How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

 

Daniel Markovitz "How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning", Atlantic, May 6, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/

Changes in the weightings so tiny that they are obviously arbitrary make material differences in the rankings. In this year’s law-school report, U.S. News issued multiple corrections—for example, eliminating a 0.25 percent weight for the “credit-bearing hours of instruction provided by law librarians to full-time equivalent law students” (whatever that is) and increasing the weighting of the bar-passage rate by 0.25 percent. These maneuvers altered the rank of 35 law schools, including nine in the top 30.

COMMENT

     This article about the fierce competition to get into elite colleges cites library instruction as a particularly absurd measure of excellence.   Apparently, law students are no longer expected to know how to do their research. 

Fighting for Life on Death Row

Lauren Gill, "Fighting for Life on Death Row," The Nation, April 22, 2019, pp.22-26.

     A couple of month after he arrived on death row at theWilliam C. Holman Correctional Facility, Drinkard met Darrell Grayson, who offered him coffee, cigarettes, and an invitation. Each Wednesday, Grayson and a group of other death-row inmates would meet in the prison's law library and work on a plan to raise awareness about  inequity in the criminal justice system.  Dubbed Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, it was -- and remains -- the nations's only anti-death-penalty organization run by death-row prisoners.

COMMENT

     This library serves some essential function of libraries, but in extremely constrained circumstances. The inmates are in the prison library hoping to become knowledgeable enough about the law in order to avoid getting executed. It's hard to imagine library research with higher stakes, Particularly since the men in Project Hope are trying to make up for the inadequate legal representation that landed them on death row in the first place. The article says that people rich enough to hire a lawyer were never sentenced to death no matter what crimes they were charged with;  impoverished  defendants with court-appointed lawyers were sentenced to death even though some of them were innocent.

     The prison library also serves as a meeting space.  The article says that the group, which has existed for 30 years, is allowed to meet so long as they do not discuss prison conditions.  There is a law class for Project Hope and members share information in a quarterly newsletter written on typewriters and printed by an outside board member who distributes 1,300 copies to subscribers.  Since the library has no digital networking or news databases, the board members also have to gather and share articles about the death penalty.

   

   

   

All Natural

 Sophia Hollander, "All Natural, The New Yorker. 94.33 (Oct. 22, 2018): p24.

Last week, as female activists swarmed Capitol Hill to denounce the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, another group of women gathered at a law library in Chelsea to push back against a more local threat: the imminent closure of the Mount Sinai West Birthing Center, one of the last remaining natural-birth strongholds in the city which also offers full access to a hospital.

COMMENT

The organizer put out a call on Facebook to organize a protest; the library provides a space for the activists to meet in person.

Women's health is a political football.  As a woman myself, formerly of reproductive age, I can attest that when you yourself become the target of a patronizing person who wants to make your medical decisions for you  the attack feels very, very personal.  Anyone who has given birth in a U.S. hospital has probably experienced the invasive tactics of medical people who think that their training gives them the right to bully women in labor.  Even this mostly sympathetic article comes off as condescending towards women who want a respectful, calm birth experience that isn't framed as a medical emergency waiting to happen.

The U.S. is one of the most dangerous places in the developed world to give birth.  I'm pretty sure I know the reason.  When I had my baby in a hospital, I was unnecessarily injured.  When I complained about it, a medical person actually yelled at me for being selfish. She said, (and I quote) "The baby is the patient. Not you." (Although the injury did in fact make me into a patient).  In a nutshell, that attitude is the reason that birthing centers should be the norm, not the exception.

Also,  Brett Kavanaugh's crying jag over his own sense of entitlement showed the he does not have the temperament to sit on the Supreme Court.

Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, Be Very Afraid

David Streitfeld. “Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, be Very Afraid: Citing Amazon’s Dominance, a ‘Legal Prodigy’ Argues for a new Approach to Antitrust Regulation,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2018, BU 1, 6-7. 

The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library.      

     “Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.”  Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades.  There are a dozen tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable. 

     At the end of the antitrust stacks is a table near the window. “This is my command post,” Lina Khan said. 

COMMENT

     The photo accompanying this article shows law student Lina Kahn in law library stacks barely holding onto a toppling armload of hardbound library books.  She’s the author of a highly-cited paper [1] about the possibility of reviving and expanding anti-trust laws in order to rein in the outsized monopoly power of Big Tech. Khan is jump-starting her legal career by delving into historical legal scholarship on a topic that has been long ignored. The “dead” books she is using for her research sat on the shelf for more than 60 years but now it seems they were really just dormant, waiting for the passing of a fad for unregulated free markets. It’s a recurring library narrative -- finding intellectual treasure concealed in unused, supposedly obsolete books.  From an original research perspective, there is deep conflict with the  the commonly-held librarian notion that the most heavily used books are the most valuable.

    Big Tech, of course, is not responding passively to being labeled dangerously monopolistic.  As the article points out, Amazon has already hired its own lawyers to write rebuttals to Kahn. Shortly before this article appeared an op-ed [2] was published on the Forbes,com website (and then quickly redacted due to public ridicule) proposing that since public libraries are “obsolete” they would be better replaced with Amazon.com outlets. The idea was a logical if misguided extension of the tired old idea that public services would be more efficient if they were run like businesses. It’s hard to imagine an Amazon branded “library” outlet that would support antitrust legal research against its own parent company.  Yes, I know there’s a difference between public libraries and academic law libraries, but increasingly corporations are “sponsoring” university professorships in order to guarantee scholarship that is friendly to their own interests and political ideology. 

     Amazon really is overly powerful. Book sales statistics are not very precise, but in 2018,  Amazon sold about 1/2 of all print books, and about 80% of all ebooks (many of them self-published) in the U.S. Market. The company has been known to  promote or suppress publications, sometimes vindictively (such as the 2014 incident when Amazon attacked the publisher Hachette over ebook pricing).  It’s probably no coincidence that American democracy is in a state of crisis. A little trust-busting could be just what's needed right now. 

[1]Khan, Lina M. "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." Yale Law Journal,  126 (2016): 710.  
[2] Mourdoukoutas, Panos. “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” Forbes.com, July 21, 2018 [deleted]