Friday is "Dear Millennial Law Prof" Day!

Dear Millenial Law Prof,

Why do Millenial students feel the need to post their rants anonymously? We other-generation-als are so much more honest when it comes to letting The Establishment know that we are pissed off at them for the bullshit that they have recently pulled. Why don’t Millenials have the guts to use their real names?

Signed,
Ironically Anonymous

First, a healthy skepticism of authority is transgenerational. Boomers said, "never trust anyone over 30." Xers grew up equating "education" with "thought control." Ferris Bueller was cool; the principal was not.

Next, though, the answer depends on what you mean by "anonymously." If you're talking about posting a rant under a screen name that doesn't readily identify the user's real name, I don't know that they necessarily consider that anonymous. I think that's a way to be known to one another without being known to authority figures. Many of them know each others' screen names; we just don't know them.

If you're talking about posting a rant and literally signing it "Anonymous," I think that's motivated by the need to express themselves (in Millennial culture, expressing every thought you have on the Internet is just what they do -- because it's so fast and easy to communicate everything they think, there's not much of a filter as to what should be shared and what should be private) combined with a healthy skepticism of authority. In the eyes of many students, posting a rant anonymously gets you the best of both worlds: you bring a problem to the attention of someone in authority, but you also get to maintain your public persona as a polite do-bee. Also, being a Millennial is a team sport, so they're far less likely than Boomers or Xers to do something that identifies them separately from the group, especially when lodging a "group" complaint.

As far as Xers being more willing to sign their own names to complaints or rants, that's not been my experience. I realize that's only anecdotal, but I don't think that Xers are more likely to put a complaint in writing (either in print or online) and then submit it over their own name. It seems like complaints in writing tend to be anonymous with Xers also. However, I do agree that Xers are more likely to lodge complaints in person with less concern about whether they are demonstrating an appropriate respect for authority. I wouldn't attribute that to courage necessarily; I think it's more of a lack of understanding of social structures and hierarchies. Xers aren't shrugging off the hierarchies they've been taught; Xers just weren't raised to know much about those hierarchies.

Ultimately, though, I think that Millennials have to be taught -- just as the Xers had to be taught -- that anonymous rants or complaints are rarely, if ever, taken seriously by those who have the power to do something about them. A complaint is only as credible as the person lodging it. If the only information we have about the complainer is that he lacks the courage of his convictions to come forward personally, we attribute low or no credibility to him. Therefore, the complaint itself is dismissed as meritless.

As far as a solution, most online discussion boards have a way to block Anonymous postings. So if you won't entertain them, just set the board so that they can't be posted in the first place. Some professors like to allow the Anonymous postings to encourage students to ask questions without being embarrassed. I don't think that's a good idea in law school, where students are training to be advocates. Students need practice in asking for help -- heaven knows they'll need that skill in the legal profession. Some of their future supervisors will be very approachable, and asking for help won't be an issue. Others will make it excruciating to ask for help, and the students need to know how to ask those people for help, too.

If, on the other hand, the anonymous rants are on student-run and student-controlled discussion boards that you have no control over . . . well . . . you have no control over that. I generally won't look at student discussion boards that are intended to be discussions among the students. They need a place to blow off steam. Whether or not I think the forum is appropriate for blowing off steam is beside the point, as far as I'm concerned. I try to respect their privacy even when they don't.

The Future of Distance Learning

In the future (read, "this coming fall"), students can attend classes from their iPhone. Read more about it here.

Laptop Use from the Students' Perspectives

The Spartan, the San Jose State University Daily, has an interesting article on laptops. Professors at San Jose State have taken a variety of paths with regard to regulating laptop use in the classroom. Here are some of the things they've tried:

• Outright ban
• Requiring laptops and using Synchroneyes-type technology
• Allowing only handwritten notes to be used in the exam

That's the first I've heard of someone using that last one. That's pretty clever.

The students had plenty to say about professorial attitudes toward laptops:

"I think it's pointless," said Kimberly Knoll, a junior animation illustration major. "People are going to do it anyway, and there's no way to check. I think if they want to rohibit that then they need to specifically say, 'Laptop lids down.' One of my teachers used to say that when she gave her lectures."

Still, many students use their laptops in class for other things."Sometimes when the professor is really, really boring or going off in a tangent, I may check my e-mail," said Andrae Macapinlac, a junior political science major. "I said 'may,' though."

Milan Balinton, a junior communications studies major, said he agrees."Being a
college student, we also have jobs and important lives, and I'm also involved in the community on campus and try to multitask per se," he said.

Some said they are more accepting of the rule."The professor is the one who really teach the class, so he has the right to give out his own policy," said William Nguyen, a senior accounting major. "You don't like it? Take another course."

Millennials Search for Jobs

I was at Rutgers-Camden School of Law this past Wednesday, invited to speak to the students about being generation-savvy in their job search. I do a lot of speaking to faculties at faculty colloquia and retreats about how to relate to Xer and Millennial students. I enjoy it because I've heard over the years that information I've presented has enhanced the teaching experience for some folks. Since I love teaching law students, it's fun to be able to do something that makes it fun for someone else.

But the most fun, by far, is speaking to students about what to expect from their Boomer and Xer professors and employers and how to adapt so that they get the most from their relationships with supervisor-types.

Xers got a bad rap -- and continue to -- because no one told us what the expectations were when we got into professional school and the profession. I know that sounds ridiculous to some -- how could we not know the expectations? We just didn't. Xers hadn't been particularly well trained by their late Silent or early Boomer parents.

The new generation of law students and lawyer are far better trained to get along with supervisors, but two things still stand in their way: The first is the Xer hangover that law firms are experiencing. Law firms just began to acknowledge that they needed to do something to adapt to the Xer lawyers that were coming through their doors, and some of the firms have done this admirably. Unfortunately, just when they got the hang of adapting for the Xers, here come the Millennials. So Millennials are getting some of the adaptations that weren't designed for them, and it's not always a great fit. The second thing that stands in the way of constructive Millennial relationships with supervisors is that the Boomers and Xers still think that Millennials have an inflated sense of themselves. I don't think that's accurate. I think Millennials have an accurate sense of themselves combined with an unrealistic expectations that others fully understand what Millennials bring to the table.

So Millennials have to understand that they're fighting an uphill battle against the perceptions of professors and employers that Millennials (a) are like Xers and (b) have an inflated sense of themselves. This means that Millennials have to approach these supervisors with a lot of humility until the supervisors realize what an asset Millennials really are.

E-mail too slow; associated with "authority figures"

The Cox News Serivce reports that email is the new snail mail according to Millennial teens.

To: Parents

From: Your kids

Subject: E-mail.

It’s too slow. Boring. No fun.

What once seemed like a dazzling new communication tool is not just taken for granted by the generation that grew up with it, it’s outright scorned.

World-changing technology? Sigh. Whatever. We’d rather be texting.

According to a new survey, “Teens and Social Media,” conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, e-mail ranks last in teenagers’ preference among seven ways of communicating. Using a landline phone was first, with 39 percent of teens talking on the phone daily with friends. Talking in person was third, and e-mail was dead last, with a mere 14 percent, supplanted by text messaging, instant messaging and such social network sites as Facebook and MySpace.

The key reason seems to be speed. E-mail is just too slow for a generation that wants an instant response to a “poke” on Facebook or a text message.

“We kept hearing in focus groups that e-mail is dreadfully slow,” said Mary Fadden, a senior research specialist on the Pew study.

“I Facebook all the time,” said Patrice Clonts, 22, a senior at Berry College in Rome, Ga., who like many young people uses Facebook as a verb. “People check their Facebook more than they check their e-mail. You can send three or four messages back and forth in the time it takes someone to get an e-mail.”

Although the Pew Internet study focused on teens ages 12 through 17, the findings apply to the whole “Millennial” generation, which includes people from early teens to late 20s.

“The Millennial generation is so huge; they’re bigger than the boomers,” said Nancy Robinson, a vice president of Iconoculture, a consumer-advisory firm that tracks demographic trends. “They’ve grown up carrying their friends and families in the palms of their hands. E-mail is just another tool in their toolbox.”

But to teens especially, e-mail can be associated more with parents and authorities, and not so much with friends and fun.

“If I’m talking to friends at school, it’s on Facebook or texting,” said Claire Brown, a junior at St. Pius X High. She uses her e-mail account to correspond with teachers, to arrange babysitting jobs and to keep up with choir rehearsals.

“Facebook is an easy way to talk to friends,” she says. “Poking (a Facebook messaging function) is really fun. It’s just a fun way to say, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ We get into poke wars, where we just poke each other back and forth for hours.”

Another reason may be that parents and teachers understand and use e-mail all the time, while many are still uncomfortable with texting and social-network sites. And teens instinctively gravitate to what is not part of their parents’ world.

“I text my dad sometimes, but my mom doesn’t really understand how it works,” said Emily Saunders, a sophomore at Atlanta’s Marist School.

She says she averages about 50 text messages every day between the time she gets out of school and bedtime, about six hours. She has a Gmail account through Google,

“but I haven’t used that in a year or so,” she said dismissively. She got the account mainly because an e-mail account was required to register for iTunes.

There can even be a little element of rebellion in teens preferring technology that is not part of their parents’ lives. “There’s not as much of a generation gap today on some things between teens and their parents,” said Iconoculture’s Robinson, “but there’s always going to be a element of ‘This is mine and you can’t possibly understand it.’”

Young communicators also consider Facebook and Myspace more interesting and intense than old-fashioned e-mail.

“E-mail is very two-dimensional, whereas Facebook is like communicating with three dimensions,” said Maria Walker, 25, a project manager with Welch Tarkington Inc., an Atlanta general contracting company.

“My generation has been on the cusp,” Walker continued. “Facebook came out when we were in college. When you post something on your profile, all of your friends can see it, so it’s a very efficient way to communicate.”

“I e-mail for jobs, I e-mail my mom,” summed up college student Clonts. “I Facebook my friends.”

None of this should be construed, however, as signaling the end of e-mail.

Robinson theorizes that texting is so popular right now in part because of all the unlimited texting plans for cell phones. But the future of cell phones is probably the smart phone, like the iPhone, which comes with e-mail built in. As more people get smart phones, e-mail may start to edge up and texting down, even among young people, she says.

And Walker sees more of her friends in their mid-20s becoming young professionals with BlackBerrys as well as iPhones.

“Increasingly people my age are receiving their e-mail on their cell phone,” she said. “Texting and e-mailing are sort of becoming synonymous. You’re not even aware of
which one it is. You just open it up and reply. It’s kind of blurring the lines.”

If you only watch one YouTube video this month . . .

. . . watch this one. Poignant and powerful. I'm interested to hear others' reactions to it.

Via Millennial Professor.

How Wired Are They?

GenerationY Blog shares some interesting statistics about Millennials:

* 97% of us own a computer
* 94% of us own a cell phone
* 76% of us use Instant Messaging.
* 15% of us IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
* 34% of us use websites as their primary source of news
* 28% of us own a blog and 44% read blogs
* 49% of us download music using peer-to-peer file sharing
* 75% of us college students have a Facebook account [23]
* 60% of us own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod.

If you haven't checked out any of the Gen Y blogs linked to the right, I highly recommend them (as indicated by the linkage on the right . . . duh). It's fascinating to read about them in their own words.

And I thought I was tough on Boomers . . .

Get a load of Set in Style on Millennials

Fighting Fire with . . . ACME Dynamite

Please make welcome the newest "weapon" in the cat-and-mouse game between professors, students, and students' laptops: software called SYNCHRONEYES (it's seriously written in all capital letters in the marketing information). The web site boasts that the software "enable[s] you to keep students focused on learning and redirect their attention if they go off track. " Apparently, it allows a professor to monitor what every screen in the room is tuned to. From what I've heard, this kind of thing isn't new. This has been a tool available for computer lab-centered courses for a while. But it seems that it's now being used to manage laptop use in non-lab courses by making any classroom a laptop computer lab and allowing the professor to monitor everyone's . . . um . . . monitor.

Inside Higher Ed's University Daily describes SYNCHRONEYES this way:

Synchroneyes marks a major escalation in the classroom technology battle: The professor as spy-master.

With Syncroneyes, the professor can “view all the computer screens in the classroom and redirect the student’s attention if they digress from the lecture topic.”

“The professor is also able to control access . . . to the Internet or to specific computer applications by blocking students individually or as a group.”

While UD lectures and leads discussions and writes on the blackboard and reads texts aloud, she also, once Synchroneyes is installed, constantly scans all the screens in the room, judges each screen’s pertinence to the class, and shuts down the impertinent.

SYNCHRONEYES is brought to you by the same people who brought you SMART Boards (and let's be honest -- about half of every law faculty thinks that the "dry erase" technology is what makes it "smart") and Clickers (the pricey software and remote control system that has been replaced by free classroom polling Internet apps). And SYNCHRONEYES almost sounds cool until you remember that our job description is not "frustrate foil's attempts to do what they want with increasingly ridiculous solutions."

I have some questions about SYNCHRONEYES:

• If students who've used computers since infancy can't surf the web and pay attention in class at the same time, how is someone who played Frogger in an arcade supposed to monitor 30+ computer screens while conducting a class? And what about the chances of someone who doesn't even know what "playing Frogger in an arcade" means?
• Isn't watching a professor manipulate a classmates' screen going to be more distracting (i.e., more fun) than whatever the classmate was originally doing?
• Isn't it cheaper and faster to just say, "screens down"?
• Won't students just respond to SYNCHRONEYES with Invisibility Shield Technology?

Ultimately, I think that "solutions" like this are tempting because they play on whatever fears that laptops evoke. For some, the fear is that they're really not very good teachers after all, and now students are going to be able to finally just sit and watch TV instead. For some, the fear is that they're letting students down if they let them believe that they can do two things at once. For some, the fear is that they're being left behind. For some, the fear is that students are somehow mocking professors with their laptops. But like all fears, the real solution is rarely to manipulate the situation so that we don't feel the fear anymore. The solution is to face it head on.

Thanks to pal and former South Texas colleague Prof. Andrew Solomon for forwarding the University Daily post.

"What lawyer surfs the web in court?"

"Dear Millennial Law Prof:

Enough with the laptops! I've heard all the reasons why I should allow students to use them in class, but here's one good one to ban them: what competent lawyer will surf the web in court?"

Good question. There are a lot of issues wrapped up in this one question. A big one is the difference between using a laptop and using the Internet. For now, though, let's set that aside and look at the more practice-oriented than law-school-oriented issue. I think this is really about envisioning the future of law practice. As Prof. David Thomson is want to say, our job is preparing students for their future, not our past.

When I was in law school [sic 'em bears], we were told that lawyers had to have their attention everywhere at once: the witness in the box, the jury, the judge, opposing counsel, the door into the courtroom. For generations of lawyers, attending to multiple tasks at once (see where this is going?) was a new skill they learned in law school and honed in practice. Now, multi-tasking is something that students come to law school already knowing how to do. Certainly, very few of them know how to do it with the focus and precision required of lawyer. But the multi-tasking that Millennials have grown up with is not so different in kind from the multi-tasking that's part of our craft. Opening the trial notebook to exactly the right place in the deposition, flipping through the well-worn and dog-eared (or Post-It flagged!) rules of evidence, and maintaining a rhythm to cross-examination are all multi-tasking skills. Access to a laptop and an Internet connection makes most of these tasks easier, not harder.

So what lawyer will surf the web in court? My guess is that, in the future, all of the good ones will.

A Social Network for My Documents

Along with the developments in GoogleDocs, WindowsLive, and Zoho, here comes another way to share documents: iPaper. Apparently, you can upload your documents for all to see. Jeff Young at Wired Campus touts it as YouTube for Documents. It seems, though, like it's more like MySpace for Documents. Or maybe GoogleBooks for your Documents. I think it's probably time to slow down and take a breath when your documents exist in alternate realities.

The Millennial Flu

I'm making my way back from a family-wide bout with the flu. For those keeping count, that means that I was trapped in a house for 4 days with another flu-d Xer and two flu-d Millennials. The Millennials have collaborated on a Get Out the Shot initiative to lobby bad parents to get flu shots for themselves and their children. The Xers are resentful and feel caught in the middle of the perky Millennial patients and their fawning Boomer grandparents, all of whom believe the flu to be the Xers' fault.

I'll be back later today with "Dear Millennial Law Prof" -- some of you had an interesting week!

The Millennial Election Connection (and so much more)

This paragraph from an op-ed by Frank Rich in today's New York Times is rich, rich, rich with generational content. Thanks to Prof. David Cohen for pointing me in this direction.

Whatever the potency of his political skills and message, Mr. Obama is also riding a demographic wave. The authors of the new book “Millennial Makeover,” Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, point out that the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama.

For the paragraph above, Rich pulls information from a Washington Post piece by Winograd and Hais with the simply delicious title, "The Boomers Had Their Day. Make Way for the Millennials."

Here are some of the things that are worth noting from this single paragraph:

1. The Millennial generation is the largest in history.
2. It is the most diverse in history (unless I'm extrapolating too much from the 40% non-white info).
3. It's been a while since we had so many children of recent immigrants.
4. If you combine 2 & 3 above with the Millennial generation's reputation for tolerance, that seems to bode well for the future.
5. The Millennials are fueling political excitement and turning out in record numbers in a Presidential campaign.
6. Someone has printed the words, "The Boomers Had Their Day." I'm trying to figure out what I can give Winograd and Hais that would equal what they have given to millions of Xers in saying that the Boomers have had their day. I'll have to think about that.

Social Networking as a Force for Good, Millenial-Style

When I think about social networking on the Internet, I remember a line from a movie analogizing something (I've long since forgotten what) to Nitroglycerin -- "it can be used to blow up bridges or heal hearts."

Following up on some of the comments to the post about Internet discussions, here's another great example of how Millennials are using social networking positively: The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus reports that students are using Facebook to connect in the wake of the shootings at NIU.

In future posts, we can explore more about the differences in how Boomers, Xers, and Millennials use the Internet and, in particular, the differences between how Xers and Millennials use social networking.

Mashup

I'm on a technology kick right now.

It started at the end of last semester when I was researching some technology for the AALS panels on Millennials and on laptops in the classroom. I was trying to find things that you can use with a student's laptop in the classroom -- something that keeps them engaged enough to stay away from the Internets. As usual, I discovered that I, as a law professor, was pretty much the last to know. By the time law schools get to something, it's more table knife than cutting edge. So I've been "researching" (i.e., surfing the web when I should be doing other things) what technology is being used in elementary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities.

A recent post from Campus Technology summarizes a report on what the cutting edge will be over the next five years. I haven't decided for myself yet at what point I just give up and decide thast I know all the technology I'm ever going to know, but I'm thinking it might be before I have to say "Today in class, we'll be using a mashup" with a straight face. Here's what the future looks like:

In the near term--that is, in the timeframe of about a year or less--the technologies that will have a significant impact on education include grassroots video and collaborative Web technologies. Grassroots video is, simply, user-generated video created on inexpensive consumer electronics devices and edited and encoded using free or inexpensive consumer- or prosumer-grade NLEs. Internet-based services supporting the sharing of these videos have allowed institutions to mingle their content with consumer content and "will fuel rapid growth among learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the viewers are," according to the report. The second near-term trend, collaborative Web technology, is already in wide use in education at all levels. The complete report provides further details.

In the mid-term, mobile broadband and data mashups will make their mark on education. Mashups, according to the report, will largely impact the way education institutions represent information. "While most current examples are focused on the integration of maps with a variety of data," the report said, "it is not difficult to picture broad educational and scholarly applications for mashups." Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and the University of Minnesota are examples of higher education institutions using mashups for learning resources and other projects. Mobile broadband too is in the early stages of adoption for educational purposes, from project-based learning activities to virtual field trips.

Further down the road, according to the report, come "collective intelligence" and "social operating systems." Collective intelligence includes wikis and community tagging. A social operating system is "the essential ingredient of next generation social networking" and "will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know," according to the report. The time to adoption for these last two will be four to five years, the report said.

"Don't they know that the Internet is public?"

As promised, Friday is "Dear Millennial Law Prof" day, so I've picked what I think is a really great one. Since Millennial Law Prof is only 3 days old, this also happens to be the only question that's been asked, but that doesn't detract from its greatness.

"Dear Millennial Law Prof:" [it really just said, "Hi Tracy," but that doesn't help me indulge my fantasy that this is the part of the movie -- or tv show; I'm not picky -- where there's a montage of me dashing off responses on my manual typewriter in my quaint home office. The music is something perky that suggests that my responses are witty and upbeat.]

"Why do law students post inappropriate material on the Internet? It's one thing to say that students have always talked about each other and their professors and shared personal information and that this is just how they do it. But it's another thing to suggest that posting those same things on the Internet is the equivalent of the student lounge. Do you have any ideas?"

Thanks for the question. My hypothesis on this is that a lot of the inappropriate use was started by Xers and picked up by Millennials and that Millennials will ultimately be the most effective at curbing it and reigning one another in as they become more purely Millennial and less Xer/Millennial hybrids (as people on the cusp of any two generations tend to be). Keep in mind that I'm not opining here about the Constitutionality of restricting Internet speech; I am opining, though, about whether the speech comports with a particular generation's standards of human decency. Here are some examples of why I think we may see less of this as time goes by:

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus reported on February 12 that JuicyCampus, a web site opened this past summer to promote campus gossip, is facing some backlash. The Pepperdine University student government has passed a resolution asking administrators to block the site from the campus network.

Pepperdine's newspaper, The Graphic, reports that, while the resolution was passed by an overwhelming majority, students made compelling arguments on both sides:

Many board members came forward and talked about their personal experiences. SGA Vice President of Administration Austin Maness, who wrote the resolution, called the Web site slander and talked about the pain words can bring.

“When I was a kid I was overweight, I was mocked a lot and made fun of,” Maness said. “I developed an eating disorder for three years and was bulimic. And, furthermore, someone on this Web site thought it would be funny to joke about eating disorders and how they thought it was good for girls to develop anorexia so that they could look sexy. And to me it is just unbelievably inhumane.”

* * *

However, not everyone agreed with the final vote. Senior Off-Campus Senator Mike Masten told the voters to not jump to the extreme of banning the Web site but to choose to fight in a different way. He proposed campaigning against the site to promote awareness, and discuss it with people to tell of the true harm such messages can bring.

“I by no means support this Web site, but the reason I opposed the movement was because I guess you can call it a faith in our student body and that they do have the capability to take responsibility for this,” Masten said. “I felt like banning the Web site should be the last resort, if a resort at all, and censorship should never really be that first stop."

What's interesting about this debate (presumably among Millennial students since we're talking about a university student government) is that the opposing sides both concede that the content is inappropriate and should be limited in some way. They just disagree about whether the best method is a ban or a boycott. This is consistent with the civic-minded, collaborative characteristics of this generation. They seem to be protective of one another and mindful of what's best for the community over the individual.

Pepperdine's Graphic also reports that the site was started by Duke law graduate Matt Ivester "with the mission of facilitating an online community where anonymous free speech could be heard on college campuses." (I can only assume that Ivester developed his "mission" after discovering that there was not nearly enough hostile anonymous drivel online to suit his needs. But I digress . . .) As a recent law school graduate, it's most likely that Matt Ivester is an Xer. I think this is interesting, too, and pretty predictable. Xers tend to be more self-referenced than other-referenced, i.e., they don't think a lot about how their actions impact others.

If a website founded by a young male law graduate sounds eerily familiar, perhaps it's because this comes right on the heels of the lawsuit filed by two Yale law school graduates against the site AutoAdmit. I'd guess, based on other characteristics of the founders that indicate their ages, that they are also Xers. Yale's paper reports about JuicyCampus, which has a Yale "channel," that

those who wish to remove a comment have little to no recourse. The FAQ page admonishes users concerned about the truthfulness of items posted on the site to consider whether statements are fact or opinion.

“Facts can be untrue. Opinions can be stupid, or ignorant, or mean-spirited, but they can’t be untrue,” the page reads. Those who object to posts on factual grounds are instructed to give the posts “a big thumbs down” by clicking an icon next to the post to express disapproval.

"A big thumbs down" sounds like entertainment. It has just enough First Amendment-related language for the site to have some plausible deniability about its motives. But really . . . the best way they could think of to champion the First Amendment was to start an online "slam book"? It doesn't quite pass the smell test. (Again, my point has to do with generational characteristics and not the First Amendment -- I understand that, if Larry Flynt gets to make fun of Jerry Falwell, then we all benefit.)

And it seems that Millennial students realize that "the big thumbs down" is not a "remedy" for the potential damage to their reputations. Thus, the Pepperdine resolution. In addition, students and other critics from Loyola Marymount University have started a Facebook page to encourage the banning of JuicyCampus. This followed an anonymous threat two months ago by an anonymous poster who threatened to kill as many people on the LMU campus as possible before getting killed by the police.

Another characteristic of Millennials is that they are less tolerant of remarks that denegrate someone based on their immutable characteristics. One of the chief complaints about the gossip sites is that much of the content is racist, sexist, and homophobic. My prediction is that the Millennials' increased sensitivity to inappropriate remarks of this type will also fuel their desire to restrict the reach of "slam sites."

Welcome!

The Millennial Generation (born approx. 1983-2003) started as first-year law students a few years ago, and they've already made quite an impact on their law schools. Likewise, they're making a splash in the legal profession. I'll be blogging here about them (Millennials), us (Xers), and the other thems (Boomers and Veterans) and how we mesh -- and often don't -- in law schools and beyond.

As Millennials find their way and impact our institutions, we struggle to respond. Do we give them the same kind of legal education we've always offered? How do we keep up with the technology we can use for teaching? What technology should we be using? What are our future law students learning in elementary and secondary schools right now? Do we finally acquiesce to the multi-tasking, technology-savvy expectations that Generation X introduced us to? How do we handle the dark side of their need for high achievement: plagiarism, cheating, use of stimulant drugs? Are there particular generations that seem to deal better with Millennials than others? And what about the Xers? Are they gone from legal education, or do we still have to figure out what to do with them (or "us" as the case may be)? And most important of all, in the future, will we all be on MySpace?

This blog will be a place to discuss these issues and more. Add it to Google Reader. Or come back to find out what Google Reader is and whether or not you have to use it to teach Torts.

Fridays are "Dear Millennial Law Prof" Days!

Fridays are the days to get your burning questions about Millennials answered. For example, why do they exhibit such courtesy in letting you know in advance that they'll miss class and exhibit . . . less courtesy . . . by doing all their sale shopping and blogging on their laptops when they are in class?

Send your questions to tmcgaugh@themillennials.org and check back Fridays to see if they were pulled from the inbox and answered. From time to time, we'll have a genuine Millennial answer the question or provide some extra perspective.