The story that Paul broke about Columbia Law School postponing exams for students who purport to be traumatized by the grand jury proceedings in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases is percolating through the press. The New York Times, Columbia’s home town paper, reports:
Columbia Law School is allowing students to postpone their final exams this month if they feel unnerved by the recent grand jury decisions not to indict police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men. …
The policy, reported this past weekend on the Power Line blog, quickly drew derision from some conservative websites.
But not only from conservatives, as the Times’s own report shows. A defense lawyer calls Columbia’s action “absurd” a law professor says this isn’t the kind of accommodation one would expect from an employer or a court, but “academic institutions are worlds of their own”; another law professor says Columbia’s action is contrary to law schools’ traditional ethos: “Law schools also have a tradition of being very tough-minded about these things. If you have an exam, it happens.”
Given that it can’t even garner support from the Times, Columbia Law School is probably feeling embarrassed. It should. If its students are so fragile that they can’t function on account of something they saw on television, they have no future in the law business.
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