How Lonely Was that Walk?

The clock in my car said 12:34 p.m. Thursday while I waited for a car to pass before I pulled out of my parking spot on N. 53 rd St. I watched as the car turned on to W. Vliet and immediately pulled in front of the Milwaukee Public Schools central administration building. The passenger in the front seat got out and slowly walked by himself to the front door of the building.

It was Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. And he was playing out a scene in what appears to have become a lose-lose political situation for him.  

The bid by Governor Jim Doyle, Barrett, and others to overhaul governance of MPS, giving the mayor dominant power over the school system, is on life support, at best. The effort is deadlocked in the Legislature. It appears to be decidedly on the unpopular end of sentiment in Milwaukee, especially among African Americans. And several days of pretty intense efforts to reach some form of compromise with backers of a less-extensive plan to shift power in MPS pretty much blew up on Wednesday.  The two sides simply and apparently irresolveably disagree on how much power a mayor should have over MPS. 

Continue ReadingHow Lonely Was that Walk?

Can Guys Teach Gender?

Yes . . . and they should! Coming back from the works-in-progress conference this past November at Harvard, one of the most interesting conversations was a late-night one between several professors — men and women — about teaching gender in a negotiation class. Now that the new semester is starting up, I wanted to bring this topic up again.

As others have noted to me, the vast majority of gender and negotiation research, and public presentations on gender, tend to be by women. Debbie Kolb would point out that everyone has gender — not just women — and yet there is clearly something about teaching gender that make at least some male professors uncomfortable. And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not for lack of thinking it’s important; it’s more that they don’t want to be patronizing or make the situation worse by raising stereotypes that they themselves do not believe in. At least one male professor hoped that by avoiding teaching gender, and teaching general negotiation effectiveness, everyone would get the message that people should not be defined by their gender. But, as he noted, that does not, in the end, necessarily serve either the male or female students in our negotiation classes. 

Continue ReadingCan Guys Teach Gender?

What Should Be Done With Legal Education? (Part III)

This post focuses solely on how some restructuring of law faculty may assist in improving legal education.  (Earlier posts in this series are here and here.)

Unlike many undergraduate institutions, law schools have not lessened their faculty costs by moving in the direction of increasing non-tenure-track faculty. While law schools have always hired judges and practitioners to teach classes in the law school curriculum (My law school, St. Mary’s, is lucky to have a current federal district judge teach Federal Courts to its evening division students, and employs a retired federal circuit court judge to teach several courses each year), law schools remain heavily dependent on full-time faculty to teach most of the curriculum. In the main, this division of labor has benefitted law students. It has forced law schools to take seriously the mission of teaching law. Law professors are not only expected to teach large introductory classes without teaching assistants to share the load, many positively relish the challenge. Students can take much from a faculty member who demonstrates both a mastery of the material and an ability to communicate that material, as well as an affinity for legal scholarship. A passion for both the theory and practice of law can infect students, though an ability to explain how students should learn to enjoy the drudgery of law may be even more important. One or more faculty members of the “Mr. Chips” type (ancient popular culture reference) are useful for any school, but schools do well with some lopsided faculty (that is, faculty who are strong teachers and weak scholars or vice-versa). 

The problem with law faculties today is one of stasis, resulting from a combination of early tenure, modest lateral movement, the end of mandatory retirement, and the pay structure, exacerbated by the Great Recession of 2008. 

Continue ReadingWhat Should Be Done With Legal Education? (Part III)