HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Livingston: Rutgers Administration Is ‘Pulling a Fast One’ With Merger of Camden and Newark Law Schools. Expect to see more such, either in a “hide the decline” mode, or as cost-cutting as law schools go from cash cows to expense items.

Plus, from the comments:

I was wondering when someone was finally going to address this issue. A large number of junior ranking faculty are trying to transform law schools into something completely different. These professors, who are largely female, want to talk about anything but traditional law. Their focus is instead on abortion, parenting, racism, sexism, human rights violations and the environment. I get that there will be some overlap between these topics and the law, but they should be restricted to when the topic actually comes us and not woven mercilessly throughout the general curriculum. Since traditional topics still need to be taught for the bar exam and some business courses need to be offered, schools end up with a bloated faculty just so that they can have a strange panoply of socially progressive seminars that fit each faculty member’s niche interest. Perversely, this effect is most pronounced at low ranking schools, where students really should be focusing on basic legal skills since there is no way that they will ever have the resume to become constitutional law attorneys or public interest lawyers.

Graduating unemployable social-justice-warrior types is not a good mission, or a sustainable one.