From the “Times Higher Education Supplement”:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408524&c=2
bq. Fights broke out as law students queued for up to 11 hours last night to secure the dissertation supervisor of their choice at Brunel University. More than 100 students queued outside Brunel Law School overnight in the hope of working with their preferred academic, after the school introduced a first-come, first-served supervisor-allocation system. ….“There are some people you just don’t want. If everybody in the school were a good supervisor, we wouldn’t have to do this. You’ve no idea how distressing it was to see people punching each other in the queue,” said the student.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
{ 26 comments }
rea 10.02.09 at 1:41 pm
To a US educated lawyer like me, the concept of a dissertation in law school seems alien . . .
alex 10.02.09 at 2:25 pm
But not, presumably, punching people…
chris y 10.02.09 at 2:28 pm
This (the decision by Brunel) plumbs depths of stupidity for which the English language is scarcely prepared. They might not have predicted fist fights, but if they didn’t realise that it was bound to cause serious ill-feeling, they must live in a padded cell.
christian h. 10.02.09 at 2:30 pm
Maye they are over-enrolled? Sorry guys, but this is just too funny. Are you sure it’s not a send-up?
ajay 10.02.09 at 2:33 pm
1: but the rest of the story seems perfectly normal, right? :)
Salient 10.02.09 at 2:39 pm
This (the decision by Brunel) plumbs depths of stupidity for which the English language is scarcely prepared.
I wouldn’t go so far as that, the first-come, first-serve queue has been unproblematic for them for… what, decades? The THES article fails to mention that this wasn’t a new policy.
engels 10.02.09 at 2:42 pm
Maybe universities should just charge more money to people who want a capable dissertation supervisor?
Katherine Farmar 10.02.09 at 2:54 pm
Salient @5: according to the article, this particular system was introduced in the last academic year.
john theibault 10.02.09 at 2:57 pm
The THES article fails to mention that this wasn’t a new policy.
The THES article claims that the policy was first implemented last year and it was the reports of last year’s participants that prompted this year’s queues. Are they wrong about that?
rea 10.02.09 at 3:03 pm
But not, presumably, punching people…
but the rest of the story seems perfectly normal, right?
Actually, we tended not to engage in assaultive behavior, which might get you sued. We did each other dirt in more subtle ways (like tearing the pages containing the answers to research problems from the relevant books in the library).
And even at the celebrated law school I attended (along with Ann Coulter, a few years behind me) there were definitely professors with whom you would have as little contact as possible.
Salient 10.02.09 at 3:51 pm
according to the article, this particular system was introduced in the last academic year.
Oops. I didn’t read the article sufficiently closely. Also, that’s what I get for reading the THES comments, where one student mentions “As a Brunel Law graduate, its really sad to read this. To be honest the system is quite fair… The system worked perfectly for all the other years” (no doubt without awareness that the policy was recently changed). Should’ve learned by now to not pay much attention to THES commenters. Ah well. (Thanks for the correction, Katherine/john.)
alex 10.02.09 at 5:37 pm
@10 – frankly, permanently vandalising a library book is a much worse crime than a little bop on the nose. Or if it isn’t, it ought to be… ;-)
peter 10.02.09 at 6:20 pm
Presumably the fights were between faculty members, determined to supervise or not supervise particular students.
roac 10.02.09 at 6:42 pm
As a Yank, the name originally registered with me as “Brunei University,” so I said Why be surprised that weird stuff goes on on the island of Borneo?
I assume the place is actually named after Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Constructor of Very Large Iron Things?
(I second Rea’s comment at no. 1. Law school in the US is about training mercenaries, not academics. If you are in the upper echelon, though, you get called on to write a law review article, which is not totally dissimilar.)
Chris A. Williams 10.02.09 at 10:19 pm
In gonzo research* carried out by impoverished research students working as exam invigilators in the mid 1990s at the University of Poppleton**, it was the law students, and disproportionately those law students from outside the EU who were paying full fees, who were most often caught trying to cheat. Just sayin’.
*Not to be confused with gonk research, which also went on. Worryingly, the medics’ lucky-item count cleared everyone else’s by a factor of 3.
** Not its real name.
Ken Lovell 10.03.09 at 3:08 am
Why not simply hold an auction and let the market determine the value of various supervisors? With supervisors getting half the fee of course. Talk about win/win.
engels 10.03.09 at 3:14 am
Becuase if they only get half they’ll want to keave to become investment bankers, obviously.
Jackmormon 10.03.09 at 5:00 am
As a Yank, the name originally registered with me as “Brunei University,â€
Whereas I, another Yank, kept reading it as Buñel University, which I also thought rather fitting.
roac 10.03.09 at 11:04 pm
The Discreet Charm of the Law Students?
engels 10.04.09 at 5:12 pm
Wasn’t there a US law school where students were auctioning off their places in oversubscribed classes on the internet? I think I did hear something like that…
lurker 10.05.09 at 3:40 am
you get called on to write a law review article, which is not totally dissimilar
It’s really not that similar though, either.
ajay 10.05.09 at 8:20 am
Given their tendency to punch each other, Bruno University would seem like a better title.
Doug T 10.05.09 at 3:24 pm
Let’s hope they don’t switch to festival seating in their lectures.
roac 10.05.09 at 3:34 pm
Well, it couldn’t be Brno University, because they don’t appear to have a law school.
engels 10.11.09 at 2:05 pm
David Willetts told the Guardian that vice-chancellors are not prepared for the pressure their students will put them under if fees go up…
“It’s amazing the change in this generation of students. The issue is not fomenting Maoist revolutionaries somewhere. They are much more likely to complain about how crowded seminars are or how slow the response to their dissertation was. Those are the kind of things that young people register.”
Nix 10.11.09 at 8:07 pm
Yes, Brunel University is named after I. K. Brunel. Unfortunately its architecture is, well, sixties brutalist: see e.g. http://www.panoramio.com/photo/13858492 (which is a photosharing site I’ve never heard of before, but that’s the lecture centre, all right. Actually that’s one of its more attractive angles.)
When I was doing CS there in the mid-90s, the university was saturated with Israeli law students, who must have made up well over half the undergraduate intake of the law school and perhaps much more (the halls were 80% Israeli, 20% everyone else). It seems that if you don’t have a law degree in Israel you have no hope of a job anywhere and must dig ditches or something, and the UK gave Israel a copy of its civil code so a UK law degree is valuable there. So Brunel (and presumably every other UK university) gets saturated with desperate Israelis who didn’t get into a uni in .il.
And foreign students pay a *lot*.
So I can understand them standing in the cold for a night if they thought it might save their degree…
Comments on this entry are closed.