"Judgment Day" is about a very important problem on college campuses. On the bigger and more prestigious schools, the qualities that lead to a professor obtaining tenure often have little to do with their abilities to teach. As the expression goes, it's 'publish or perish'. In other words, unless a professor has multiple articles published in various journals, rarely are they offered the opportunity to remain at the school. As a result, many of the tenured (hence, almost impossible to fire) professors are horrible teachers and may have questionable people skills.
In this particular case, Assistant Professor Peterson is immensely popular with the students, as he makes the topics exciting and, more importantly, transmits this excitement to the grad students. But, because his skills are poor when it comes to writing articles, he's unlikely to be offered tenure. Likewise, while a nice guy, he isn't political enough to create a groundswell of support among the faculty for his receiving tenure. Golding goes out of his way to try to help Peterson get an article published in Law Review--hoping this will be Peterson's path to remaining with the university.
The second and lesser plot is about the hysteria the first-year students are feeling when a flu bug is going around campus. Instead of caring about the sick among them, these selfish students avoid the sick like they have the plague, as they are almost hysterical about getting behind in Kingsfield's class. Look quickly--one of these hysterical students is a young Jon Lovitz.
This episode struck close to home. With my experiences in grad school, I noticed that the tenured faculty OFTEN sucked at teaching as the university prized publications over everything else. Sadly, I don't see this system changing any time in the future but at least this show drew some attention to this sad situation. Worth seeing and thought-provoking.