Apparently some mosquitoes heard bloodsucker jokes and found a law school, thinking they’d be safe.

I sometimes fall into a deep coma on the sofas and chairs in the law school. I almost always wake up itchy. I thought it was mites at first, or maybe ghosts. It’s mosquitoes. I just counted five of them hanging out near room 127. If I could control the ecosystem, I’d eradicate mosquitoes. Who needs vectors anyway? All they do is make you itch and spread malaria. No one likes either of those things.

But that’s what we get for living in a school down by the river.

SBA, please invest in tiki-torches or DDT. Rachel Carson’s long gone.

The BFC

Energy drinks – what did people do without them? I drank a 32 oz Monster the other day. It’s basically a keg of caffeine and B vitamins. But here’s the deal. 32 oz is too big for an energy drink. It’s just too much power for one person to have. It’s also too much for my kidneys, heart and nervous system because I was tweaking out, couldn’t sleep and just wanted to keep reading. How unhealthy – but cost effective!

You know your institution of higher learning just got owned if the Times called it out.

Baylor University (not BLS, we’re a distant outpost) hasn’t had a good piece of news in, oh, ten years? The basketball scandals. Massive NCAA rule violations. Rotating presidents. Absurd battles over teaching creationism. Tenure issues that pissed off an entire faculty.

Well, here’s the latest embarrassment. In brief, Baylor was paying undergraduates to retake the SAT. Once those students proved they could improve their scores, they got scholarship money and everyone went on their way. Wait, Oh, right, it was a scheme to fudge all-important rankings:

A [Baylor] professor of higher education, said, “I do think there was an underlying motivation to increase the average SAT scores and therefore then improve our position with regard to the rankings.” Baylor then got to misrepresent its median SAT scores.

Who thought that was a good idea? Did anyone consider how a big Baptist school, with a “distinctive Christian mission,” a school that’s faced crisis after embarrassing crisis, needs to be especially wary of even mild chicanery? This school has been under the microscope for a while. This doesn’t help anything.

This would bother me less if I went to “Brazos River Law School,” or “Jaworski School of Law.” But it’s Baylor Law School. When the mothership looks bad, WE ALL look bad. Even if BLS students know we’re hardly a part of the mothership, we’re still tainted by what goes on across the street.

And so I ask all administrators at Baylor: Please stop screwing up, at least in high profile ways. Seriously. Stop. Grow some common sense flowers in the finely manicured gardens. Perhaps consult the bears because it seems like they would have said “NOOOO RAARARA!” to this plan and they would have settled all previous debates by roaring and eating the obstinate. And so help me, if I hear someone say “Well WK, administrators are people too and they make mistakes!” I’m going to lose it. That’s like giving a pass to a student for cheating on an exam, repeatedly. “Oh it’s OK, I won’t fail you. You get five more mistakes though!” That would never happen. That student would be canned in a heartbeat.

It’s a common refrain, but it’s true – some of us pay way too much (I’ll be an indentured servant for 20 years) for our administrators to further tarnish the name and brand of this school. Yeah, we’re your students and low men on the totem pole. Students complain all the time about all kinds of trivial things. We’re usually told to grow up and stop complaining, or, my favorite, you just don’t understand. But it’s a totally well-founded complaint, one that has nothing to do with maturity or experience, when one complains about the school’s brand gradually being turned into a punchline.

Universities are giant businesses. I know that. But believe it or not, students are your clients. Do your job like we’re your clients. I’m not saying bend over backwards and cater to every whim, but we’re owed the same respect and duty a professional owes to their client. Why? One day, in the future, you’re going to use some undergraduate at a phone bank, call us up on our high tech space phones, begging for donations. If this is the kind of stuff that we remember about our institution, good luck getting my nano-credits from my cold robotic hands.

Thanks.

On a lighter note, this guy ate a 20 pound hamburger.

Guest writer: A requieum for hubris, or: How 25% of people you’ll meet in law school and 100% of people at lawschoolforums.com are going to get punk’d by life at some point

One thing I’ve learned in my twenty-two years of life is that the one common denominator in my failures in life is arrogance. I’m not sure exactly what causes one to be arrogant (they are cocky by nature, they are aggressive, or they are concealing self-doubt), but I’ve always found that when I am arrogant, whether it’s in a game of Madden or in a footrace, I tend to fall short.

Maybe it’s the pressure building. Maybe it’s covering up doubt, or “puffing.” Maybe it’s karma. Either way, I’ve talked a whole bunch in my life, and not always walked the walk. The more I am confident, the more I’m sure I’ll do well, or beat someone, or make a cut, the more likely I don’t. I think the reason is that when one is so confident that they are unshakable, or infallible, they underestimate the force amassing against them. That’s certainly true of me—there have been many times where I underestimate someone or something only to be humbled. Call it cosmic justice or fate, but I’m just thankful to say that just recently, I may have learned of this fundamental error I kept making.

I’m more humble. I’m not humble in the declarative, final sense, because all of us are human, and all of us fall short of ideals. I try to be humble, I try to pray for humility, and I tend to undervalue my own performances for fear of being cocky and stumbling. Every round of moot court, I went into the room thinking Will and I could be beaten, and that I could lose the round. I created that presumption to work against, to climb up from, and ideally overcome. Now, this all must be tempered by the idea that one does not want to be a defeatist, but that’s not what I’m advocating. What I’ve realized, though, is that not only does humility work for me, but it also makes you a lot more likeable of a guy.

Take the example of the typical arrogant or cocky person, who is smart and able and knows damn well that they are. These are the sorts that take pains to make sure everyone else knows how smart they are, how hip they are, or how good they are at something. I’ve always thought that except for the very true progenies (freaks of nature like Einsteins or Lebron Jameses), most of those people are compensating for some inner doubt or unhappiness. This presents two problems, though. First, when they do win (as they are wont to do, being as smart or talented that they are), no one cheers with them. In fact, many people secretly root against these people. Second, when they do eventually fall short, they’re not given the sportsman handshake or showered in admiration by their peers. No, they get the sense that everyone is thankful they’ve fallen, and then beat themselves up over it. Either way, projecting one’s arrogance or self-confidence to these levels (unless you’re T.O. and you need to see the world as haters) can only bring you down.

The point of this is that it’s an ideal. I strive for it, as do the majority of people around. I’m certainly one to stray—just ask my friends when I start winning in Call of Duty 4. But it’s served me well in this tournament, and it’s refreshing to think that I may be on to something for a change.

NS