...no sir, not one bit. That's why it's so odd that the first thing mentioned by the Dean in his letter welcoming students was this:
"First, I am pleased to inform you that Northwestern Law advanced two places in U.S. News & World Report's 2004 graduate school rankings to secure an overall 10th place for the first time since U.S. News began ranking law schools in 1989. More importantly the long-term trend is positive - we are up from 14th in 1996 to 10th this year."
Surely this can't be the "first" thing worth mentioning, can it? After all, Dean van Zandt has presided over the most astonishing exodus of top faculty talent in the United States (imagine the well-deserved scholarly rank of a school with Northwestern's "best and brightest," such as Thomas Merrill, Michael Perry, Daniel Polsby, Stephen Gardbaum, Annelise Riles, Paul Robinson, Henry Smith, Richard Brooks, Gary Lawson, Keith Hylton, and Tracey George--all faculty that departed during, and sometimes because of, Van Zandt's tenure); this is nothing to be proud of, and the mere fact that it is easy for a small private school to game the numbers , and move up in US News, is not something any serious Dean, as committed to scholarship as Van Zandt, would want to highlight.
So obviously this Dean's letter was drafted by an incompetent bureaucrat, not an academic.
On the other hand, I suppose it is true, as long time observers will remember, that Northwestern was the school that pioneered in such areas as hiring all unemployed graduates as research assistants in order to boost employment stats, as well as spending merit aid money with an eye to boosting the median LSAT, not recruiting the best students.
So could it really be that a serious Law School Dean thinks moving up two places in the fake US News rankings constitutes an accomplishment?
Nah, not possible.
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