The Victors

This requires a little background.

Law professors mainly publish their scholarship in student-run law reviews, which is a crazy and dysfunctional system for all sorts of reasons but that's the way it's been for more than a century now.

Navigating the system is often difficult for junior faculty who are trying to learn the ropes. A key fact here is that most articles have to be submitted at either the beginning of February or the beginning of August, because the six weeks or so after these dates are the main publication windows.

OK so at one school there were complaints from the faculty about scholarship not getting supported enough by the administration, so the dean had the bright idea to pay a lot of money to a retired academic who had had a lot of publishing success to be a consultant to the junior faculty on publishing matters.

This was already extremely stupid to begin with, because advising junior faculty about these sorts of things is absolutely part of the senior faculty's job, and it's truly absurd to pay somebody to do it. But wait . . . Distinguished emeritus professor then announces that he won't be available for any consultation in July, because he will be on vacation for the whole month! July of course is one of the two months of the year, January being the other, when he would need to be available to do this job that he's being paid a lot of money to do, or rather not to do, because the dean thinks that hiring "consultants" is the answer to everything, because all upper administrators think that now.