There’s certainly nothing wrong with a wellness program. It may sound hokey when you call it a wellness program, but law schools taking the initiative to improve the mental and physical well-being of their students is a laudable thing. Law school puts students through a ringer, and it’s important to keep them healthy.
But… come on.
The Ave Maria School of Law has just unveiled a $2 million fitness center for law students and faculty to serve as the physical centerpiece of “a wellness program that includes the nationally acclaimed Complete Health Improvement Program, CHIP, to improve diet and nutrition.” This is the reminder that Ave Maria exists because stoners and depressed shut-ins binge ate Domino’s throughout the 90s.
So what is CHIP?
Founded in 1988 by Dr. Hans Diehl, a national expert on lifestyle medicine, CHIP is a 12-week program to change eating and nutrition practices to plant-based food to improve health and reduce risk of chronic disease. The program has been used by 80,000 people in the U.S., often with employers bringing the program to their workforce.
So… vegans. Great, we need to give lawyers another reason to feel superior to everyone else. Oh, did I say lawyers? I shouldn’t have because Ave Maria continues to boast a woeful 53.4 percent bar passage rate coupled with its 55.7 percent employment score. So we’re really only half talking about lawyers and vegans. Kind of like pescatarian paralegals.
Right now, students need to opt into the dietary program but they can look to a test group of faculty and staff who have already been through the system:
The group collectively lost 47 pounds and there was a drop of 448 points combined in triglyceride (fat in the blood) levels, along with 10 participants lowering their blood pressure.
Except… there were only 11 participants. So they dropped an average of 4 and a half pounds? That’s not a weight loss program, that’s a nasty cold. Jenny Craig doesn’t make commercials, “I lost 3 lbs. and I feel great!”
Look, getting healthy is all well and good. But Ave Maria is tagging kids with roughly a $240K bill to have a 50-50 shot at a job and when it comes time to make investments in the school, the answer probably shouldn’t be hiring trainers and diet experts. Is this supposed to entice someone to enroll in the school? “Gee, well, it looks from my LSAT that I’m probably not going to be employable as a lawyer but maybe I can take out a mortgage to eat seaweed for three years from a law school based on cardboard pizza.”
Ave Maria School of Law debuts wellness program for students and faculty [Naples News]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.