Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 20:25:22 -0500 (EST) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: M-I: Harvard Law Students to the Poor: "Drop Dead!!" As if the news wasn't bad enough; now the latest in a string of studies analyzing the social attitudes of students at the nation's most prestigioius law schools confirms the worst. Law students, especially those on the verge of graduating would much rather make a lot of money than help those in need. These findings confirm an earlier study of Harvard Law students first published in 1990, and updated in an article for the National Lawyers' Guild this year. In that study, the authors quoted Ronald Fox, the former director of the Public Interest Counseling Center at Harvard Law, who reported that, while about 40 per cent of the entering class expressed some interest in public sector law, that figure declined to less than twelve per cent after the second year and to about six per cent following the third year of law school. The new study, by Allen Dale Seidman, focuses on the effects of "complex ideological processes" that operate in a "culture of affluence and rising expectations" that permeates Harvard Law. This includes subtle but powerful "ideological work" that takes place within this rarefied environment to reorient idealist sudents toward elite career goals. All this takes place against a background of the culture at large, which embodies the values of competition and consumption, as well as the prestige and expectations a Harvard Law School education engenders, both in the student and within his immediate sphere of friends, peers, and extended family. The Harvard Law experience, Seidman's study found, is a remarkably effective equalizer. On his questionnaires, third-year students showed little differentiation along demographic variables. The attitudes of female students were quite similar to those of males; whites did not differ substantially from nonwhites; and even class background proved of little moment by the time of graduation. However, Seidman's study is striking in that, in comparing the attitudes of entering students to those who have just been handed their degree, it shows the dramatic effects of the long and arduous psychological journey undergone by these same students. And its ideological consequences. I wonder if perhaps such a "journey" from idealism to pragmatism is replicated in other callings as well. And what can be done about it? Louis Godena --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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