Jack Bauer: Eco-Warrior. Friend of Garofalo. Federal Agent.

TNR: "How Liberal Can '24' Get? Flower Bauer by Daniel Chun

'24''s upcoming seventh season appears to mark a different direction for the conservative-leaning action drama. First, producers cast a female president. Then they struck a plan to make the show's production more environmentally friendly, leading to a 'carbon-neutral' season finale. And last week, they cast Janeane Garofalo as federal agent Janis Gold. We got our hands on some scripts from the next season, and it looks a new era for the show. A sneak peek:
EPISODE 1: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM Int. CTU - day JACK BAUER talks to JANIS GOLD.
JANIS GOLD Our source tells us that the terrorists' plan is blow up Broward Dam. This would create mass flooding, cut power to the entire state, and destroy the habitat of the tidewater goby.
JACK BAUER Dammit! Without that goby, what will our local heron population eat?
JANIS GOLD Try not to think about that.
JACK BAUER I can't help it! Every link in the food chain matters! Jack punches his hand through a wall.
JACK BAUER (CONT'D) Chloe, get me a schematic of the dam's facilities.
CHLOE O'BRIAN I'm on it. Let me power up my". Let me power up my computer.

Chloe mounts an exercise bike connected to a power generator into which her computer is plugged. She pedals furiously. Her computer slowly boots up.

JANIS GOLD
We don't have much time, Chloe! Pedal harder!

Chloe pedals harder.

JANIS GOLD (CONT'D)
(to Jack, proudly) Did you know that just ten minutes of pedaling powers her computer for an hour?

CHLOE O'BRIAN
Not to mention burns calories and improves my heart health.

Jack nods, impressed and a little inspired. ...

Why Do So Many Americans Dislike Academe?

Chronicle.com:By Evan Goldstein

Why Do So Many Americans Dislike Academe? The prospect of promotion to the status of full professor has Timothy Burke in a reflective mood. In particular, he has been thinking about why he has maintained his blog, Easily Distracted, for the past five years. Burke, who teaches at Swarthmore, describes his blogging as an effort to better understand how the society at large relates to academe. 'I blog because I want to understand how we’re seen, to hone my own ability to enter a wider public conversation, and to think about what it is that scholars and educators need to do to reform their own practices,' Burke writes. 'I want to understand where we are at fault, where public critics of academia may be mistaken or malicious in their views, and where we’re entangled in some much more complex social matrix that isn’t easily encompassed by debates within the public sphere.' Burke argues that 'all that is valuable and productive about higher education...is now very much at stake politically in a way that it has not been in Western society since the mid-19th century.' In a very lengthy post, which is worth the effort of reading in full, Burke explores why Americans are so dismissive or hostile to academic institutions and academic professionals.

Idaho Governor Faces Speculation on Senate Seat

New York Times:

BOISE, Idaho — If Senator Larry E. Craig yields to calls for his resignation amid allegations that he solicited sex in an airport bathroom, his successor would be chosen by a fellow Republican who once entered a tight-jeans contest — and won.

Gov. C. L. Otter, known as Butch, was lieutenant governor when he won the “Mr. Tight Jeans” contest at the Rockin’ Rodeo bar here in the state capital in July 1992. A few days later he was arrested, and eventually convicted, for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Now, after having gone on to serve three terms in the House of Representatives before being elected governor last year, Mr. Otter knows better than most what voters in this deeply conservative state will tolerate when it comes to the private behavior of public officials. “As a public servant who has made mistakes in my private life, I am mindful that you don’t really know who your friends are, until you stumble,” he told reporters here this week.

Where do they come up with these people?

Robert D. Novak: Small Shoes at Justice

washingtonpost.com:
Robert D. Novak

I first met Gonzales in 2001 when, along with other conservative journalists, I went to the White House for a background briefing by presidential counsel Gonzales on the new president's judicial nominations. I was stunned by the incoherence of the briefer. When I checked with several Republican senators, I received the same verdict. Their judgment was that Gonzales was not qualified to hold a senior governmental position.
Gonzales's handling of the crisis over the firing of U.S. attorneys set new standards for incompetence. In the midst of the furor, he agreed to address the National Press Club on May 15 (insisting on breakfast instead of the usual lunch). It was by chance the 44th anniversary of this column, and I concluded that in all those years I had never seen anything like it.

Novak, the legendary journalistic "prince of darkness", is pretty much a jerk (and a hack, and a partisan flack)in my (long time) estimation. His judgment and sense of public duty are pretty well summed up by a simple juxtaposition: he chose to out Valerie Plame as a CIA analyst to punish Joe Wilson for (and deter others from) challenging the phony Bush-Cheney case for war, while withholding this (apparently widely shared) recognition of Gonzales' incompetence, until it could do no good. Thanks a lot, Bob.

Maybe W will award him a Medal of Freedom for his mis-spent career.

Southern Illinois President Faces Allegations He Plagiarized His Dissertation

Chronicle: By THOMAS BARTLETT

The president of Southern Illinois University, Glenn Poshard, is being forced to defend his 1984 dissertation against accusations that it contains numerous examples of plagiarism and improper citation. The student newspaper at the university's Carbondale campus, the Daily Egyptian, did a detailed examination of his dissertation and presented its findings to Mr. Poshard this week. He told the newspaper that he was very busy when the dissertation was completed. 'This is not an excuse, and I would never offer it up as an excuse, but at that point in my life, I had a family,' he was quoted as saying. 'I worked two jobs. I was running for the Illinois State Senate. I was trying to get my dissertation finished.' Mr. Poshard received his Ph.D. in education from Southern Illinois at Carbondale. Through a spokesman, Mr. Poshard declined an interview request from The Chronicle, but the spokesman said Mr. Poshard would respond to the allegations after he had had a chance to review them. The allegations are the latest in a series of accusations of plagiarism against top officials at Southern Illinois. Last year Mr. Poshard asked the chancellor of the university's Carbondale campus, Walter V. Wendler, to step down after revelations that portions of a strategic plan Mr. Wendler put together came from an earlier strategic plan he helped write for Texas A&M University at College Station (The Chronicle, November 9, 2006).

Mr. Wendler's copying was brought to light by a group of professors and students close to Chris Dussold, an assistant professor of finance at Southern Illinois at Edwardsville who was fired in 2004 for copying his two-page teaching statement (The Chronicle, February 10, 2006). After his dismissal, Mr. Dussold and a group of supporters set out to uncover examples of plagiarism at the university in order to prove that he had been treated unfairly. Mr. Dussold has filed a lawsuit against the university for wrongful termination. ...

There are several examples in the dissertation of what might be called classic plagiarism: Passages are lifted verbatim, or near verbatim, with no citation given. In one instance, a 68-word passage from another source is used without quotation marks or citation. The two passages are identical except for a single word change: Mr. Poshard has substituted "a" for "another."

In another example, an 80-word section, also lacking quotation marks or citation, is taken from another source with only a few minor changes -- such as switching a verb from "has been" to "was."

In addition, there are numerous examples in which Mr. Poshard appears to disregard the accepted rules of crediting someone else's work. While he may cite a particular source, he often fails to place quotation marks around passages he uses verbatim. For instance, Mr. Poshard writes that "It has become almost axiomatic to say that the welfare of the world rests significantly with the utilization of the potential of the gifted youth to solve social, economic, ecological, political, and human problems."

He cites the source but does not indicate that the passage is copied nearly word for word. There are so many examples of such practices that the dissertation seems as if it has been cut-and-pasted from other sources. Mr. Poshard told the student newspaper that no one on his dissertation committee told him that he had to use quotation marks.

U. of Dubuque Settles With Professor Who Sued Over Ban on Public Criticism

Chronicle.com: By Andrew Mytelka

The University of Dubuque has agreed to pay $50,000 to settle a former professor’s unfair-termination lawsuit that raised the question of whether the university was seeking to stifle criticism, according to the Telegraph Herald, a local newspaper. The professor, Paul F. Jeffries, won tenure in philosophy and religion in 2005 and was subsequently offered a special chair in which he would teach ethics and speak about ethical topics as part of a newly endowed “character initiative.” He balked, however, at contract provisions that said his salary would stay the same and that said he would have to pay it back if he ever made “any disparaging, denigrating, or otherwise critical statements” about the university to reporters. Shortly after he complained, the university said he would be removed from his new post and sent back to the philosophy and religion department, without tenure. He refused to accept the demotion, left the university, and filed suit. His lawyer told The Chronicle in 2006 that the contract provision on criticism, even though a requirement of all faculty members at Dubuque, contradicted the purpose of the character initiative. Under the settlement, approved by a judge on Tuesday, the university will pay Mr. Jeffries $50,000 but admit to no breach of contract.

Mitt Romney shivs his pal Larry Craig

Slate Magazine: By John Dickerson

...We don't have to guess about what Goldwater would do. During the 1964 presidential campaign, he faced almost precisely the same issue. In October, the Goldwater campaign learned that Walter Jenkins, LBJ's closest aide, had been arrested on a 'morals charge' in the YMCA bathroom. According to J. William Middendorf's account of that campaign, A Glorious Disaster, Goldwater's aides wanted to use the scandal against Johnson, who was well ahead in the polls. Jenkins was not only a security risk—open to blackmail— but long before he was arrested, there were allegations he'd used his influence with then-Vice President Johnson to get an Air Force general who had been busted on a morals charge reinstated. The Goldwater aides even tried out slogans: 'Either way with LBJ.'
Goldwater insisted that they make no use of it. The story never came up during the campaign. This may say more about Goldwater's personal decency than it does about his governing philosophy. Jenkins had served in Goldwater's Air Force Reserve Unit, and as Goldwater later wrote, 'It was a sad time for Jenkins' wife and children, and I was not about to add to their private sorrow. Winning isn't everything. Some things, like loyalty to friends or lasting principle, are more important.' Mitt, you're no Barry Goldwater.

Everybody (On Campus) Digs Barack Obama

On Faith: Georgetown Blog:

The results of my scientific poll of scholars of religion and theology at various universities (n = 14) have now been tabulated. The question asked was: “With which current presidential aspirant would you most like to sit down and discuss issues pertaining to faith—Church/State issues, Gnostic Gospels, Schleiermacher, anything?” Save one stray vote for former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, every professor I spoke to expressed a preference for the same candidate. If, like me, you believe that the titles of classic Jazz albums are repositories of timeless wisdom and wit, then my campus findings may be summarized by the title of Bill Evans' 1958 masterpiece: “Everybody digs Barack Obama.” Incontrovertible proof of the Academy’s liberal bias, this adulation for the Senator from Illinois? Perhaps. Yet he does possess qualities that make him uniquely attractive to people with advanced degrees in religious studies and other subjects. Obama can sound awfully professorial, as opposed to wonkish, when discussing issues pertaining to faith. The decade he spent as a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago has clearly left its mark. When reading or listening to him analyze questions of public policy and religion many scholars undoubtedly experience the pleasure of recognition. They may even conclude--somewhat narcissistically-- that “Senator Obama is one of us!”

All presidential candidates must weave what I call “a narrative of faith.” Here again, Obama offers something out of the ordinary. The generic storyline of a Protestant aspirant for High Office goes something like this. Candidate X was once an OK Christian. Then a traumatic episode occurred which solidified his or her faith, resulting in deepened spiritual awareness. Candidate X emerged from these travails a better, stronger Christian--a “hard champion” of godly virtue (Here, using the title of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ 1985 album).

Mr. Obama’s narrative is rather different. As a child, he was schooled in both Catholic and Muslim institutions. Too, there is reason to believe that prior to his later-life baptism he was under-churched or non-churched and may even have flirted with a casual sort of non-belief. All of these experiences tincture his thinking on religion with more sophistication and edge than any other candidate in the race.

Last, as regards religious imaging, God Talk, and so forth, Senator Obama is a very original and cunning operator. Much in the way that he manages to constantly criticize the Democratic Party all the while portraying himself as the embodiment of a Democrat, Obama can lampoon the faith and values game while playing it with extraordinary skill. His quip about the “politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps (off rhythm) to the gospel choir” is a classic zinger. It is a mustard-filled paint-ball aimed at John Kerry that then ricochets directly into one of Hillary Clinton’s preferred photo-ops.

Of course, the types of politicians who mesmerize the theology professors are rarely the ones who sway the American electorate. Opposition Research teams may also dig Barack Obama, as we shall soon see.

Posted by Jacques Berlinerblau on August 27, 2007 9:44 AM

Blessings and Curses

AJWS Commentary:

Within the narrative of blessings and curses in Parshat Ki Tavo, God sets out clear expectations for how we should behave, making it clear that this is not a covenant of faith, but one of deeds. Contemporary Jewish philosopher David Hartman contends that the blessings and curses are not literally inflicted upon humans in response to their observance or nonobservance of commandments. Hartman argues, instead, that our Torah enumerates these curses and blessings in order to emphasize the grave importance of acting with holiness and thereby actualizing God's presence in our midst. The blessings and curses are provided as a symbolic reminder of our covenantal obligations, reinforcing our commitment to a covenant rooted in action.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel also invokes our covenant with God when he asserts that the blessings and curses are meant to impart a sense of our partnership with the divine as we struggle to cope with good and evil. Simply observing the Torah's written laws is not enough to continually bring sanctity into our lives. The Torah not only narrowly stipulates that certain acts are prohibited, but also broadly demands that we accept our responsibility to realize a sustainable and just society. Heschel understands the significance of our deeds both as signs of our covenantal relationship and as active agents of change in our surroundings:

It is in the deeds that human beings become aware of what life really is, of their power to harm and to hurt, to wreck and to ruin; of their ability to derive joy and bestow it upon others...The deed is the test, the trial, and the risk. What we perform may seem slight, but the aftermath is immense."

Understood this way, mitzvot ben adam l'chavero - those commandments that guide human relationships - really actualize our covenant with God. The majority of the mitzvot detailed in this parshah focus on supporting just and compassionate relationships with other human beings - in effect, offering guidelines for the creation of just communities. Prohibitions against subverting the rights of the stranger, secretly harming a neighbor, and accepting bribes support the universal human rights we seek to uphold in our social justice work. The Torah champions human integrity and dignity, and our literary tradition further elevates this with the assertion that the highest form of tzedakah is to help someone become self-sufficient.

JTS Weekly Torah Commentary

-R. Marc Wolf - JTS Weekly Torah Commentary:

The sixteenth-century Italian commentator Moshe Hefetz writes on this verse in his commentary on Ki Tavo, 'You witnessed all those great wonders but only appreciated their full significance just now, at this time, after they had receded from view, as if you had to this point lacked sight and hearing' (Milekhet Mahshevet, Warsaw Ed., 315). Hefetz is observing that the people of Israel did not understand the miracles because they needed distance from them. It was their time in the desert, wandering, gaining perspective, and experience and growing as a people that allowed them to appreciate the full significance of the miracles. ...

The true significance of the Exodus was not in the signs and wonders, but in the time it took for the people to become Israelites. Their experience in the desert served as the vehicle for transformation from a wandering mass to a People ready to live as a Nation in the Land of Israel. Moses' statement, then, cannot be viewed as a critique, but as a compliment. B'nai Israel had made it through the desert and had matured into the people with "the mind to understand, the eyes to see and the ears to hear."

With Judaism, we are continually in and out of "the woods." This month of Elul leading up to the High Holidays is time in "the woods." Elul has traditionally been the month for introspection, a month to take our individual heshbon ha'nefesh (accounting of our soul) and examine our relationship with God. It is a period to develop as individuals to emerge like b'nai Israel from the desert with the mind, ears, and eyes we need to approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

On Legal Education

As we prepare to embark on the new academic year, I have repositioned for more convenient access the following series of entries on legal education originally posted on March 27 and 28, 2007. Comments are welcome.

Toward a kindler, gentler (and more intellectually rigorous) law school: Epigram

It has been observed that my proposal (posted in four parts, below) is long, dense, and convoluted (and has too many parenthetical inserts (which make it hard (and very irritating) to read)).
Got it.

Could I possibly try to distill my message to something people might actually read?
Sure. Here goes (standing on one foot):

Our graduates should have the courage to take on established power, and the skills enabling them to do so effectively.

The rest is commentary.
Now go and study.

With apologies to the Jewish first-century sage, Hillel, asked by a Gentile to summarize the whole Torah while standing on one foot. (On my reading of the sources, it is somewhat obscure whether it was Hillel or his interlocutor who was standing on one foot, and whether the inquiry was sincere or sarcastic. Maybe an especially well-informed and/or industrious reader can help. You may sit down while doing your research.)

I. Toward a kinder, gentler (and more intellectually rigorous) law school--Introduction (rev'd 3/27/07)

March 20 Aardvark* proposal by Alan J. Weisbard

What sort of learning environment do we, faculty and students together, wish to create here at UW Law School?

As a member of the British House of Lords, Baroness Whitaker, recently stated (quoting Mark Twain in summarizing the attitude of many of her colleagues toward proposed reforms): “I’m all for progress; it’s change I can’t stand.”

Most discussions of educational policy are incremental to a fault. Motivated by our current circumstances, I would like to propose a more far reaching and radical discussion, taking us to the roots of our enterprise together.

My proposal is predicated on a particular view of that enterprise. We, the faculty of the law school, are training our students to function as legal professionals. Given the roles that lawyers have played historically in our society, and seem likely to continue to play for the foreseeable future, we are also training our students to function as public citizens. You, our students, will enjoy the opportunities and bear the burdens associated with civic and political, as well as professional, leadership and influence.

Lawyers and public citizens require courage, commitment and fortitude as well as technical competence. As lawyers, many of us tend particularly to our distinctive garden: the formulation and enforcement of legal rules of conduct. Here at Wisconsin, we also study and pursue the law in action. Both are necessary and important. But there is more: the cultivation, development and pursuit of lives of virtue and service to others.

From my perspective, we don’t do nearly enough to inculcate, reinforce or value these virtues as law teachers or as a law school. What we do in this domain, we probably do best through our clinical programs. More is required of us, not least in modelling for our students lives of integrity, courage, and service.

There has been much twaddle in American academia of adopting a “marketplace” model of the educational process. According to this model, students are consumers, seeking a credential to advance their careers; faculty are providers of a service. (Entertainment value is a bonus.) At its far extreme, we as students and teachers become mutually complicit in seeking to effectuate this bargain at least personal cost or bother. To exaggerate somewhat for effect, information flows from the professor’s lecture notes, through the student’s laptop, to the student’s blue book, with as little lasting or transformational impact on the student’s brain cells as is necessary to the credentialing purpose of the transaction. Then we go about the real business of our lives, outside the classroom, and we congratulate one another on a job well done.

This is not what I sought as a student. It is not why I, or most of my colleagues, became a teacher.

The times require us to articulate a better model of our mutual enterprise.

II.Toward a kinder, gentler (and more intellectually rigorous) law school --Proposal (rev'd)

What follow are some preliminary thoughts in that direction, a proposed model of a more collegial and mutually respectful educational process for our law school. The model demands more from all of us, teachers and students alike. I suspect that few will agree with all of its implications and entailments. Much help will be needed from students and fellow faculty members to think it through and, perhaps, to test it in practice, on an experimental basis. Perhaps it will be of interest to legal educators and law students elsewhere, but my primary focus is on UW.

The model rests on the conception that faculty are senior colleagues, and students are junior colleagues (and responsible adults), engaged in the shared enterprise of training future professionals. The model presumes respect, of one another and of the importance of the joint enterprise. It also presumes responsibilities as well as rights, again going in both directions.

Most fundamentally, we as students and teachers share a responsibility to and for the collective educational project. We all learn from one another, in ways conducive to life-long learning, the cultivation of professional skills, and service to our clients and our communities.

In this model, we value diversity, in substantial part, because of its tremendous liberating potential to expand the range of perspectives and life experiences from which we can all learn, as well as for the opportunity to learn to work effectively with others who differ, in all kinds of ways, from ourselves and our own experiences of the world (and of the self). We also promote diversity to enhance the likelihood of extending the reach of affordable and high quality legal assistance to all elements of the community, particularly to those currently not adequately served by the existing legal profession.

The world, and the social and professional realities we inhabit, are not simple ones. Conflicts are rife, and our society has gone a long way in approving the single-minded pursuit of individual gain, while downplaying elements of community, solidarity, and a fair-minded regard for the needs of others.

Some of this is inescapable in the human condition, and it has found its place within our halls. Law school is a competitive place (perhaps less intensely so at Wisconsin that at some other institutions). “The system” is set up (here as virtually everywhere else) so that some advance their own prospects at the expense of others, creating resentment, disillusionment, and intellectual and emotional withdrawal by all too many of our students. This is perhaps most obvious in our system of examinations, recommended and quasi-mandatory curves, and grades. (Recent grading reform may help some, but I would argue not enough, on this score.) It is powerfully and sadly reflected in widespread negative student attitudes toward fellow students who speak in class with “too much” frequency, seriousness, preparation, or engagement.

These issues also bear a disheartening relationship to the supposed traditional model of the faculty-student “Socratic” exchange, as portrayed in One L or The Paper Chase, in which sadistic professors, abusing their superior authority, knowledge, and experience, demean and humiliate students who cannot live up to impossible standards.

I experienced some (but relatively little) of this behavior in my own education. To be candid, I thought at the time, and now even more so in retrospect, that a measure of experience learning to survive attack and to respond quickly and effectively to intellectual intimidation was probably good for my development as a lawyer (and to my masculine identity; I suspect there may well be an important gendered aspect of this, worthy of discussion in its own right). From discussions with (particularly male?) faculty colleagues of a certain age, I suspect that others also look back on such experiences with a peculiar mix of nostalgia, pain, and gratitude.

Times and practices have changed since those years, mostly for the better. I do not emulate this model in my own teaching, and have not seen much of it in my colleagues’ teaching here at Wisconsin. I do understand that some students may perceive their experience here as a (perhaps somewhat muted) form of my hyperbolic description. We need to talk more openly about this.

The nature of our surrounding environment also affects our reality in a second, and at least equally important sense. If we are to respond effectively as lawyers and public citizens to a world that is complex and rife with conflict, we must seek to understand it, both through the production of knowledge (our research mission) and through the fearless examination of sometimes uncomfortable and emotionally-frought realities of life around us. We must learn to engage with competing perspectives and arguments, many of which we (in perhaps differing ways) will also find distasteful, or even offensive.

As lawyers and as legal educators, we are committed to the proposition that the best response to “bad” positions is through better development and use of complex evidence and through better arguments. Better arguments, by and large, are developed through careful and critical scrutiny of what makes the competing arguments tick, both in their internal logic and in the ways they depend on what we perceive to be incorrect beliefs and only partial truths.

The skills of an effective lawyer vitally depend on this capacity for critical examination. The process by which this capacity is cultivated (and made memorable to our students) is intrinsically an edgy and sometimes risky one. Even when done with the utmost skill and sensitivity, and with dedication to the objective of a more just society (as I think is characteristically the case here at Wisconsin), it will sometimes miscarry. Offense may be given, and feelings may be hurt. It comes with the territory.

To abandon the territory is to be derelict in our responsibility to train students properly to be professionals and public citizens. The trick is to find a way to turn that offense, and those hurt feelings, back into the classroom, to advance our collective learning (certainly including the learning of the teacher).

The great “teachable moments” often come in such circumstances. One of the tragedies of recent weeks is that we have not--at least thus far--adequately taken advantage of the potential teaching moment created by the compounded miscommunications and misunderstandings that have brought such pain to our community. The March 20 Forum was a useful start. But there are further discussions and hard work to come, if we are to make the most of this moment of opportunity. Let us not allow this precious occasion for collective reflection, engagement, and constructive change be lost in our understandable shared desire to put recent difficulties behind us.

Please, engage.

III. Toward a kinder, gentler (and more intellectually rigorous) law school --Concluding Reflections (rev'd)

Now to step back for a moment. I believe in academic freedom, defined in fairly expansive terms. The academic community must fight, often against powerful external actors, to protect freedom of thought and freedom of speech, even when those freedoms are exercised in ways we find distasteful, offensive or just plain wrong. (And we are free – indeed, obligated – to speak out against the substance of “wrong” ideas, without compromising the principle of academic freedom.) Professors should not risk their employment when they explore controversial ideas, even, and perhaps especially, when those ideas are unpopular, perhaps even hateful. (I put to the side deliberate personal insults and clearly discriminatory practices in the classroom, which should be neither tolerated nor protected.) That sets what I would consider the inimal or enforceable standard for faculty conduct. But it does not end the discussion.

There should also, I believe, be a more aspirational standard or set of communal norms at play, reflecting our widely shared commitment to the kind of open, respectful and sensitive learning environment that we seek to create. In such an environment, all members of a diverse community can feel fully at home and able to flourish.

Those who violate these norms in the exercise of legitimate academic freedom should risk not their employment, but their good names and reputations among colleagues, students, and the community. The lines here are not easy to draw, and differing recollections may make confident judgment difficult in evaluating some instances. Recognizing that others will differ on this point, I would argue that when students are offended by an arguably proper and good faith exercise of our teaching function, the first recourse should normally (unless this is demonstrably futile) come in the classroom, where engaged discussion can contribute to our shared learning. Where conflicts persist, we as an academic community must treat our offended students with compassion and support, but must also stand ready to rally to protect the good name of our colleagues when we are convinced, after due inquiry, that they are acting in good faith in the honest pursuit of our calling as law teachers.

Filling in the content of these aspirational communal norms, and learning how better to pursue them in the classroom, is one of the challenges we face in attempting to move beyond the expression of fine sentiments toward concrete transformational actions that will make our law school a more active, collaborative and mutually respectful place for learning together. I do not think it will be easy. I do believe we will dramatically improve our chances of getting close to this target in a law school community more like the one I have tried to sketch out here.


I would be delighted to receive constructive comments on the ideas expressed herein. Please submit your comments directly on the blog. Thank you.

IV. Toward a kinder, gentler (and more intellectually rigorous) law school--A beginning agenda of topics for further discussion (rev'd)

Please find below my own list of topics intended to create an agenda for further discussion and debate as we move this process forward in future meetings. Others are welcome and encouraged to add to them.

I HAVE ESTABLISHED SEPARATE "DISCUSSION BOARDS" FOR EACH TOPIC ON THIS BLOG. PLEASE COMMENT THERE (posted March 28 am).

>How do we achieve fuller, shared recognition that students are responsible adults training to be legal professionals? How do we determine the mutual expectations that should follow from this recognition?

> Should we establish an honor code governing student behavior, to be developed and administered, in whole or in substantial part, by students?

>Can we substantially enhance opportunities (in addition to existing clinical opportunities) for collaborative work, both among students and in combined groups of students and faculty? Can we find ways to surmount obstacles posed by existing patterns of individual grading?

>Can we provide more frequent and timely opportunities for students to receive meaningful and constructive feedback on the quality of their work, both at the end of term and while courses are still underway and improvement is possible?

>Can we find more effective and timely opportunities for students to provide meaningful and constructive feedback to faculty on the quality of their teaching, both at the end of term and while courses are still underway and improvement is possible?

>Can we enhance opportunities for students who find difficulty in speaking in class to find ways of sharing their views and perspectives with teacher and classmates through more effective use of technology (such as email lists and class e-discussion boards)? How can we more effectively help students to improve their public speaking abilities and self-confidence in speaking before groups?

>Can we provide regular opportunities for students, as individuals or in groups, to share distinctive aspects of their backgrounds and perspectives through presentations to a substantial law school audience? Such presentations, which might come from first generation professional/college students, students from rural and small town upbringings, foreign-born students, and students from working class families, as well as members of different racial, ethnic, linguistic, gender, and sexual-orientation groups, would allow all of us to reap more fully the benefits of our diverse community.

>Can we reconsider the appropriate use of laptops in the educational process? Considerations here might vary, depending on class size, the amount of lecture vs. more interactive forms of learning, the objectives and teaching style of the professor, the nature of the material being taught, and other factors. One area of concern is the amount of non-class-related web browsing, emailing and instant messaging, and other behaviors distracting to others as well as the student engaging in the activity. A second potential concern is the need for future lawyers to train their memories and learn not to rely unduly on notes. Perhaps most important is the need for full student presence, engagement and participation in class discussion, which should not be viewed as a distraction from the compilation of a complete stenographic record of the proceedings.

> Can we reconsider the impact of our grading system (noting recent reforms) on placing undue emphasis on small (and often not meaningful) distinctions across the broad middle of the class, resulting in unnecessary stress and competition and adversely affecting potentially innovative modes of teaching and evaluating student work?

I would be delighted to receive constructive additions to the topics listed above. Please post comments directly on the AGENDA-10: DISCUSSION BOARD (posted March 28 am)on this blog. Thank you.

Discussion Board Project for UW Law

I am establishing individual discussion boards for each of the topics on my agenda for change. (See background on my March 27 series of postings, "Toward a kindler, gentler (and more intellectually rigorous) law school (revised since the March 20 Forum). Please post comments directly on the relevant discussion board. Discussion board 10 is currently reserved for suggestions for additional topics--I will establish additional discussion boards for new suggested topics as circumstances warrant.

Suggestions and comments on my analysis and proposal can be made directly on the relevant March 27 entries.

Comments will be moderated, but with a relatively light hand, to facilitate a respectful, civil and relatively orderly discussion.

Agenda-1: Discussion Board-Students Are Responsible Adults

How do we achieve fuller, shared recognition that students are responsible adults training to be legal professionals? How do we determine the mutual expectations that should follow from this recognition?

Agenda-2: Discussion Board-Student Honor Code

> Should we establish an honor code governing student behavior, to be developed and administered, in whole or in substantial part, by students?

Agenda-3: Discussion Board-Collaborative Work

>Can we substantially enhance opportunities (in addition to existing clinical opportunities) for collaborative work, both among students and in combined groups of students and faculty? Can we find ways to surmount obstacles posed by existing patterns of individual grading?

Agenda-4: Discussion Board-Feedback on Student Work

>Can we provide more frequent and timely opportunities for students to receive meaningful and constructive feedback on the quality of their work, both at the end of term and while courses are still underway and improvement is possible?

Agenda-5: Discussion Board-Feedback on Teaching

>Can we find more effective and timely opportunities for students to provide meaningful and constructive feedback to faculty on the quality of their teaching, both at the end of term and while courses are still underway and improvement is possible?

Agenda-6: Discussion Board-Public Speaking

>Can we enhance opportunities for students who find difficulty in speaking in class to find ways of sharing their views and perspectives with teacher and classmates through more effective use of technology (such as email lists and class e-discussion boards)? How can we more effectively help students to improve their public speaking abilities and self-confidence in speaking before groups?

Agenda-7: Discussion Board-Learning from Our Diversity

>Can we provide regular opportunities for students, as individuals or in groups, to share distinctive aspects of their backgrounds and perspectives through presentations to a substantial law school audience? Such presentations, which might come from first generation professional/college students, students from rural and small town upbringings, foreign-born students, and students from working class families, as well as members of different racial, ethnic, linguistic, gender, and sexual-orientation groups, would allow all of us to reap more fully the benefits of our diverse community.

Agenda-8: Discussion Board-Laptops/Presence

>Can we reconsider the appropriate use of laptops in the educational process? Considerations here might vary, depending on class size, the amount of lecture vs. more interactive forms of learning, the objectives and teaching style of the professor, the nature of the material being taught, and other factors. One area of concern is the amount of non-class-related web browsing, emailing and instant messaging, and other behaviors distracting to others as well as the student engaging in the activity. A second potential concern is the need for future lawyers to train their memories and learn not to rely unduly on notes. Perhaps most important is the need for full student presence, engagement and participation in class discussion, which should not be viewed as a distraction from the compilation of a complete stenographic record of the proceedings.

Agenda-9: Discussion Board-Grading System

> Can we reconsider the impact of our grading system (noting recent reforms) on placing undue emphasis on small (and often not meaningful) distinctions across the broad middle of the class, resulting in unnecessary stress and competition and adversely affecting potentially innovative modes of teaching and evaluating student work?

Agenda-10: Discussion Board--Additional Topics

Please use this discussion board for suggestions of additional topics for discussion.

It's elemental.

Tom Lehrer's "The Elements". A Flash animation by Mike Stanfill, Private Hand

Embattled Attorney General Resigns

New York Times:

"The official who disclosed the resignation in advance today said that the turmoil over Mr. Gonzales had made it difficult for him to continue as attorney general. “The unfair treatment that he’s been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department,” the official said. ...

On Saturday night Mr. Gonzales was contacted by his press spokesman to ask how the department should respond to inquiries from reporters about rumors of his resignation, and he told the spokesman to deny the reports.

Good to the very last drop...

Hebrew Charter School Spurs Dispute in Florida

New York Times: By ABBY GOODNOUGH Published: August 24, 2007

HOLLYWOOD, Fla., Aug. 23 — The new public school at 2620 Hollywood Boulevard stands out despite its plain gray facade. Called the Ben Gamla Charter School, it is run by an Orthodox rabbi, serves kosher lunches and concentrates on teaching Hebrew.

About 400 students started classes at Ben Gamla this week amid caustic debate over whether a public school can teach Hebrew without touching Judaism and the unconstitutional side of the church-state divide. The conflict intensified Wednesday, when the Broward County School Board ordered Ben Gamla to suspend Hebrew lessons because its curriculum — the third proposed by the school — referred to a Web site that mentioned religion.

Opponents say that it is impossible to teach Hebrew — and aspects of Jewish culture — outside a religious context, and that Ben Gamla, billed as the nation’s first Hebrew-English charter school, violates one of its paramount legal and political boundaries. But supporters say the school is no different from hundreds of others around the country with dual-language programs, whose popularity has soared in ethnically diverse states like Florida.

“It’s not a religious school,” said Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic member of Congress from Florida who started Ben Gamla and hopes to replicate it in Los Angeles, Miami and New York. “South Florida is one of the largest Hebrew-speaking communities in the world outside Israel, so there are lots of really good reasons to try to create a program like this here.”

Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation

New York Times: "By SANDRA BLAKESLEE

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Tej Tadi A reprensentation of one of the scenarios scientists used to study out-of-body experiences. When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies. The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams..."

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences...

Legal Questions Remain for Freed Scholar in Iran

New York Times: "By NAZILA FATHI and NEIL MacFARQUHAR

TEHRAN, Aug. 22 — Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American scholar freed on bail after three months in prison, is waiting for Iranian judicial officials to inform her whether the travel ban against her will be lifted and a new passport issued to allow her to return to the United States, her husband and her lawyer said Wednesday.

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies - New York Times

New York Times: By MARGALIT FOX

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose acclaimed short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84 and lived most of her life in Manhattan before moving to Vermont in 1988....

Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailyness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.

To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, its hairpin rhetorical reversals and its capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg be read aloud. ...

A self-described “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist,” Ms. Paley was a lifelong advocate of liberal social causes. During Vietnam, she was jailed several times for antiwar protests; in later years, she lobbied for women’s rights, against nuclear proliferation and, most recently, against the war in Iraq. For decades, she was a familiar presence on lower Sixth Avenue, near her Greenwich Village home, smiling broadly, gum cracking, leaflets in hand.

Italy’s American Baggage

New York Times: By ANDREA CAMILLERI

In the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, it seemed immediately clear to many in Europe and the United States that their arrest in 1920 — initially for possession of weapons and subversive pamphlets, then on a charge of double murder committed during a robbery in Massachusetts — the three trials that followed, and their subsequent death sentences were intended to make an example of them. And this regardless of the utter lack of evidence against them and in spite of defense testimony by a participant in the robbery who said he’d never seen the two Italians. The perception was that Sacco, a shoemaker, and Vanzetti, a fishmonger, were the victims of a wave of repression sweeping Woodrow Wilson’s America. In Italy, committees and organizations condemning the sentence sprouted up as soon as it was announced. By the time the sentence was carried out in 1927, Fascism had been in power in Italy for nearly five years and was brutally consolidating its dictatorship, persecuting and imprisoning anyone hostile to the regime — including anarchists, naturally. And yet when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, the biggest Italian daily, Milan’s Corriere della Sera, did not hesitate to give the story a six-column headline. Standing out glaringly among the subheads was the assertion: “They were innocent."

One can, perhaps, distinguish between a miscarriage of justice and the issue of ultimate innocence.