Elgin Community College beats Yale

A mock trial team from Elgin Community College held its own -- and then some -- against teams from some of America's most elite universities in a competition staged at Harvard this past weekend.

They hadn't been invited. According to the report on the NBC Chicago website, "The team from ECC wasn’t even allowed into the tourney until a regular team dropped out and they got a call to fill in."

Brought in as last-minute tomato cans for the privileged to spar with, ECC instead beat Villanova and Yale, losing narrowly to Brown (the eventual tournament winner). Kerry Lester's story for the Daily Herald (citing college paralegal coordinator Laurel Vietzen as its source) states that, "in addition to beating Villanova and Yale, ECC had a better record than Boston College's 'A' team, Wake Forest, Boston University, Dartmouth's 'A' and 'B' teams, and Wellesley's A&B teams. It also tied Penn State."

The story on the CBS2 website stresses the disparity in the tuitions charged by the various institutions: The sticker price at Yale, according to the CBS2 article, is $47,500 a year; this year at Villanova would cost $49,600. And the ECC tuition? According to the CBS2 story -- $2,740. Robert Channick's story for the Chicago Tribune notes that the ECC team members range "in age from 20 to 50 and [hold] down full-time jobs as waitresses, administrative assistants and stay-at-home moms while working toward their paralegal degrees."

That's right: Paralegal degrees.

In the fullness of time some of the members of the ECC team will become paralegals; some of these will wind up with elite, 'silk-stocking' Chicago firms -- as the law firm equivalent of hewers of wood and drawers of water.

And, in time, the members of the Yale team will recover from their loss. Most will go on to law school, probably at Yale or another Ivy League school, and then on to prestigious clerkships, law school faculties, and prestigious, silk-stocking firms all around the country... and some, perhaps, will come to Chicago -- where they will become partners and members of Chicago's elite.

And where, I hope, they will be reminded, as often as necessary, of ECC's triumph at the 2009 Harvard Crimson mock trial tournament.

Congratulations to team adviser (and Wheaton attorney) Ronald Kowalczyk (who teaches legal writing, litigation and torts at the school), team captain Jennifer Rieger, team president Asia Toufexis, and team members Rebecca Day, Jessica Bianchi, Elizabeth Martzel, Eleni Bala, Robert Dalin, Rita Russo and Mary Burke.