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Oregon law professor loses it over proposal to donate faculty raises to students

University of Oregon, Knight Law Center (Wikimedia Commons)

If there’s one way for a professor to make your students hate you, Rob Illig has found it.

In a wild blog rant that went viral this week, Illig, who is a professor at Oregon Law School, spoke out about his compensation.

You see, Illig is livid over the fact that instead of raising his six-figure salary, the faculty wishes to spend the money to fund a “post-graduate fellowship program for new law grads,” Oregon Live reports. The fellowship would help ease the financial burden of graduating Oregon Law students, who leave school approximately $105,000 in debt when they graduate.

The proposal is what set Illig off.

Some of his fellow UO law professors suggested that they should forgo planned salary raises and contribute the money they would have received to fellowships for unemployed law school graduates instead.

Illig was having none of it. He believed that he'd sacrificed enough for his students, and felt he deserved the raise. So what did he do? He made his opinion very known via a very angry — and lengthy — blog post.

“Is this some kind of faculty version of white-man’s guilt?” he asked in his online rant that spread across the Internet faster than he’d probably anticipated.

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“The UO and its students are lucky to have me and all the other wonderful university faculty and staff who have sacrificed to be here,” he said.

Illig simply doesn’t believe that “throwing the students a couple dollars” will aid in helping them find a career after graduation. He wants his raise.

In an effort to try and convince the rest of the faculty to see his side of things, his lengthy blog posts just keep coming out like verbal diarrhea, making him look worse by the keystroke.

“In my former life, I was an M&A lawyer at a large New York law firm, where I was all but certain to be earning more than $1 million annually,” he wrote in the blast.

He vows that he’s on the students’ side, but I'm sure that any law student who has read the rant is thinking otherwise.

Margie Paris, a senior faculty member, thought the idea to donate the salary raise money to non-profit organizations for the hiring of new law school graduates was a great idea.

Especially since, of all of 2013 OU law school graduates, only 57 per cent actually found jobs that required a law license and passing of the bar exam.

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So maybe Illig feels that’s not his problem. Maybe he feels he has done his due diligence, taught his students what they need in order to succeed, and feels this raise of his is long overdue. He might be right, but he went about it in the wrong way.

Either way, the point of the whole debacle is moot because Dean Michael Moffitt informed the faculty on Wednesday that the UO administration had nixed the idea of donating the faculty raises to the students. The result of Illig’s Internet rage-a-thon had nothing to do with the decision. The faculty had only proposed the idea of donating the money to the students; nothing had yet been passed.

Oregon’s law school responded, reminding the public that the plan for student fellowships was not a done deal. They want to remind people that the faculty remains “committed to solving the employment issues facing our graduates.”

Illig has made no comment on the decision.

(Photo of Rob Illig courtesy University of Oregon)

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