicity (and the threat thereof) would be the only way (though certainly not assured) to reduce such pressure. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and all that.
So I can only conclude that the professor not only think that it happens everywhere, but that it's not a very big deal. And if they think it's not a very big deal, then that increases the chance that they'd give in to the pressure.
1) Politicians are expected to behave in mildly corrupt ways, so long as they don't get caught, because of this expectation there is no huge outcry when they are corrupt.
2) Politicians have supporters who will protect them for two reasons
a) shared ideology
b) precisely because they are corrupt (i.e.: they have vested financial interests in the politician being protected)
This leads us to an unstable condition in a democratic republic, once we introduce *expected* corruption, it becomes very hard to get rid of and only leads to more and more corruption, since the politicians who are corrupt are the ones that end up being protected as a result of their corruption. I don't know if this leads to an eventual equilibrium or if its a runaway reaction, but looking at the third world would suggest to me its a runaway process beyond a certain point.
I'm incredibly saddened by this response. The UI administration and faculty are not the victims here. The Illinois taxpayers are. Enabling corruption may not be as despicable as exerting the power to obtain a benefit. While such things may happen everywhere, that does not excuse it.
Though there is a lot more that I find wrong with this response, here are a couple of highlights:
1) Personal benefit to the administrators: they do receive a benefit in bowing to political pressure, presumably being able to keep their jobs. The duties of the administrators are to the state, not to the politically powerful. If they can't handle that responsibility in an ethical manner, they should resign. We might overlook a cop who allows a politically powerful person to avoid a speeding ticket for fear for their jobs, or even a revenue agent that responded to clouted pressure. But a police chief or head of treasury that expressly authorized such behavior? These are public funds they are using to educate students. Off with their heads.
2) The contention that political clout was just one factor among many. Please. I think Paul Pless' email to Hurd more than adequately dispenses with that as complete poppycock.
3) The Hurd sarcasm issue. Yes, there was sarcasm present in her responses. It does not change the fact that she was authorizing an exchange of jobs for admits. It is obvious to anyone reading those emails without a vested interest in the matter that the whole thing was incredibly improper. Maybe not illegal, but certainly unethical and something the people of Illinois have every right to know about. It's their money, not yours.
I am simply astounded by this response. You have been exposed for doing something highly improper and unethical, and your response is to play the victim. I suggest a simple comparison between this response and that of another set of journalists: look at the WaPo's response to its "underwritten salons" scandal. They acknowledged what they did was improper, and even fudged a bit on who was ultimately responsible. But they acknowledged their mistake and took steps to address the impropriety, and they certainly did not try to portray themselves as the victim. And as a private enterprise they owe significantly less to the public than you do. You are employees of the state of Illinois... please do not try to hold yourself above the public trust. If there is a tin ear here, it is the tin ear of the UI professoriate to the public outrage over what has been done at their school. It is mindbogglingly disconcerting that you learned about these lapses but express no remorse, or "dismay," that this occurred at your school. Mindboggling.
You should be ashamed of yourselves, for what happened and for your response. Get your house in order... until then none of you have the moral authority to weigh in on the affairs of anyone else.
That is some standard they are aspiring to.
Plus, if a defense takes that long to explain, how persuasive can it be...
I totally agree that politicians using undue influence like this is wrong. But so is giving into it, despite the control of the purse strings argument. If a politician said "admit X even though he's an unqualified illiterate" or "expel Y because I don't like his father" or whatever, the law school would rightly resist that pressure despite possible consequences (well, it better resist that sort of pressure...). The sort of admission due to pressure discussed in the original story is different in degree, not in kind.
To take a different tack, if the law school before this was open and aboveboard about admission policy then the law school's behaviour would be far less objectionable e.g. to take an extreme example if the admission brochure stated: "Please note, as a publicly funded institution, we will sometimes cave to political pressure from local or state officials or other connected people, to admit a student we otherwise wouldn't. When we give into this pressure we will try, if possible, to get some benefit applicable to other students such as an employment opportunity open to non-patronage students. If you don't like it that we will admit people because of political pressure, then try to get your elected officials to explicitly outlaw such behaviour - maybe you'll have more luck than us or elect a governor who doesn't get indicted."
Look at the beginning paragraph, the points (1) and (2). Arguing in the alternative has it's place in a brief before the court - but it has little or no place in the court of public opinion.
That these legal academics thought the letter could be persuasive is laughable. And I'm not just arguing semantics - it's merely the first big mistake over the dozens of them in the letter.
You know about “TL;DR”? That's an abbreviation on the intarbogs. You find it in comments. Stands for “Too Long; Didn't Read”. Maybe you're out of the loop. It's only now breaking into the mainstream. A year from now, it'll be passé.
The law professor's open letter invites a “TL;DR” reaction. Indeed, Adler admits as much. He begs for attention. He's forced to write:
That's an admission. A good letter would pull you in. And Adler knows it.
TL;DR.
The majority of voters in Illinois seem to believe that the sole reason for voting for anyone is to ensure that patronage continues. It may be ugly, when it it is all exposed, but surely it was not a surprise.
More broadly, I found it funny that the professors have done nothing but identify the same problems that are in virtually every "investigative" news story we read these days. Yet, I highly doubt that the professors read other stories, particularly those that were published about the past administration or anyone else from a different political view, with such a questioning eye.
If they think that this is a non-story because everyone does it, then what do they call a letter simply noting that an "investigative" report reads things in a sensationalized and biased way?
Do these people forget that Patrick Fitzgerald has a tape of Rod Blagojevich speaking with his minions about how he might get the Tribune editorial staff fired for giving him a hard time? Do the letter writers really think the Tribune is scared of Illinois politicians?
This letter is merely a symptom of the corruption that infects all Illinois public institutions. The improprieties should be disconcerting if not shocking, but they are so common as to merit a great big humpf from Illinois citizens.
There is also something a bit sad about the letter writers and some comments here pawning this off as "no big deal . . . everyone does it" and then calling the Tribune a bunch of Pulizter chasers. Are we really supposed to implicitly laud the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for not investigating UM-Columbia for the same practices?
Finally, the whole "Admit this kid or lose funding" argument is bunk. I might be inclined to believe if someone can show me it has actually ever happened. Like voter fraud, I suspect the evidence is pretty thin gruel.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I meant simply the effect of the media from the institutional perspective (particularly inasmuch as it puts pressure on the government officials who are driving the process to make changes).
I agree with you with respect to the university employees. A dean explicitly going against the political appointees who run the school would be quixotic, at best. I find the number of people castigating the dean for not running to the US Attorney's office particularly puzzling. Leaving aside what most people would do in a similar situation, it's not even clear that anything here is illegal (even if it should be).
As an aside, I'd be interested to know what triggered the Trib's inquiry. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't someone involved in the admissions process decided they'd had enough.
You don't have to look at the third world. Just look at Chicago.
A question for the professors out there: how much politics go into admissions on an ordinary basis for the ordinary state and private law schools? I have not way of knowing whether Illinios should have refused to play ball because that sort of thing just isn't done, or if this is just how all law schools play the game.
I once had a conversation with a law school ad comm member in a school that was forbidden to practice affirmative action, and the member said "they can never prove what thoughts we have in our brain." That seemed to me to be a likely attitude among ad comm members. So, how much ordinary politics go into law school admissions?
The whole thing? Gosh that was a long letter.
I live in Illinois, subscribe to The Chicago Tribune, graduated from U of I and have been following the story.
I think the letter writers are mistaken when they claim the Tribune only heaps blame on UofI administrators. Politicians have also been named in the articles, as have specific people making requests. Recent articles are making connections between the politicians and fund raising by politically connected individuals who made calls to politicians requesting the politician help out a student applying for admission.
The stories in The Tribune may have repercussions at election time. This alone would make the story worth covering.
I also think the law professors are overlooking other reasons Tribune readers may be interested in many topics covered in the UofI clout list story. Some issues are not specifically related to individual corruption of either politicians or failings of adminsitrators, but simply describe the rather opaque process that applicants may use to request reconsideration in the event they are not admitted. Whether the law professors at the big U like it or not, the stories describing the existence of such a process, and how some learned about it while others who tried to learn of it were stonewalled has likely been of interest to students, parents, voters and taxpayers in Illinois.
Overall, if The Tribune's coverage of the story really matched that group of law professors' perceptions and characterizations, subscribers would probably not be be following the story. But subscribers are following the story, because, notwithstanding the law professors views, the subscribers think this is a story.
The arguments that particularly undermined the rest were the ones where they said, essentially, "Hey, who knows, maybe these people weren't unqualified admittees at all; it's a judgment call, and who can say? Maybe the fact that powerful politicians liked them is actually a sign of merit!" and, "Merit, schmerit. We let in people based on geographic considerations, which isn't merit, so what's a little influence peddling, too?"
So an administrator refuses; he resigns rather than let the applicant in. Is that going to topple the politician who made the demand? Of course not. Is it going to end the practice of making such demands? No. But it will cost the dean his job, and/or cost the school some funding.
What I am entirely unsympathetic to, though, is the professors' claim of victimhood at the hands of the Tribune. If you're going to make moral compromises, even small ones, every so often you're going to get tarnished, and you can't complain when people point out that tarnish. That's just shooting the messenger.
Maybe it's not a legal defense, but if traffic along the Dan Ryan is moving at 75 mph through a 55 zone, do you really think that going 55 is prudent? Isn't going with the speed of traffic in violation of the law the best course of action, at least for the safety of yourself and others (which, in my mind, makes it the ethical course of action)?
About the "sarcasm."
You can definitely get summer jobs leading to full employment based solely on clout. Two connected people in my 1L class got summer jobs at Paul Hastings and King and Spaulding before they had taken their first exams.
Also, the students who were denied admission in favor of the clouted are the victims, not the administrators, who were not the same as "victims" of a robbery. While the politicians deserve the lion's share of the blame, the administrators were not victims.
Pardon the snark, but I really can't see anyone finding the letter even remotely persuasive.
The law professors weren't trying to pursuade!
OK. I don't know that for absolute sure. But it fits. Accuse me of falling for ‘truthiness’ all you like. It still fits the facts we know.
The law professors weren't trying to pursuade anyone.
At the deepest level, this is true. The letter was about signaling. The letter was written primarily to kiss up to the Dean and other power players at the U of I. "We stand behind you all." Etc.
We stand behind you... all sharpening our knives.
If I recall, ethos was one of three modes of persuasion. It simply doesn't make sense to dismiss someone entirely because you don't care for his tone.
Obviously, appeals to your moral character can persuade people - or at least not repulse them, as this letter does. But that doesn't mean an uninspiring speaker is actually wrong about anything. It just means the audience doesn't like them, which is a stupid basis for dismissing them.
I worked for the campaign of a reform candidate for mayor of Chicago when I was 19 but was so dismayed that people didn't want reform that I lost interest in politics.
When my father lost his job he called a state senator of the same nationality and got a good job with the state. But around election time he needed to help out.
I moved away, and when I called a friend from high school the other day to ask how he can keep voting for corrupt politicians he said corruption might add a few percent to the taxes, but he'd rather live in a system where you know how to get things done than one where the results are unsure.
Then there was the Chicago alderman who said something like "What's the world coming to when you have to give a job to a stranger rather than your son-in-law." In some people's minds an alderman or a senator should have some powers and rights because of his position, and should be able to help friends and family.
That people in Illinois prefer a corrupt system should be considered when we try to impose our ideals on places like Iraq.
http://www.uillinois.edu/our/news/2009/June25.docs.pdf
123 pages for ya, Adler! Start reading.
Same happened to me. I was at the Chicago city hall elections office door before it opened on the first day that 18-20 year olds could register to vote, back around 1971. But I could see through the glass door that a girl was already inside. Saw her photo in TIme magazine described as the daughter of a judge and the first to register to vote.
Like most victims of bullying, they don't want more attention paid to them, because then the bullying just intensifies.
Parts of that thing just read too much like an abused spouse complaining about the cops investigating bruises.
Really? Y'all need some more air circulating up in that tower.
Except for a few posts here and there, there has been very little forthcoming from the law prof blogs on this, and not a single prof that I can tell has ventured to condemn the behavior. What a bunch of spineless weenies. Ribstein won't even moderate the comments on his post, which undoubtedly contains a lot of criticism from people not in the legal academy.
I believe it's a runaway reaction, and we're finding out that we've allowed it to pass the certain point.
Bloggers have the right to decide whether they allow comments on their sites. The rest of us, however, have the right to think of them as sniveling weenies because they can't take the least bit of criticism.
I recently decried the fall-off in the quality of comments on Volokh. That was directed at the commenters themselves. I suppose props are due to the bloggers (minus Lindgren) for continuing to believe that their academic and educational aims are best served through a conversation, not a lecture, and for not describing the majority that disagrees with them as unratiocinative bottomfeeders.
I guess that just because someone admits something using a sarcastic tone doens't mean it they didn't do the thing.
Private universities could do it too. I think we'd find that alumni preferences at the top schools are tiny relative to affirmative action preferences--- but we'd know for sure, which is a good thing. And if voters and private school "owners" (alumni, faculty, whatever) are still willing to keep the policies once they're made transparent, I'd be less unhappy about them.
Any objections?
FERPA.
Thus the immediate objection is specifically to a “rule”.
I'll reserve for later any potential objections to a new public policy, or law implementing that policy.
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