Symposiums Schmymposiums

What is a Symposium?

1. A group hug for obscure law professors who pat each other on the back for delivering unintelligible speeches highlighting portions of obscure and unintelligible law articles, posing unintelligible questions, and receiving unintelligible answers. Oh yeah, nowadays a little Bush-bashing is thrown in for good measure. Then they drink free cocktails.

2. A chance for students to pad their resumes with claims to having organized said group hugs, and for the brave among them a chance to impose their own unintelligible question of their own after the unintelligible lecture. Usually a student asks a stupid question, but unlike in the classroom, the tradition at symposiums is for the lecturer to ignore the question and diffuse the awkwardness by giving an unrelated unintelligible answer. Bonus points for Bush-bashing. Then they drink free cocktails.

STOP THE MADNESS. Consider:

For those of us who had no clue what BarBri was as 1L's, we now face the fact its time to shell out another $2K for Bar review courses. More if you sign up for PMBR. Excuse me? Umm....exactly what did I shell out $90K for? How many law students graduate from UM? How many from Florida law schools generally? You do the math. Worse, students who can't find the money to pay for a review course will probably (or so the conventional wisdom goes) fail the bar on the first try. When that happens, UM Law looses precious ranking and we all suffer as a result.

Is there any legitimate reason why Florida law schools can't collaborate to produce free (or nearly free) bar preparation materials and lectures? I have a few guesses:

1. BarBri pays select professors to prepare materials and give recorded lectures. Those professors thus have an incentive to suppress their respective schools from offering a free alternative. I'm guessing in addition to the money they pay the lecturers, at some point there is the opportunity for drinking free cocktails.

2. Professors are too busy fawning over eachother's unintelligible blather and drinking free cocktails at all of these useless symposiums to bother with the practical needs of the students.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps we could get UM and other law schools to take action and offer a free bar prep program if we somehow combine it with drinking free cocktails.