Look, being a law professor is rough. Especially if one finds himself teaching a gaggle of Younglings who don’t quite yet “Think Like A Lawyer” and are probably still struggling to figure out why school is so much harder than doing keg stands at Michigan State while bulls**tting their way through a seminar on “The Critical Feminist Turn In Geology Studies” (a class that isn’t as made up as one would hope). If the professor in this hypothetical is also an internationally respected academic with decades of experience, this has to be particularly vexing.

Which is all to say that we understand why Professor Steven Winter lost it on his students at Wayne State Law. We may not wholly agree, but it’s easy to see where he’s coming from.

In defense of Professor Winter, seriously students, get your papers done on your own time. Wasting a lecture hour working on a stupid memo is a tell-tale sign you lack the time management and prioritization skills necessary to be a professional. Now, I’m usually not one to judge for skipping lectures — I broke the curve in a 1L class I attended twice — but it’s all about the reasoning behind your actions. In that case, I wasn’t skipping because I couldn’t figure out how to properly manage my off hours, I was skipping because I was drunk! But I’ll tell you another thing: I got my goddamned legal writing paper done too.

As Professor Winter explained, Con Law is certainly more important to GPA, but how key it is to the bar exam? How much of law school — let alone 1L year — ever really makes it onto the bar exam? That’s what bar prep courses are for! This just seems like a reach of an argument where it’s not really needed. I mean, one-third of the Michigan bar is on standing? Maybe, but I’m incredulous. Stick to “why are you skipping a graded 1L course that determines your standing going into interviews?”

Still, as sympathetic as I may be to Professor Winter’s plight: gotta say he lost me at “pinkeye.” Come on, man. Pinkeye is a highly contagious and entirely gross disease, and anyone suffering from it should be banished to the wastelands immediately. Thankfully, Wayne State is in Detroit so those are just outside the door.

Unless Professor Winter was trying to suggest that none of the accepted valid excuses rise to the Platonic ideal of “pinkeye.” If this was Professor Winter’s point then so be it… but he may be undermining the rest of his argument on the importance of legal writing instruction.