"More than anyone I know, his approach to work and life was Socratic. Questions meant so much to him; he was suspicious of answers, certainly easy ones."

Said the opera director Daniel Fish, quoted in "John Conklin, Designer of Fantastical Opera Sets, Dies at 88/Realizing a childhood dream, he created scenery that was highly conceptual yet playful for the Glimmerglass Festival, New York City Opera and other companies" (NYT).

In an early meeting about the [Bard College production of “Oklahoma!”], “John reached into one of the drawers in his studio and pulled some sparkly fringe, a miniature version of the stuff you see hanging over used-car lots, and asked, ‘What if we hung this over the space?,” Mr. Fish said in an email. “That ‘what if’ was key to John’s creative process.”

"Larry David had one of the stupidest op-eds in today's New York Times in which he compares Bill Maher having dinner with Donald Trump with having dinner with Adolf Hitler."

"Um, you know, Larry David, that's a form of Holocaust denial. Comparing Trump to Hitler is a form of Holocaust denial because Trump didn't have gas chambers, he didn't have shooting squads, he didn't take babies, and throw them into ovens, and if you're making a comparison what you're saying is Hitler didn't have any of those things either. So shame — shame — on you Larry David. You know, we used to be friends, boy. No more. And the one thing: about Larry David he stopped being funny, I don't laugh at his jokes anymore because I know they're not jokes. That's who he really is, so they're not jokes...."

Said Alan Dershowitz, trashing Larry David's trashing of Bill Maher's dining with Trump.

Here's David's NYT op-ed "My Dinner With Adolf" — free-access link — which begins:

Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side....

Read the whole thing. I gave you the free link. Now, I do think what Larry wrote there is funny. It just violates a rule of taste: You shouldn't compare anything to the Holocaust. 

We can talk about why that rule fell out of fashion. But whether Larry David is violating a strict and important rule or just going with the flow of the current taste within his hyper-elite stratum of society is a separate question from whether it's funny.

"In January 2022, Dr. Kershnar appeared on a respected philosophy podcast, Brain in a Vat.... The guest presents a thought experiment..."

"... and the hosts spend the rest of the episode questioning the guest about it. Dr. Kershnar’s thought experiment was... 'Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl; imagine that she’s a willing participant... A very standard, a very widely held view is there’s something deeply wrong about this. And it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized. It’s not obvious to me that is, in fact, wrong....'... Dr. Kershnar is a 'Socratic gadfly' who goes around questioning fundamental assumptions, often quite annoyingly, to try to get at a clearer understanding of morality and why something is or is not wrong.... After LibsofTikTok posted clips of Dr. Kershnar’s podcast remarks on X..., the university was immediately deluged with demands for action.... Alumni threatened to stop giving money.... [T]he university received what officials described as threats of violence...."

From "A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy. Now He’s Banned From Campus. Stephen Kershnar, who teaches philosophy, is suing for the right to return to SUNY at Fredonia. The university defends its ban as necessary for safety" (NYT).

"I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion...."

"But brick by brick, the university has... transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division. Students at Portland State... are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.... [I]n 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: 'The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.' This example of pseudo-scholarship, which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems. Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department.... In 2018 I co-published a series of absurd or morally repugnant peer-reviewed articles in journals that focused on issues of race and gender. In one of them we argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and proposed that we leash men the way we leash dogs. Our purpose was to show that certain kinds of 'scholarship' are based not on finding truth but on advancing social grievances.... ... Portland State filed formal charges against me [for 'r]esearch misconduct' based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our intentionally deranged articles were 'human subjects.' I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects."

From "My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit. The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced" by Peter Boghossian (at Bari Weiss's Substack).

ADDED: The Wikipedia article on Boghossian is interesting. Excerpt:

"A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter..."

"... and equated its members with 'flat earthers' over their embrace of calls to defund police departments.... Mr. Uhlig’s Twitter posts criticized demonstrators.... 'Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest and say #defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter,' Mr. Uhlig wrote. 'Enjoy! Express yourself! Just don’t break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm.'... Mr. Uhlig, a 59-year-old German citizen, also faced scrutiny over past writings on his blog.... Those included a 2017 post in which he asked supporters of National Football League players kneeling to protest police brutality, 'Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?' Mr. Uhlig also wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2016, complaining about calls for greater diversity in the motion picture industry at the Academy Awards. 'This whole "diversity = more American blacks in Hollywood movies" thing?' he wrote. 'So so strange. Really.' Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, said in an email on Wednesday that 'the tweets and blog posts by Harald Uhlig are extremely troubling' and that 'it would be appropriate for the University of Chicago, which is the publisher of the Journal of Political Economy, to review Uhlig’s performance and suitability to continue as editor.'"

From "Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter/The editor of a top academic journal faces calls to resign after criticizing protesters as 'flat earthers' for wanting to defund the police" (NYT).

ADDED: "Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?" That's a perfectly phrased Socratic question, so let's raise a glass for Professor Uhlig.

"Warren agrees that her belief in Socratic dialogue informs how she instinctively engages with people professionally."

"In part, she said, Socratic teaching is about that back-and-forth, a breaking down of ideas and examining them from all angles. So when she and her policy team began discussing a wealth tax, she said, 'I kept taking the side of the opposition: Wouldn’t this create a problem? … We’re pulling it apart to stress-test it, see if it would work.'... One of Warren’s former students who declined to be named had a theory about the seeming paradox of a woman known as a bold political progressive adhering to an old-fashioned, rule-bound approach to teaching. It reminded him, he said, of Thurgood Marshall, who was known for being punctilious about civil procedure even as he broke revolutionary ground on civil rights. This student talked about how Marshall understood that rules could be used to enforce equality, and that as soon as you introduced flexibility and discretion, those with more power would take advantage of the wiggle room. Regulations, calling every name in a classroom, could serve as a set of guide rails, a system it would be harder to take advantage of. It’s easy to see how Warren’s fondness for just this kind of formal system jibes with her view of regulations in the financial industry. It is also true that teachers love rules.... It’s true that people may resent teachers. It’s also true that people are primed to resent teachers, because they resent women who might wield power over them, and it is still new and uncomfortable to think about women having political — presidential! — power. And yet: People who have had great teachers love them in ways that are intense and alchemical and irrational and sometimes difficult to convey — which is also, oddly enough, how some people love the politicians they believe in and choose to fight for."

From "Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy A lifelong teacher, she’s the most professorial presidential candidate ever. But does America want to be taught?" by Rebecca Traister" (The Cut).

"Isn’t it a pity that you need to analyze cases? You can’t just go around with your mouth open waiting for a spoon that will feed it to you in one big, luscious bite!"

"Students should sue. The teachers should just give you the law," said Professor Robert S. Summers, transcribed by my son John when he was a student at Cornell Law School, quite a few years ago and posted to John's blog when Professor Summers retired in 2010. John wrote, "Summers took the Socratic method to the extreme. He rarely made any direct statement about anything, almost always preferring to ask questions instead."

Now, we see, "Robert Summers, pre-eminent legal scholar, dies at 85" (Cornell Chronicle):

Robert S. Summers, who grew up milking cows on his family’s farm in Oregon and went on to co-write the most widely cited treatise on U.S. commercial transaction laws and help draft laws governing Russia, Egypt and Rwanda, died March 1 in New Canaan, Connecticut. Summers, Cornell’s William G. McRoberts Research Professor Emeritus in Administration of the Law, was 85....

Summers joined the Cornell Law School faculty in 1969. During his career, he produced 55 books and more than 100 articles, including influential works on legal realism, statutory interpretation, and form and substance in the law....

[H]e was known for his dedication to the Socratic method of teaching: instilling principles and concepts through rigorous questioning and argument, rather than “ladling [information] out on a spoon,” as he said....

Goodbye to one of the great law professors. Was anyone else ever so dedicated to the Socratic method? I grew up with a father who wished he had become a lawyer and who liked to wield what he called the Socratic method in family conversations. I was a law professor myself, and the Socratic method was always only a distant ideal.

"Hi, Juan. What is 'a knowledgeable road'?"

I respond, at 6:03 a.m., to a commenter who stopped by yesterday at a post I wrote in August 2013 called "The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel..."

Was this a squandered topic by a terrible thinker and writer? Did this post make any sense with its never ending questions? Did the tone of the writer make you want to jump off a bridge for being so condescending and close-minded? Did you once think "I never want to travel with this person. She has got to be biggest killjoy. She probably likes Olive Garden."? Could I have been better served asking a child, who probably has a better sense of travel and basic writing skills? Does this person think very highly of herself because she asks rather meaningless questions instead of leading her readers down a knowledgeable road? Again, she's probably the worst travel buddy, right?

"'Dadcore?' 'Momcore?' What the heck are these trendy lingoes?"

Asks someone at Metafilter, linking to a Glamour article titled "Move Over, Normcore — Dadcore Is Here. What It Is, Plus 3 Takeaways to Apply to Your Non-Dad Closet."

Someone pointed out the obvious, that the "-core" suffix comes from "hardcore," but how did "-core" get into "hardcore" in the first place? "Hardcore" does not appear in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary, and "hard core" is only a "draft addition":

hard core adj. and n. (usu. as one word) orig. U.S., (a) adj. denoting harsh, aggressive, or extreme versions of various types of popular music (originally punk, now also rap, techno, etc.), typically faster, louder, or more experimental than related forms, and determinedly less mainstream; (b) n. any of various forms of popular music (often a variety of an established genre) regarded as particularly extreme, aggressive, or experimental.

But we use "hardcore" far beyond that music meaning, most notably for porn, but it's widely used, certainly by me. Some examples from the 10 years of this blog:

If you're hardcore enough to burn [artwork worth millions], why are you not hardcore enough to lie to the police?...

Ironically, this professor is teaching that it's all about power and you need to use hardcore tactics to win, and the student seems to have learned this lesson well. The edited video, dumped on the internet is a hardcore tactic, flipping the power on the old white guy....

I'm not purporting to interpret this scripture and won't argue about how it should really be read, but I think there is a scruple about calling attention to charity that some people might be hardcore about. Posting even anonymously on a website that is only about advertising charity could be taken as wrong. I note Jesus sounds rather hardcore about it and puts the stakes very high....

One of the reasons "We Won't Get Fooled Again" is a great song is because of the complicated ambivalence expressed by the character who sings it. A hardcore politico cannot use those words, even though a hardcore politico is likely to hear that song and mistakenly believe it expresses what he believes....

An innovative idea for a new law school would to use an old style hardcore Socratic Method approach. It's actually hard to find Kingsfield-type lawprofs any more; everybody's already competing to be the most nurturing. I'd like to see a school compete for students and faculty by offering a retro hardcore method....

If one of the hardcore righties had won the Republican nomination, I would probably have gone for Obama. But Mitt Romney got the nomination, which is what I had been hoping for (after Mitch Daniels decided not to run)....

What's toxic about debate, disagreement, and hardcore argument? When was feminism ever supposed to be about being nice to anybody?...

Would East and West Pakistan be one country today if the government hadn't been so hardcore about Urdu?...

If you were a fan of "Fraggle Rock," you may remember that the Fraggles called Doc's workroom "outer space," and if you're an incredibly hardcore fan of the Althouse blog, you may remember that that there is a room in my house that we call "outer space." We've been calling it that since the '80s....

Tom Ford is more hardcore about men in shorts than I am....

You may imagine that Madison is a place where government nannies coddle the populace, but when it comes to facing winter, we are hardcore northerners. No whining. Be tough. Deal with it. We don't submit to Nature. We're having a Snow Action Day....

It's all about the clavicle, the clavicle that you've etched out through hardcore exercise and stringent dieting....

I wouldn't want all nine [Supreme Court Justices] to be flexible pragmatists. Having a hardcore originalist or two in the mix is a moderating safeguard. But don't give me five of them!...

I came away surprised that some people, especially the libertarians, were hardcore, true believers, wedded to an abstract version of an idea and unwilling to look at how it played out in the real world.

There's also "softcore," a word I'm using for the first time on this blog right now, oddly enough. "Softcore," a less useful word that "hardcore," is reserved as a contrast to "hardcore." It's a back-formation, like "underwhelm," not a real word in itself. And I say that acknowledging the contestable reality of hardcore as a word in itself.

Tales of gender difference, the Socratic Method, and the hostile environment that is philosophy.

The story of one female University of Wisconsin-Madison student and the undergraduate club the Socratic Society:

“People were yelling and banging on the table to make their points,” [Macy Salzberger] says. “It was basically a free-for-all... The environment felt hostile, and often I was the only girl in the room”...

“I told women that I understood the problem, but that it was possible to balance out the combative tone if more of us came. The women who started coming were intentional, as well. They shared that goal.”...

“Macy has been an outstanding leader,” says Philosophy Department Chair Russ Shafer-Landau. “It’s absolutely vital that we enfranchise all who want to participate in philosophical discussion, and Macy’s efforts have been exemplary in this regard.”

Can we get some Socratic dialogue on what "enfranchise" means here? And nice as it is to feature some hard work by a UW student, do you really believe that if only more women came in at the intake level and "shared" a "goal" of inclusiveness, then some "tone" you view as exclusionary would be "balanced out"? What do you think women are? Are we some bland ingredient to be added to an over-spiced stew to make it more palatable for everyone?

The comments vacation.

We've closed the door to comments... for a while at least, but there is still a backdoor, manned by Meade.

Will the comments section ever reopen, or is this a permanent vacation? I expect to reopen, well refreshed, and with some new ideas about how to make the ongoing experience rewarding for commenters of good faith.

ADDED: A reader emails:

Just a note from the peanut gallery that's been around since at least the Bush/Kerry election and a non participant in the comments section (I think I've commented 3 times in the history of the blog.)

I preferred the no comment policy.

Anti-law school propaganda.

Yikes. That was mean. I must say I laughed at the law professor (at 1:50): "I will assign you an enormous amount of reading, and then proceed to humiliate you during lecture." (No real law professor would say that. Even if he'd admit to an intention to humiliate students with the Socratic method — and I've never run across a law professor who did — he wouldn't refer to the Socratic dialogue as "lecture." And he probably wouldn't assign a lot of material. The most Socratic fun/torture is done with just a couple cases per class.)

(Via Prof. Jacobson.)

"The fact that Daley’s appointment did not work out shouldn’t, perhaps, come as a surprise."

"As a millionaire boardroom Democrat, he was out of step with an increasingly populist political climate. And as someone without much personal connection with Obama, his margin of error was likely slim from the very start. In the end, the most interesting question about Daley’s rise and fall probably pertains to President Obama’s management style—namely, why he decided to hire Daley into such a precarious position to begin with."

Paul Starobin, writing in TNR, actually blames Obama a little bit for something. That's surprising! Now, that's the last paragraph of the article, stating "the most interesting question." Who really cares about Daley? Let's get some sharp analysis of "President Obama’s management style." Or is that supposed to be an eternal enigma?

"Instead of offering a quick answer and moving on to another subject, Mr. Santorum began a Socratic lecture..."

"... repeatedly asking the students questions."

A Socratic dialogue?! Oh, no. It's like he actually cares about educating students! The very idea! When he could have offered a quick answer and moved on to another subject...

"I was determined... not to raise a soft, entitled child...."

"Classical music was the opposite of decline, the opposite of laziness, vulgarity, and spoiledness."

I read books with a pen in hand and mark passages I want to be able to find later. That's the only thing I marked in "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," which I'd read about a third of a few weeks ago and picked up and read to the end yesterday. Those 2 quotes appear on page 22 (of the hardback). As you probably know, the book is a memoir written by a lawprof, Amy Chua, who goes to great lengths driving her 2 daughters to learn to play the piano and violin and portrays this intense venture as Chinese.

You're left on your own in deciding whether to hate her for being so cruel or to worry that you should be (or should have been) a whole lot tougher on your own kids. In the process of making that decision, you've got to face up to or struggle to deny the way you are influenced by the extremely high level of accomplishment the 2 daughters reach. There has to be some degree of admiration or envy pushing you around.

See? She's a lawprof, and, I, a lawprof, see the book as setting up a Socratic inquiry. The lawprof keeps her distance as she gives you something complex to try to pull apart and examine. I can see why I marked the passage I marked and then left the pen capped.  There's a very basic goal that is easy to accept in itself: We don't want to raise soft, entitled children. But how do you do that? Here's one example of someone trying to achieve that goal. Now, what have we learned about the goal and how to achieve it?

There's something skeletal about the story Chua tells. The accomplishments of the daughters are documented objectively. There are specific honors that can't be denied. But we can only imagine the cost. Chua presents herself as a cartoon character, and she all but excludes her husband from the picture. I have no idea why these 2 people are married or what their relationship is like. That's one way to write a memoir. I've read other memoirs that deal with ongoing marriages that way. (One is "Dreams From My Father.")

A novelist could find rich material for a brilliant rewrite in "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (or "Dreams From My Father"). There is so much missing from these stories. Create the flesh that could hang on those bones.

Erwin Chemerinsky says those other law schools are "remarkably resistant to change."

It's the Dean of the new UC-Irvine Law School, speaking at a "Future of Legal Education" symposium:

One reason schools are sticking with a familiar playbook: "It's a cost-effective method of education," Mr. Chemerinsky said. "Putting one professor in front of a large group of students is very efficient." Clinical classes and simulations, which require low student-to-faculty ratios, cost more, he said.

Because his own law school wasn't bound by decades of tradition, Mr. Chemerinsky said, he and the founding faculty members were able to do some things differently, like stressing hands-on, interdisciplinary study across all three years.

Asked by an audience member how the school could afford to do that, he answered, "It starts with having to charge ridiculous levels of tuition."

Chemerinsky made a funny. No report of the volume of the laughter in the room.

Nothing like using other people's money to play out your expansive, innovative ideas. Except clinics and simulations are very old ideas. Cf. "high-speed" rail.

God forbid we should do what's "cost-effective."

By the way, what is "hands-on, interdisciplinary study"? Do we get to fondle a sociologist? 

You know what I would love in a new school — one that "wasn't bound by decades of tradition"? A deliberate decision to embrace tradition. Let's get a bunch of tough Socratic lawprofs in front of a classroom of students. And that's it. Perfectly cost-effective. You can save money on admissions too by going old-school. Make it an old-fashioned GPA/LSAT meritocracy (and flunk them out if they don't perform).

If you're a prospective law student, do you want to go to my new traditionalist school or to Chemerinsky's place? Is that because the tuition will be way lower or because you think that would be a better education? If you're an employer of law grads, do you want New Traditionalist grads or Chemerinsky grads?

If I had to go to a law school, I'd pick:
	Chemerinsky's Old Visionary Law School
	Althouse's New Traditionalist Law School
	Something more moderately in the middle
pollcode.com free polls

"You have a steady diet of borderline cases. Is this bending up your mind?"

"Is this having the effect of dulling your sensitivity to the 7 major values of certainty in law? If you’re getting accustomed to life on the borderlines — that's what you're in, life on the borderlines — could that have a prejudicial effect on the general standards that you have with regard to what the law is like? And you just take for granted that the law will be open-ended, spongey, discretion-ridden? Some of you do think there’s value to predictability, determinativeness. There are probably not just 3 ways in which it’s valuable, but probably about 15."

Said the eminent, venerable law professor Robert Summers, according to the verbatim notes of a student in his Contracts class at Cornell Law School. Summers recommended that students try to write everything down, and the student, my son John, followed the recommendation. At the link, you'll find much more about Summers — the ideal of the Socratic law professor, who taught his last class on December 1st.

Professor Summers taught law for 50 years. That's about twice as long as I've taught law, and I see myself as well past the middle of my teaching days. I encountered Professor Summers when I interviewed at Cornell — it was my first law school interview — in the fall of 1983. He went on an oddly long rant about how awful it was to have to grade exams.

If I had a transcript of that now, I'm sure I would see that it was hilarious, but at the time, I was terrified, and I furiously racked my brain to think of some interview-appropriate response. Perhaps if I'd been less tightly wound that day and laughed instead of looking however I looked — mystified? blank? clock-watch-y? — I'd have ended up at Cornell.

But I ended up at Wisconsin. And I'm pleased that my son John grew up in Wisconsin and that he ended up at Cornell — with the presence of mind and the sense of humor to appreciate the great Professor Summers.

John says:

... Summers took the Socratic method to the extreme. He rarely made any direct statement about anything, almost always preferring to ask questions instead.

He mockingly voiced the way he thought students would react:

Isn’t it a pity that you need to analyze cases? You can’t just go around with your mouth open waiting for a spoon that will feed it to you in one big, luscious bite! Students should sue. The teachers should just give you the law.

For me, that is a luscious bite of incentive to keep trying to find the wit and the nerve to go for the Socratic ideal. What if I took a secret vow to teach speaking only in questions? How long would it take the students to notice? And by notice, I mean, notice that I'm using the technique of only asking question, not notice that I am really, really annoying.

Summers talking about another lawprof:

MacNeil was a whale of a law professor! Never uttered a declarative sentence! Never uttered a declarative sentence! Not in 35 years! Best law professor we've ever had! Now he's retired. What a mistake that was. What a mistake that was.

The "Should I Skip Class Today?" Calculator.

When you not only don't want to go to class, you don't even want to make a decision for yourself.

(Via Inside Higher Ed.)

As a teacher, I need to reverse-engineer my classroom policies. I can see students using this calculator would be encouraged to skip!

Hmm... I just tried to do that. It seems the only way I can change something to get a different result is to give pop quizzes. That would be bizarre in law school. But the equivalent — which is  not accounted for in the calculator — is to call on students randomly and have class participation be part of the grade.

Should we say "single-gender education"?

Mark Liberman -- who saw that term in a headline -- wonders why someone would want to avoid the standard phrase "same-sex education." [ADDED: I meant to write "single-sex education," and I can see that my slip shows a problem with the term.] Is it a matter of embracing the word "gender" to express the belief that differences between male and female are produced by culture, not biology? Or is it prudery about about the word "sex"?

Liberman informs us that the word "sex" goes back to 1382 -- "Of alle thingis hauynge sowle of ony flehs, two thow shalt brynge into the ark, that maal sex and femaal lyuen with thee" -- but the first use of it to refer to "genital pleasure" is in this D.H. Lawrence poem, "Pansies":

If you want to have sex, you've got to trust
At the core of your heart, the other creature.

I think it's mostly prudery, unless they're going to let the kids decide on their own gender identification, which I think would be a good idea. You have one school that teaches in a way they think works best with most boys and the other that -- like most schools these days -- does things that tend to work with girls. Then, each child, with a parent's help, looks carefully at the different teaching styles and picks the one that suits him or her best.

This reminds me of my old proposal for a law school dedicated to the traditional Socratic method in all the classes. Presumably, that's a male style of education -- not to say that all male law students would like it or thrive in it or that no female students would want to attend. But wouldn't it be good to have that option? Would you take it?

Thinking about Professor Kingsfield again.

Writing the previous post, I ran across a couple of bloggers who talked about going back to my Kingsfield column in the NYT a few weeks ago. (TimesSelect link.) I described a talk by John Jay Osborn Jr., the author of "The Paper Chase," and wrote:

... Osborn says [law students] hate law school, and they hate it because the law professors don’t care about what the students think. “You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer,” said Osborn’s sadistically Socratic professor, Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. This legal discipline deprives students of “their own narrative,” as Osborn put it, and they need to learn how to struggle, as Osborn’s protagonist Hart did, to “reclaim” it. They need to resist what law school tries to impose....

Here's Greg, a law student who actually has had Osborn as his lawprof:

Because Prof. Osborn didn't cold-call, didn't even assign people to be "up" for a particular class, it was the narrative of a few that we heard most from.

This is the #1 problem with relying on volunteers. I, myself, have used volunteers through most of my 20+ years teaching law. It is more relaxed and does give you the good feeling that you're not intruding on anyone. But of course, you are. You're intruding on the minds of everyone in the room, even if they are passive and silent. They may avoid the fear and pressure of getting put on the spot, but that doesn't mean they're having a fine time listening to the students who enjoy engaging with the professor. Osborn wants to empower students to "reclaim" their "personal narrative" in class, but you've got to picture that in practice. Just because the opportunity is offered doesn't mean the students will respond in proportion to their need for personal empowerment or the value of their personal narrative to the classroom experience. Most likely, the students who bring the most empowerment to class will do the most talking. These may be the extroverts or the students who came from families or great schools that got them comfortable with exposing their minds. Having to listen to these already-empowered students may very well disempower the students who are more introverted or whose families did not debate politics at the dinner table or whose high schools were substandard holding pens. It may strengthen some students over others -- perhaps males over females or white students over minorities students. If we care about diversity, we need to worry about a teaching method that activates some and not others. Even if you rankle at "diversity" talk like that and prefer to think in terms of individuals, you should care about systematically empowering some individuals over others. Well, if you rankle at "diversity," you probably hate "empowering" too, but the point remains! If you're going to have a classroom where students do some of the talking, it's best to get the full range of students talking, especially if the students are going into a field like law, where speaking is going to be part of the work. Here's another law student blog post, from Aaron of The Stopped Clock:

One of the best student experiences I had in law school was being taught by J.J. White, who was probably the most like Professor Kingsfield of any professor at UM. He knew his material cold, and I had the impression that he spent more time reviewing cases and preparing for each class than did most of his students.... Had every professor at UM been like him, I would have had to work a lot harder and I would have learned a lot more.

Aaron's post is pretty rambling and entails an awful lot of personal narrative. It's hard to tell what he's driving at. And then it ends with a question for me. Hey, Aaron, I'm the lawprof. I'm the one who wants a neo-Socratic revival. That is, I'm the one with the questions. No answers for you! By the way, I love Prof. Osborn, who sent me a nice note about the NYT column, in which he cleverly pointed out that I used personal narrative and told my own story in the column. He's quite right! Here I am, leading up to a conclusion that rejects the idea of opening up the classroom to students telling their own stories:

When I was applying to law schools in 1977, I really didn't need an anti-authoritarian novel about a young guy who lets a love affair with the professor's daughter eat into his study time. I was married and -- it seemed then -- a little old for that sort of frippery. I was 26. What I needed was to get serious after years of underemployment inspired by books and movies about defying authority. I had to set aside that obsolescent hippie balkiness and adopt a pragmatic attitude for the task ahead. ''One L'' -- which was new then -- laid out the facts about law school and got you just scared enough to fire you up for the challenge.

And of course, "One L" is a personal narrative too. (And where's my letter from Scott Turow?!) I'm not against personal narrative. As a blogger, could I be against personal narrative? Actually, I could. A blog could be much more personal than this, and it could also be utterly impersonal. Like a law school class, you've got to choose where you want to pitch it. Unlike a law school class, you've got a full range of choice. I think it would be downright abusive to make my law school class as personal as this blog... and to make this blog as personal as it could be... well, that would be crazy, wouldn't it? Or are you just waiting for the day when I lay my inhibitions aside and tell you what I really think... and what I really do?