An Academic Disaster

Arthur Joel Katz
Columbia Law School Class of 1951

March 6th, 2005

Columbia Law School is my alma mater. I take great pride in that fact, and even more in the fact that I actually taught there for one year after my graduation. At more than fifty years distance I remember each of the professors as if I left them this afternoon. They were an extraordinary lot. Although I don't remember a twentieth of the law they taught me, what remains is their instruction on how to think like a lawyer: Find the issue, reason, anticipate, and don't do anything blatantly stupid.

Columbia Law has been crowing quite a bit of late. Recently, its dean became president of Rice University. Many people would regard that as a step up in the world, but we Columbia stalwarts tend to be slightly embarrassed by its old dean's acceptance of a demotion. However, not to worry. A new dean was recently appointed, a 35-year-old whipper snapper who is alleged to be so brilliant that he easily deciphers the tax code. It is therefor with great sadness that I report that in practically his first month on the job, the new dean (herein “ND” -- his true name is not used to spare ND from search engines) has done more to alienate the alumni than Harvard's president did to alienate women.

It seems ND felt called upon to comment upon a controversy involving charges of antisemitism in one of Columbia University 's departments, the one — surprise — concerned with Middle East and Asian language studies. Why ND should choose to involve himself in this controversy is odd as that department is not part of the law school and therefor not under the ND's jurisdiction. Accordingly, at best what he has to say about that subject would be, as we lawyers say, obiter dictum. But, as ND suggests, free speech is a good thing and everyone is entitled to comment. On the other hand, there may be a connection: Kent Hall, where the alleged antisemitic department is housed, was the building in which the law school was housed when I attended. Since my time, a new law school was built and then had to be rebuilt when it quickly turned out to be badly designed. But I digress.

ND wrote an Op Ed piece which was published in The New York Sun, a newspaper of whose existence I was unaware until ND brought it to my attention. It is a little infra dignitatus for the dean of our law school to publish an Op Ed piece in anything but the NY Times. No matter, it was neither a masterpiece of prose nor logic. What is one to expect of a tax lawyer? Essentially he argued that the University could not be antisemitic because it had any number of Jewish students and faculty and ND, an Orthodox Jew himself, felt comfortable there. ND, however, was so proud of the piece that he circulated it to every Columbia alumnus by email. Unfortunately, he put the general address in the “To” box of Outlook.

Instant disaster! In the first place, the computer of most alums who were not at their desks generated an automatic “out of the office” reply. These replies, since they were addressed to the sender, were circulated not only to ND but every other Columbia alum. The flood of emails crowding the “In” boxes of those who were actually at their desks gave rise to outrage. Many of those outraged contributed to the debacle by replying with sharp words. These responses were, of course, circulated to every Columbia alum and engendered even greater outrage.

Perhaps I have been too hard on tax lawyers. Lawyers in general, as the Columbia alums proved, are often not especially computer literate. However that may be, it took several hours, not to mention many flooded “In” boxes, before people began to write to ND directly by finding his email address on the law school website. Indeed, when I did this, ND responded that the problem was being fixed by the technical group and he offered an apology.

Like a woman scorned, Hell hath no fury like a group of lawyers enraged over inconvenience to themselves. Goodness knows how they would have reacted had ND proposed to raise the Social Security tax on incomes over $90,000 or proposed a in a new course to teach anger management and humor to law students.

 

P.S. Let he who is not without sin at least engage in full disclosure. I confess that when I first began distributing my columns to an email list I made essentially the same mistake as did ND: I put the addresses of all recipients in the “To” box rather than the bcc box, thereby sharing my email list with the world at large. Someone was kind enough to point out this stupidity and I have never done it again. I know of no damage this has caused, but if it has, please hire a Columbia Law School grad to sue me.