Full Title: Chicken Game: Legislature Threatens U. Md. Law School Funding
Like many law schools, the University of Maryland School of Law operates legal clinics that allow students to get experience tackling real cases. The school's environmental law clinic recently helped file a lawsuit against poultry producers to enforce the Clean Water Act and stop pollution of rivers flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. Now the poultry producers are fighting back, and members of the Maryland legislature have taken their side by pressuring the law school to name all of the clinics' clients or face funding cuts. Here's a Washington Post piece on the subject, and here is the Baltimore Sun's editorial opposing the threatened cuts.
As with similar threats made in the past, the legislators' intervention seems to me to miss a crucial point about how people actually learn. Education is not just academic; experiences teach too. If legislators try to impose such tight control on universities that nothing they disagree with ever occurs on campus, they take away opportunities for students to learn from making and living with their own choices, and from engaging diverse perspectives and interests. A college education should be more than a series of exercises conducted within the straight and narrow lines drawn by state lawmakers.
As with similar threats made in the past, the legislators' intervention seems to me to miss a crucial point about how people actually learn. Education is not just academic; experiences teach too. If legislators try to impose such tight control on universities that nothing they disagree with ever occurs on campus, they take away opportunities for students to learn from making and living with their own choices, and from engaging diverse perspectives and interests. A college education should be more than a series of exercises conducted within the straight and narrow lines drawn by state lawmakers.
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Posted: April 4, 2010, 3:07 PM