USC Law Adds Video Professor to Faculty

Last week, the UCLA School of Law made headlines when it announced a “Transition to Practice” L.L.M. in response to a changing environment for law school graduates. Sensing an opportunity to one up its rival, the USC Gould School of Law countered UCLA this week by undertaking an intense effort to help train its students for non-law careers, titled “Transition to Employment”. To kick off the initiative with a bang, USC announced today that John W. Scherer, aka “The Video Professor”, had been added to the law school’s faculty. Although some academics may quibble that Scherer is not actually a professor of anything, USC anticipates that Scherer will be well received by his colleagues because he has been playing a professor on TV for years.

After being introduced at a press conference, Scherer admitted that he “doesn’t know the first thing about law,” but he believes that opening his entire resource library of educational DVDs and training programs to USC’s law students can only help them “weather this economic tsunami”. Scherer markets himself as being able to provide “Knowledge at the Speed of Life.” While life in the job market for new attorneys may have slowed to a crawl, only The Video Professor can provide those intangible soft skills that busy law firms are ill-equipped to nurture.

A press release from USC’s Dean, William P. Harpington, also praised the addition of The Video Professor as a transformative moment in the school’s history. Dean Harpington’s statement noted that USC Law “has been too focused on providing its students with straightforward legal training.” He goes on to state that “the addition of new courses taught by The Video Professor allows us to swap out third year seminars on now defunct topics such as ‘Credit Default Swaps and the Law’ and ‘How to Securitize a Fraudulent Subprime Loan’ with ever practical and timely courses such as ‘Making the Most out of eBay’ and ‘Budget Online Travel Booking’. After all, at USC, like at most businesses, we feel it is necessary to adapt to the changing times. The addition of John Scherer to the faculty means our graduates are more likely to be driving down, and not begging alongside, this road we call life.”

The addition of The Video Professor is only one aspect of USC’s approach to equipping its students with the tools needed to pay back their private loans, with or without Big Law offers. Another primary component of USC’s strategic initiative includes the addition of Rosetta Stone kiosks in the men’s and women’s bathrooms. Harpington hopes that these displays will encourage students to “learn a new language and maybe look oversees for their next job.”