The Director of the University of Mississippi Law Schools Career Service Director has garnered national attention–and not in a good way. The hugely popular Above the Law blog reported this week on the director sending an email to students taking the position that the career services office is not in the business of finding students jobs. The email states in part:

“A little birdie” stopped by my office after I sent the last e-mail and informed me that there was some type of agreement among several of the 2L’s and 3L’s to refuse to supply this information in some form of protest against Career Services not “doing our job” — apparently misconstrued as “finding people jobs.”

My first reaction upon reading this was: My God! Joyce Whittington would never say that. She must no longer be the Career Services Director. Turns out I was right.

The law schools website lists the current Career Services Director as Kristin Flierl. Joyce Whittington was the director for over 25 years. I had heard that Joyce was going to retire, but I wasn’t sure when.

It didn’t take long to find a 2003 UM Lawyer article about Joyce in which she took the exact opposite position of Ms. Flierl on what her job was:

I think one of the most stressful parts of this job is that it’s never done—a class may graduate, but not everyone in the class has a job. So I’m still working with those kids, sometimes for months, to help them find jobs. And there’s always a 2L or a lL who needs a summer job. Then there are the alums who have Job A but seek Job B, or quit Job A before they have Job B.

For a person who likes to have things “finished,” it took me a while to realize that I’m never going to be finished, that there’s always another student or another alum who needs something. But that’s the nature of the job. I consider this office to be truly service-oriented and client-based, with my kids and my alums being the clients.

So the law school has gone from having a career services director who was a beloved and award-winning figure who viewed her work as never done; to a patronizing impostor who views her work has never starting? Nice!!!