File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9711, message 353


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 



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