Update on our earlier post about Columbia Law School letting students postpone their final exams if they feel “traumatized” by the non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases:
The president of the law school’s student senate was apparently not satisfied with the procedure the school laid out for getting a postponement.
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, writing at the Washington Post, quotes from that student official’s email to law students:
[A Vice Dean] sent out an email explaining that while extensions for exams for trauma related to the recent non-indictments can be granted, they can not be done by boilerplate email and require either an individual explanation in an e-mail or meeting with an academic counselor. If you do not feel comfortable doing either of these methods to request an extension and would be more comfortable with a peer interacting on your behalf with the administration, please email [email address]
If there is anything we can do to support you in this time of grief please do not hesitate to contact [email address]
So apparently the student senate will arrange a proxy for students who feel too traumatized to explain the reason they want a postponement.
It’s not clear whether anyone asked the student senate to take this step, but as Volokh notes, it’s indicative of the delicate disposition of today’s students that their leaders feel like they can’t handle the real world:
Where would the civil rights movement have been if civil rights lawyers were so traumatized by injustice that they couldn’t function effectively without deadline extensions? Where would a lawyer today be if, faced with a verdict — even in one of his own cases, and not just elsewhere — that he thought horribly unjust, he was so overcome with “grief” that he couldn’t perform effectively?
Such requests for accommodation, if granted, seem to me to promote expectations and attitudes that won’t serve the students well once become they lawyers (and won’t serve their clients well, either).
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