Monday, October 24, 2005

 

Is there a "no porn spam" list for law professors?

This post violates the tried-and-true rule of handling someone who is obnoxiously pandering for your attention: "Don't pay any attention to him -- that's just what he wants."

I've previously complained about receiving too much "law porn" in my office mail. What is "law porn," you ask? It's the (usually) glossy four-color brochures and postcards law schools send out to promote and market themselves in the hope of rising in the U.S. News rankings. See also here and here.

Last week, I decided to conduct a little experiment. Instead of simply taking the law porn from my mailbox and throwing it directly in the recycling bin unread, I would let it accumulate in my office for a full week, and then dump the whole lot of it in the recycling bin unread.

The week got off to a great start: Here's the eleven pieces of law porn I received in the mail in the first two days.

DSCN5803

In the above photo, I included one of my shoes, for scale. That's a big pile o' law porn: the SMU, USC and William Mitchell brochures are each full magazine size. The shoe was also meant to signal my intention to stomp all over this pile before dumping it unread into the recycling bin.

But it turns out that 5.5 pieces of law porn a day was a bit below average. Here is the law porn accumulation after one week:

DSCN5831

No, my shoe hasn't gotten smaller. That's 43 pieces of law porn pictured there, including eight magazine-size glossy brochures. That's an average of 8.6 pieces of law porn each working day. And it weighs 5 lbs., 15.7 oz. That's right -- just a single postcard shy of 6 lbs of law porn in a single week, an incredible 1.2 lbs per work day.

Why are they sending me all this stuff? And what kind of stuff? This pile o' porn includes: general promotional brochures for the law school; announcements of new faculty hires; alumni magazines of law schools I never attended; brochures bragging about recent faculty publications and accomplishments; and announcements of conferences, distinguished speaker series and presentations of academic work.

The latter category sounds like it might have a function other than pure puffery, until you take a closer look. Of the 15 pieces of porn purporting to invite me to hear speakers, 6 were announcing speaker events in distant cities that were to take place in less than two weeks -- so I couldn't have reasonably arranged to attend even if I'd wanted to -- and 4 others were for events that had already happened. Five announced a full academic year speaker schedule, all of which included at least two dates that had already passed.

And some were just absurd: like I'm really going to fly down to Birmingham, Alabama to Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, to hear somebody's 1-hour lunchtime workshop. How far do they think I'd go for a free lunch?

As for the glossy brochures, the prize for has to go to NYU Law School -- the institution which arguably deserves the credit for starting this whole law porn trend -- for its magazine-sized brochure:

DSCN5833

Isn' that precious? If their self-description as "The Law School," isn't enough to make you sick, there's that cover story, "Dworkin on Dworkin," in which the famous philosopher -on-a-law-professor-salary will undoubtedly hold forth on the importance of his work to legal discourse. How do you spell "wankathon"?

Comments:
At least it's good to know that a bunch of freelance writers and graphic designers are getting work. There were some nice cover designs in your pile o' porn.
 
Bring back the banana. A shoe just doesn't have the same impact.
 
Ugh. This reminds me of all the grad school and undergrad info I still get from time to time. While I don't get that much anymore, I still get way more than I should, considering I've already been to undergrad and grad school...
 
Dworkin on Dworkin? Sounds kinky.
 
Wow, a junk mail post. How original.

The shoe thing works only if you tell us your shoe size.
 
Oh, whoa woe!
 
Wow, anonymous sarcasm! How edgy and out there!
 
Well, first of all, I went to NYU, and I'd just like to say the place is called NYU School of Law not NYU Law School. So the damned brochure ought to be called The School of Law. But I always thought "School of Law" was pathetically grasping. Law School is better. And the slavering over Dworkin! It was going on 25 years ago and it's still going strong.
 
And look how smug and self-satisfied Dworkin looks in that photo! It's as if The Onion did a parody of NYU law porn.

We should all publish blog posts "on" ourselves. Tonya on Tonya. Althouse on Althouse. Oscar on Oscar. How's that for a new meme?
 
Ann, does NYU also have a School of Rock?
 
Tonya: I'm a little afraid that is what we're doing already!
 
Yeah, I guess we kind of are doing that -- aren't we?

Who was I kidding anyway? My blog is named The Tonya Show after all.
 
My ex hasn't been here for over 5 years and I'm still getting all his "doctor porn" at my house. He has claimed to send change-of-address forms to the whole world but I think the volume is increasing.

But bless the internet: on almost all of the junk mail these days there is a reference to an email address. I've sent out a dozen or more "help! I'm getting mail for an ex-husband" messages just this week.

It is faster and cheaper than snail mail plus I ask the recipient that if they aren't the right person, please just pass it on.

Try it on your worst enemy!
 
So it's not on Andrea Dworkin?
 
Sorry for the anonymous sarcasm.
 
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