Happy June, everybody! We’ll start off with some cheery news: law school just got easier!

That’s right, the venerable Stanford Law is dropping letter grades. We can hear the criticism now: it’s just a short slide from here to watching the moot courtroom fill up with stoner hippies munching granola, playing bongos and “creating their own learning environment.” That, or Elle Woods is taking over as dean.

Stanford’s actually making a bold move here, even though Yale and UC Berkeley (hisssssssss) have already blazed the trail. The idea is to refocus students on learning rather than competing with one another, and Stanford already has a history of promoting individual success over classroom competition. It’s one of the few top-tier schools that does not award class rankings of any kind for undergraduate or graduate students. No valedictorians, no cum laudes, nothing. With Stanford’s reputation on their resumes, the school figures, law students don’t need to worry about not having a GPA to show employers.

Meanwhile, Mission to Learn has an insightful essay on the five basic tenets of Web 2.0 learning. Prospective (and current) online students and teachers may find it very useful. It is a bit new agey (consciousness, self-knowledge, yada yada) but hey, that stuff’s been known to come in handy.

In your student loan news, the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act is still being thrashed out in committee, where Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski is filling in for Ted Kennedy, a longtime champion of the bill. The House of Representatives, which passed it as the College Opportunity and Affordability Act back in February, sent it to the Senate with aggressive tuition caps and closer scrutiny of many universities’ ginormous endowments. (Ahem.) Stay tuned to see if the bill will pass without Teddy at the helm.