A Study In Douchebaggery: Dean Thomas Mengler Edition

With a tip of the hat to Nando over at third tier reality, we have someone who may give David Brooks a run for his money in the category of World’s Biggest Douchebag.  Yessiree Bob, Dean Thomas Mengler of the St. Thomas University School of Law, you are a true triple threat: clueless, an apologist for the rich, and an insensitive dick.  Way to go, buddy!  That’s pretty fucking impressive, and puts you in truly elite company.

Check out this asshole pontificating about the virtues of the free market separating the wheat from the chaff in the legal market:

A portion transcribed over at TTR, but watch the whole thing:

Not every lawyer in America, or not every lawyer in Minnesota, should be practicing law. And some of them are getting forced out. And they probably should be, for the same reason that the coffee shop down the street may not be – maybe there are too many coffee shops in that four-block area. And we don’t lose a lot of sleep over the concept that businesses come and go, because the market economy plays it out as it should be.

And, yet, St. Thomas promotes itself and the debt its grad need to take on quite differently:

Money Quote from Mengler: I still think that’s a pretty good deal. If you ask yourself, ‘Are you prepared to invest $75,000 or $80,000 in a career that might extend for 40 or 50 years.

First of all, the cost of attendance at St. Thomas School of Law is not 75-80k, that’s just “average” debt, the real cost is close to twice that, but more importantly, as I stroll through the information advertising on its website, I find nary a peep suggesting that “some people shouldn’t be lawyers.”

Now, anything I can do to help pollute the Google stream for this douche and his “school” is an unequivocal positive, but that’s not the reason, I decided to write this post, oh no.  This reminded me of a letter I saw a while back from huge prick Jon Kyl (yeah, that Jon Kyl) of Arizona to a struggling attorney advocating for the dischargability of student loans in bankruptcy.

But the forgiveness of debt or the discharge of such debt in bankruptcy hurts someone else – the lender.  I know you don’t intend that, but it is the inevitable result of discharge.

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Aspiring lawyers are usually willing to take on such debt because they know their law school education will enhance their earning potential for the rest of their working lives.  Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual earnings of all wage – and salaried – lawyers amounted to just over $102,000 in 2006.

Let’s first discuss Kyl’s rhetorical trick – it’s similar to Mengler’s – he goes from “law school education” in the first sentence to “wage – and salaried – lawyers” in the second sentence, but as many of the good people in the disgruntled lawyers category of this fine blog can and will attest A ≠ B.  More importantly, and this really gets to the core problem, is that people coming out of graduate school are not given any opportunity to fail.  Let’s stick with law school grads – if you’re not suited for the practice of law, or you can’t develop clients, or you simply aren’t able to find a job at a living wage, you are fucked for life.

That is the basic reason that relying on statistical averages or medians is the completely meaningless rhetorical device of a douchebag.  But what we see is that law school marketing is based on average salaries, and public policy decisions being based on medians, when such numbers do nothing to clarify reality, they simply obscure the grinding disaster of tens of millions – maybe more.  It is sophistry of the highest (or perhaps more accurately, lowest) form.

But failure, a clean slate, and moving onto something else is not a realistic option for huge numbers because they are saddled with massive, nondischaragable debt.  For example, you can’t build capital to start a business or move into some other line of work because Aunt Sallie and her bill collectors will take any money that you manage to put away.  The debt handicaps your ability to seek your comparative advantage – which should be the fundamental goal of any well-functioning economy – and the economy turns into a stagnant cesspool, banana republic style.  It’s like a compulsive gambler in hock to a loan shark – either you win big, or the mafia drags you out into the desert and puts a bullet in your head.  Want an analogy for the higher education complex in the United States – there it is.

The old saw says that there are “Lies, damned lies, and statistics,” but sometimes when you’re dealing with politicians and law school deans, you’re lucky enough to find all three.

Oh, and Dean Thomas Mengler, go fuck yourself, you slack-jawed piece of shit.