Open Letter to Kansas Law Dean
Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2014 8:33 pm
Mods: I think posters with keen insights into legal education and good ideas about making threads - such as, for example, lacrossebrother and myself - should be allowed to start substantive forum clutter topics like this in the on-ts. This should probably be merged into the metathread eventually but right now I want to make a big to-do about it for attention, which I guess should be discouraged by posters who are everyone else. Feel free to also make me a mod if you'd rather I merged it myself. I think Nony and I could really do some good work here in the on-topics. I refuse to go into the Lounge, which is more or less pure filth.
Subject: Kansas Law Admissions Dean Answers Your Questions
It's not entirely true that nothing will satisfy the naysayers. The post history of this particular account comprises insult comedy, self-aggrandizement, champagne socialism, experimental fiction, arguing with mods about rules and norms, ragequitting at intervals, indictments of prestige whoring as a trashy and obvious cover for character flaws, and various other casual vulgarities and abuse, all written as if over text message by a teenage girl. This has proven to be an effective overall approach to accumulating social capital on a website of applicants to elite law schools. However, I assume you don't have the professional luxury of most of these indulgences - apart from the ragequitting, it appears, which unfortunately is the single tactic listed apart from textspeak that is worst for approval ratings here. Mature posters with lots of posts on top-law-schools.com/forums will be sure to point out your lack of maturity. That is pretty much all I know about the culture here.
See, at 6:13:
[youtube]ZF8jej3j5vA[/youtube]
I think that you may be close to a more powerful understanding of the medium. I may be overestimating the literacy of this website's readers, but as it stands, you give the untoward appearance of picking up your toys and leaving right before giving substantive responses to Dirigo's substantive questions. I would rather you credibly figured out how to do what you hopefully came to do, which entails knowing your audience. It would be a shame to waste the professional, institutional, and societal benefit of your openness by ragequitting.
I mean, it's impressive enough that you've come off as kind of an awkward hard-on at worst where the rebuttable presumption is probably rightfully one that admissions officers are scam artists and cannibals. But seriously, I think you should just ask mods to clean it up in the way I propose and just continue as you were. The conversation is either 1) not as doomed as you genuinely think, because the mods are actually really good discourse sanitizers and there's an unwritten rule some will enforce that being "willfully dense" is pretty much bannable, or 2) in my opinion likely to be perceived as ending on a cop-out whether or not your intent is to try to make an exit from what was always a foreseeably high risk/high reward strategy.
To be fair to the mob, there's definitely something to the idea that it's incongruous to expect law students to do research on schools (and, like, life) before shitting up a thread, and then to exit right before addressing a raft of substantive questions. I'm going to be annoyed that I potentially wasted months of goodwill obtained by accusing posters of virginity and illiteracy here on your cause if I start to feel you're validating them by taking the opportunity to bail on your thread so as not to have to stray too far from your brochure. If the concern is really a messy thread full of ankle-biters, just let mods catch up to the task of figuring out how to deal with what you yourself describe as an issue that didn't come up previously. There will probably be a formal realizability question about how to make up a policy to get prattling idiots that don't know they're prattling idiots not to be prattling idiots, so it could take a second, but I think your surrender is premature if you're actually dedicated to this.
Less coherently but probably more conspicuously (as with most things here), it's about a perfect shitstorm to forward e-mails that failed to meet discursive standards while flaunting the norms and expecting "special treatment" here. You should assume you'll be median at best. Just because you're a dean of admissions doesn't mean that there aren't posters here who know more about the law school scam. These include literal former LSAT tutors - like, people who taught taking a standardized test in exchange for money - who applied ED to a much more expensive school than yours rather than make any attempt at all to reduce the cost of tuition. You might consider changing the name of the thread to Brut's Knowledge Palace or something similar.
I hope you figure out a way to make narrative transparency work for you, which may come down to flatly stating when it should be obvious what an admissions director will and won't say because of institutional politics. Reading between the lines in a nuanced fashion is maybe only a valued professional legal skill in an idealized world, and maybe disingenuous character assassinations and obfuscations are the name of the game in practice in 2014, especially in the worlds people here aspire to enter. Still, it would suck if your efforts thus far and preference for PMs over posts left the most cynical here to shade in your picture as one of a sociopath who scams and sabotages applicants because, respectively, you didn't wait for mods to clean up in the way they thought best before you gave up on the whole thing, and didn't think about the possibility that an intelligent and sometimes even clever applicant might become popular for posting Elliot Rodger-tier content about tits and beer and lifting weights before you forwarded his e-mails about ripping out eyeballs and setting large fires as a result of sports outcomes under a mistaken idea of other local schools' idea of "fit" or your futile hopes for the makeup of your graduates' opposing counsel. I read somewhere it's a numbers game. I hope this is a teachable moment for you. Be sure not to be able to conceive of that sentence as a dry joke when you accuse me of humorlessness.
Enjoy your break. I'm told that nobody ever really quits TLS, however.
Subject: Kansas Law Admissions Dean Answers Your Questions
I hope you'll reconsider, as you're still in the process of shaping norms and expectations. I'd suggest you ask mods to 1) merge the Q&A thread into the discussion thread, then 2) split the useful and constructive posts back into a new Q&A thread, with the continued understanding that shitting it up is bannable.JayhawkLaw wrote:That's it, I surrender. This thread has clearly been hijacked by a few posters committed to keeping this thread off topic.
At this point if I said that the number eight follows the number seven, a crew of posters would jump on here. First they'd accuse me of being misleading. Then when confronted with the fact that eight in fact follows seven, they'd say well, that might be true, but you were misleading when you said seven follows six. At which point...well, you get the idea. Nothing I can say on here will satisfy the naysayers.
It's not entirely true that nothing will satisfy the naysayers. The post history of this particular account comprises insult comedy, self-aggrandizement, champagne socialism, experimental fiction, arguing with mods about rules and norms, ragequitting at intervals, indictments of prestige whoring as a trashy and obvious cover for character flaws, and various other casual vulgarities and abuse, all written as if over text message by a teenage girl. This has proven to be an effective overall approach to accumulating social capital on a website of applicants to elite law schools. However, I assume you don't have the professional luxury of most of these indulgences - apart from the ragequitting, it appears, which unfortunately is the single tactic listed apart from textspeak that is worst for approval ratings here. Mature posters with lots of posts on top-law-schools.com/forums will be sure to point out your lack of maturity. That is pretty much all I know about the culture here.
See, at 6:13:
[youtube]ZF8jej3j5vA[/youtube]
I think that you may be close to a more powerful understanding of the medium. I may be overestimating the literacy of this website's readers, but as it stands, you give the untoward appearance of picking up your toys and leaving right before giving substantive responses to Dirigo's substantive questions. I would rather you credibly figured out how to do what you hopefully came to do, which entails knowing your audience. It would be a shame to waste the professional, institutional, and societal benefit of your openness by ragequitting.
I mean, it's impressive enough that you've come off as kind of an awkward hard-on at worst where the rebuttable presumption is probably rightfully one that admissions officers are scam artists and cannibals. But seriously, I think you should just ask mods to clean it up in the way I propose and just continue as you were. The conversation is either 1) not as doomed as you genuinely think, because the mods are actually really good discourse sanitizers and there's an unwritten rule some will enforce that being "willfully dense" is pretty much bannable, or 2) in my opinion likely to be perceived as ending on a cop-out whether or not your intent is to try to make an exit from what was always a foreseeably high risk/high reward strategy.
To be fair to the mob, there's definitely something to the idea that it's incongruous to expect law students to do research on schools (and, like, life) before shitting up a thread, and then to exit right before addressing a raft of substantive questions. I'm going to be annoyed that I potentially wasted months of goodwill obtained by accusing posters of virginity and illiteracy here on your cause if I start to feel you're validating them by taking the opportunity to bail on your thread so as not to have to stray too far from your brochure. If the concern is really a messy thread full of ankle-biters, just let mods catch up to the task of figuring out how to deal with what you yourself describe as an issue that didn't come up previously. There will probably be a formal realizability question about how to make up a policy to get prattling idiots that don't know they're prattling idiots not to be prattling idiots, so it could take a second, but I think your surrender is premature if you're actually dedicated to this.
Less coherently but probably more conspicuously (as with most things here), it's about a perfect shitstorm to forward e-mails that failed to meet discursive standards while flaunting the norms and expecting "special treatment" here. You should assume you'll be median at best. Just because you're a dean of admissions doesn't mean that there aren't posters here who know more about the law school scam. These include literal former LSAT tutors - like, people who taught taking a standardized test in exchange for money - who applied ED to a much more expensive school than yours rather than make any attempt at all to reduce the cost of tuition. You might consider changing the name of the thread to Brut's Knowledge Palace or something similar.
I hope you figure out a way to make narrative transparency work for you, which may come down to flatly stating when it should be obvious what an admissions director will and won't say because of institutional politics. Reading between the lines in a nuanced fashion is maybe only a valued professional legal skill in an idealized world, and maybe disingenuous character assassinations and obfuscations are the name of the game in practice in 2014, especially in the worlds people here aspire to enter. Still, it would suck if your efforts thus far and preference for PMs over posts left the most cynical here to shade in your picture as one of a sociopath who scams and sabotages applicants because, respectively, you didn't wait for mods to clean up in the way they thought best before you gave up on the whole thing, and didn't think about the possibility that an intelligent and sometimes even clever applicant might become popular for posting Elliot Rodger-tier content about tits and beer and lifting weights before you forwarded his e-mails about ripping out eyeballs and setting large fires as a result of sports outcomes under a mistaken idea of other local schools' idea of "fit" or your futile hopes for the makeup of your graduates' opposing counsel. I read somewhere it's a numbers game. I hope this is a teachable moment for you. Be sure not to be able to conceive of that sentence as a dry joke when you accuse me of humorlessness.
Enjoy your break. I'm told that nobody ever really quits TLS, however.
