One L (15 page)

On the whole, he proved a lot more reasonable on certain matters than I'd expected—affirmative action in law school admissions for women and minorities, for example. I did have one brush with him unintentionally, when I said, almost casually, that there is a deliberate emphasis at the law school on corporate law.

“I deny that,” he told me heatedly, “I deny that completely. Students and not the faculty are the ones who emphasize corporate law. You're the consumers here.
We
are not lining up to take Corporations and Advanced Business Planning. You should compare the enrollment in those courses with Family Law or Criminal Procedure.”

I suppose it's a point. He was fair in general—candid, if not loose. Seeing him up close enhanced my understanding of him personally. I think he's free only when he's teaching, behind the podium, onstage. He seems to have that kind of showman's personality.

As for Zechman, he proved much the shy, formal man he is in the classroom. With him, we went to a far less imposing place, a small Italian restaurant where we could sit and talk. He spoke a lot about practice. For the past few years he was with one of the big Washington firms, appearing often before the Supreme Court. He passed a little tepid Supreme Court gossip, especially about Justice Douglas, for whom he clerked in the '50s, still sees socially, and greatly admires. For the most part Zechman seemed to be glad to be back in the academy. “He's a bright guy, quite a scholar” was a comment he repeated a few times about various people—his idea, I think, of high praise. When he asked how the class was going, we all told him how much we like it, a reaction that is now close to universal.

 

As I mentioned in the journal, faculty lunch is a traditional, and often very sincere, attempt to make some personal contact in a situation that does not much favor it. With 140 in a class there is little chance for professors or students to get to know one another well. The situation hardly improves in the second and third years, when classes are often even larger. To an extent the problem of class size is unique to Harvard, where there are more students to be accommodated than anywhere else; but at all American law schools the ratio of students to faculty is notoriously high, probably rivaled among American educational institutions only by the business schools. It is another of the institutional difficulties often laid at the door of Dean Langdell.

“One of Dean Langdell's great contributions to legal education,” I heard one professor say later in the year, in addressing a group of students, “was to make it cheap. By establishing the Socratic method, he found a way to educate 140 people at the same time, a form of educational mass production. He proved to the presidents of universities all over America that they too could make money by opening a law school and hiring just a few people to teach.”

Some professors deny that the reason for large classes is economic. A faculty adviser named Thomas Heinrich, a teacher of business and tax courses, was appointed for our Legal Methods group. Heinrich invited all of us to his house one evening, and in the course of conversation he defended the large classes as producing a better educational environment.

“You have Smith over here and Johnson over there and they both want to make the same point. And there's Green there who has something to say to each of them. With 140 people in the same class you get a greater diversity of response and sharper answers.” Heinrich also reminded us that the pressures of speaking in a large class may offer good training for people soon to be making their careers in court.

Whatever the reason for large classes, it is a safe bet that many students would prefer a more intimate setting. During the first term, the Law School Council, the student governing body, proposed that in the future, for 1Ls, one course in each section should be taught in small classes of thirty-five. That compromise, one smaller first-year class, has been adopted at many other law schools—Yale, California (Boalt), Minnesota. At our lunch with him, Perini surprised me by saying that he favored the proposal and believed that all classes in all years should ideally have enrollments no higher than forty. But the majority of the HLS faculty judged the proposal too expensive and impracticable and it was never seriously taken up.

To me, though, the proposal had made good sense. When I was deciding between law schools, a number of friends had encouraged me to go to Yale, because it has the lowest student/faculty ratio of any law school in the country. I had tended to dismiss the point, but now I could see how valuable an opportunity for more regular contact with the professors would have been for us all.

For one thing, much of that gnawing, maddening sense of not knowing how you are doing could have been eased with smaller classes. Most of the professors were loath to grant us any kind of praise in the large classes, no matter how extraordinary was a student's performance. Their thinking, I guess, was that to do so would only increase the resentments in an environment that was already emotionally taut. On occasion, Nicky Morris could compliment students quite skillfully—a quick, casual, “That's very good,” after a person had spoken—but much of that ability might have been a function of Nicky's ease in the classroom, hard for many on the faculty to duplicate. In smaller courses, however, professors could easily give individuals the small amounts of personal attention which would allow them to feel reassured about their progress, not to mention the additional benefit of providing students with a sense of recognition as persons apart from the mob.

The other point I felt in favor of the smaller classes was that in subtle ways the teaching would be better and more complete. A lot of snags in learning law, like any other subject, are idiosyncratic—little mental wrinkles that seem to crease every brain in the room but yours. Sometimes peers, who are just getting acquainted with the point themselves, can't help; but the professors can straighten you out in a minute. Yet it was frequently impossible to get to the faculty. After class there was that cattle show, fifteen or twenty people clustered about the teachers, the brownnosers and the shouters and a few people who'd resolved not to miss a single faculty word no matter when uttered, as well as a number of students who had sincere questions that had seemed too minor or personal to disturb the whole section with during class. To visit professors in their offices was even trickier. Frequently they were out, and if your problem was small, you were reluctant to make an appointment. Some teachers—Morris, Zechman—were actually exceedingly generous with their time. But too often, students got the clear impression that most professors would much prefer not to be disturbed in their offices. It was seven weeks before Mann announced the number of his faculty office in class and when he did, he said, “Don't come yet—you won't find me there.”

I am sympathetic to a degree to the faculty wish to be left alone sometimes. Students, especially those as tense and eager for knowledge as we were, can devour a professor. Yet at HLS, by the middle of the fall I'd already begun to feel that the distance between faculty and students—not just in terms of the classroom, but even on a more personal level—was extreme. Part of the problem was one of personalities.

“I'm not sure you'd enjoy getting to know some of my colleagues in a smaller setting,” Heinrich told us that night at his house when we discussed the law school council's small class proposal. “Many of them wouldn't
come out
well,” he put it, trying to be delicate about the fact that there are some stuffy and arrogant people who teach at Harvard Law School. Many on the HLS faculty are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the best of the best, the finest minds for miles, and there are a number who appear reluctant to waste too much of their brilliance on students.

And beyond that, the sheer numbers often spell great distance and formality in relations. At HLS, it is rare to be called anything but “Mr.” or “Ms.” by a professor and even rarer to address faculty members by their first names. Seldom do students and teachers pass more than a nod or a smile when they see each other out of the classroom. You are business acquaintances rather than friends, persons bound only by the slenderest connection: the fact that they know and you don't.

A few of the students in my section, more or less assaulted the faculty into closer contacts. One simply presented himself at a professor's house and invited himself in. Another employed one of our teachers to work on a specialized legal problem. But less exceptional means of making contact are few. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of professors I saw in the student dining hall during the year. The rest stuck to the faculty eating place. And not many of the teachers seemed to walk through the underground tunnels that connect all the law school buildings and through which, during the winter, the students usually travel. Most faculty members seemed to prefer slush, snow and cold to dealing with 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls.

I remember how amused Peter Geocaris was the day I stopped him to ask why I never saw a professor in the library.

“Because,” he said, smiling, “they have their own.” It had never occurred to me that with the biggest law school library in the world only a hundred yards away, the professors would build another on the fifth floor of the faculty office building, one from which students are normally excluded.

The fact that professors were so remote naturally tended to increase the kind of awe in which we held them. As it was, the faculty to us were figures of great power. They could intimidate. They could clarify. They could ruin our weekends and evenings with assignments. They could fill our heads with the ideas with which we struggled night and day. Most important, they were world-renowned masters in the game of law—the learning of which now had our full attention. In many ways they were the people we most wanted to be, and at moments we seemed to regard them as if they were half mythological. When we were not engrossed in actual discussion of the law, we seemed to spend all our time talking about professors, exchanging rumors—about the famous cases Mann had prosecuted or the Washington figures who'd had this or that to say about Perini. About Morris, our talk was especially reverential, because he had so recently been through the law school himself and had left such an astonishing record. The most amazing tale of his prowess was a story, perhaps apocryphal, that in a single four-hour exam period he had written not only the test in the course, but also a term paper which he'd forgotten to do in the crush of Law Review duties. On both, he'd received the highest grade in the class.

For me, dealings with the faculty were complicated by the fact that only the year before I had been a teacher myself, up there in the front of the classroom, listened to, obeyed. Now I was in the seats, unheeded—in an assigned seat, in fact—with many details of my life suddenly controlled by other people. I began to sense that I'd been turned into a child again, an adolescent. With its murky corridors tiled in linoleum and lined with the lockers used by students who live off campus, the law school has much of the look and smell of a high school, and there were an increasing number of moments when I really felt like a teenager, angry and adolescently rebellious. That was not a unique reaction. In many of the Guild members, I saw a similar pattern of response, a return to teenaged rages. It was the source, I think, of some of the vehemence of our criticisms.

But there were also times when that feeling of having retreated was more passive and more quietly painful. Our absorption with the faculty frequently reminded me of children's concern with their parents. By late October I had to confess that the hot feeling which came over me when I raised my hand in class was very much a child's wish for commendation, and recognizing that bothered me a great deal. I thought I'd grown beyond emotions of that kind. Now I learned that my childishness had disappeared only because there'd been a period when I had not been treated like a child. Thus there were episodes, like the one in Mann's class, when I blundered and felt not only the horrible shame of the child in disappointing grown-ups but also a grown-up's shame in having lost all that ground as a human being.

An incident with a friend, Tom Blaustein, is illustrative of how grimly confused all my feelings about teachers were becoming. Tom was a young law professor from another school who was visiting at Harvard for the year. Annette and I had met Tom and his wife a couple of years before at the home of a mutual friend in California; and when we'd found ourselves here together, we'd all gotten to know each other much better. Tom was open and generous with me and our friendship was conducted not as law professor and student, but on the personal plane on which we'd first met. On occasion the four of us would get together; now and then I'd see Tom alone for lunch. When we spent time together, we were usually away from the law school.

One day, I ran into Tom in the law school gym. I was with Terry and we had just left class. I guess the setting overcame me. Somehow when I saw Tom, the first thing that went through my head was that he was a law school teacher. Normally, I would never have thought of calling him by anything other than his first name, but when he said, warmly, “Hi, Scott,” I couldn't quite keep the words “Hello, Professor” from coming out of my mouth.