Taking the externship debate seriously

as published in the Georgetown Law Weekly

We have benefited from an active SBA this year, but its lobbying for an expanded externship program has been a rushed and ultimately misguided attempt to respond to a difficult job market. We need instead a serious reexamination of how to serve the long-term interests of Georgetown students.

Superficially, the SBA’s proposal sounds like a boon for students: the chance to earn 3 credits from an externship which don’t count toward the pass/fail limit. Looking deeper however, the proposal undermines our interests.

First, there is no meaningful faculty supervision or support of externships. We would be paying the Law Center not for any educational services but simply for the privilege of doing externships: we would be paying for something that costs the school nothing. For part-time students, who pay per credit, this deal is particularly unjustifiable. Second, without any faculty supervision, students are being deprived of what could be a meaningful educational experience. When employers and not faculty have exclusive control over the externship’s content, the externships will more likely serve the short-term needs of employers and promote their ethos rather than serving the needs of students. Unlike the SBA’s proposal, peer schools which provide externship programs also provide extensive faculty supervision - a feature of externship programs also required by the ABA for accreditation.

In the long term, this externship program will hurt Georgetown’s reputation. It requires the university to give academic credit for activity that it does not supervise, and cannot meaningfully guarantee. This imposes a serious cost on all students, whether or not they participate in the program. Further, the continued existence of this program makes meaningful reform less likely. So long as the externship program remains in its current form, Georgetown purports to be doing something meaningful to help its students get jobs, even though this program will likely have little effect in reaching that goal.

In a deeper sense, the SBA’s proposal would hurt the entry level legal market and makes things worse for all jobseekers. A common argument in favor of externships is that employers want students with practical experience. When a student does an externship for credit, they are paying for the privilege of on-the-job training. Wouldn’t it be better if the costs of job training remained with employers, rather than being absorbed by already debt-strapped students? Worse still, by filling entry-level trainee jobs with unpaid students, we remove employer’s incentive to hire graduates for those positions. If we stand together as students, we can fight this race to the bottom, and demand better treatment. The externships represent yet another way that students are treated as mere products to be marketed to employers. The school should be tailored to the best interests of students, not that of employers. This is a great law school. We shouldn’t sell ourselves out so cheaply.

Furthermore, the shallow political methods the SBA used to drum up support, while perhaps appropriate for a national political campaign, were wholly inappropriate for a small community like Georgetown Law. Law students (and professors) prefer substantive debate, and take it seriously. We do not take to superficial and misleading flyers or slogan-oriented politicking. The SBA never seriously responded to the objections raised by professors even though they took the extraordinary effort to contact every student in the school. Jim Secreto, SBA delegate and co-author of the proposal, sent out a mass email stating: “I did not expect the intense, even vitriolic, opposition this proposal received. A very small but vocal group of professors would like to kill the proposal.” (emphasis added) He then asked students to contact faculty members to tell them “how you feel,” and included a form email students could forward to professors without explaining or replying to the substance of the objections. Describing faculty opposition as “vitriolic” rather than taking the objections seriously is indicative of the SBA’s attitude toward this important decision.

The SBA also started a substance-free Facebook event and circulated an equally insubstantial flyer, neither of which took seriously the earnest, complex and good-faith arguments raised by concerned, progressive faculty. Some of the communications were actually misleading. An email to the student body signed by SBA president William Broderick-Villa stated: “Stanford gives 12 externship credits; Berkeley gives 10; GW gives 8. Currently, Georgetown gives 2 credits; we’re debating whether to raise that to 3.” But Broderick-Villa didn’t mention that Stanford’s program requires weekly 3-5 page reflection papers, and a final paper of at least 15 pages, nor that Stanford requires a law faculty member to visit each externship site to ensure its quality. The Berkeley and GW programs are similar. The SBA internship proposal, by contrast, has no such requirements. How does Broderick-Villa expect that students will engage professors in a meaningful discussion when he misleads students by suggesting that the SBA proposal is in any way equivalent to the practices at Stanford, Berkley or GW? And if the SBA wants a “discussion,” why did it furnish students with pre-written form emails rather than informing students of the other side of the debate? Given the failure of the SBA to take opposing arguments seriously, it’s no wonder that the faculty voted to table the SBA’s proposal by a 2-1 margin: it turns out that the group of faculty opposed was not “small” at all, despite the SBA’s assertions to the contrary.
The SBA was, however, responding to real fears of job insecurity given the recession, and while it’s easy to criticize proposals, it is also important to offer solutions. We see this as an opportunity to look for creative, student-empowering alternatives to the current, unacceptable status quo.

There are two ways to approach the legal recession: we can either keep doing what isn’t working, that is, using students to prop up the failing traditional legal market, and forcing us to scramble for the crumbs it has left to offer us, or we can look to create new opportunities and jobs the school has not previously supported. We propose that students be given the tools to become self-sufficient – for example, to be able to take advantage of fee shifting statutes and contingency fee work. Georgetown should make working as many lawyers do, as independent practitioners, a viable and attractive option. The school could provide a clinic seat for every student who desires one, and institute a new module in the curriculum aimed at giving students the skills and knowledge needed to build new practices. This program should also be open to recent graduates.

There are many other alternative ways forward. We need to get creative and change the law school paradigm rather than continuing to peddle students to a collapsed legal market. To this end we would like to invite discussion and debate and contributions of new proposals at http://legaleducationreform.blogspot.com/. Lets offer the faculty a better alternative to the externships-or-nothing decision Georgetown has been asked to make.