I had always liked to teach. I had an opportunity to do that when I was assitant pledge trainer and then pledge strainer in SAE. When I graduated from college and worked in the presidents office of MIT, my career goal was to go into academic administration, which I understood to center around the student affairs function. The people I was interacting with on the SAE leadership school faculty very much reinforced that desire
But I understood enough about the way universities worked, by then, to know that an academic administrator who is not also faculty member is a second-class citizen. A combination of the draft and thin finances made infeasible for me to get a PhD, and law school was still very much a desire. I continued to indulge my teaching interest by serving on the SAE leadership school faculty during all the time that I worked at Lockheed and for the first couple of years that I worked in the federal government.
While I was in Washington, I found an opportunity to teach as an adjunct faculty member at Marymount College I northern VA, teaching an introductory business course. I jumped into it and use the Socratic method. I had a class of not terribly motivated freshman and sophomore girls. As I recall, it went all right.
After I left the government and went to work for Conrail, I was having a drink with a friend and whining about things’ not going particularly well at Conrail. Ed Jordan, the chairman, for whom I worked directly, was charismatic but slippery and treacherous, putting more energy into trying to undermine Dick Spence, his chief operating officer, than into running the railroad. I told my friend that I thought I wanted to teach when I retired. “If you want to teach,” the friend said, “you should do it now. Don't wait until you retire.”
That actually seemed like a good point, and so I began examining possibilities. One possibility was to go to Harvard. I had remained close with John Dunlop, and regularly went up to see him. Through him, I got to know Graham Allison, then the Dean of the Kennedy School. Graham liked my scholarly interests and offered me a job as an assistant dean. I had notions that I could translate that into a more serious academic position, but Dunlop disabused me of that notion. At Harvard, an administrator is always an administrator—and a second class citizen, he said.
I also was courting MIT at the time in connection with some railroad related research and writing. Some of the MIT faculty thought that I might be able to design a hybrid temporary appointment in the Sloan school, the Aeronautics department, and the civil engineering department, which had led to an opportunity for me to make a presentation on railroad labor economics to a faculty recruitment committee.
But as I thought about the Harvard possibility and Dunlop's warning and about the sketchy possibility MIT, I realize that I did not want to leave the law for either of those. That meant, if I wanted to teach, I must want to teach in a law school.
I didn't know anything at all about the “meat market,” the annual job fair in Washington for law professors and wannabe law professors, so I just started sending resumes out. I got an invitation to go to Kansas for an interview, but I didn't think I wanted to move to Lawrence, Kansas. I so happened that my resume landed with the Villanova Law School hiring committee just as a woman they had made an offer to reneged on her acceptance. They were scrambling to get somebody to teach for the fall. My background was hardly a standard entry-level law professor’s, but they were intrigued enough to invite me out for interview. I played up my academic interests and the articles I had written while in law school, in the government, and at Conrail. I guess that sufficiently checked off the “will he write?” box, and they gave me an offer
By then, and Jordan left Conrail and Stanley Crane was CEO. I loved working for Crane. He was really smart, tough, creative, and entirely devoted to good railroading. I was involved at the center of Conrail’s labor negotiations, necessary to save the railroad from being broken up. I was having a ball, and did not want to leave. I went to Villanova and asked if I could start on a part-time basis. Villanova said, “No. If you want to come here, you start full-time.” So I made arrangements with John Rowe, the chief legal officer of Conrail, to do some very active consulting for Conrail and went to Villanova.
From the first day in the classroom, I was determined to teach Socratically. That means presenting the students with a hypothetical fact pattern synthesized from the cases they were assigned to read. You ask a student to take a position on how to deal with the hypothetical and then gradually change the hypothetical to test the boundaries of the position the student is arguing. Ideally you get students taking adversarial positions, vis a vis each other. Teaching that way is hard. One of my colleagues at Villanova said, “It’s like making an appellate argument, every time you teach.” Lazier law professors do not do it that way; they lecture; it’s easier.
The problem was I wasn't all that good at it, at first, to the point that my Professional Responsibility students applauded when I said it was the last day of class. Of course law students never like professional responsibility, and I don't know why the Villanova faculty made newbies teach it. My torts class went much better, as a labor-law seminar.
I was very much interested in trying to build a model of legal education that would imitate the medical education model – putting students in a practice setting while linking them to their law school academic program. When I first went to Villanova, I spend a good bit of time lining up practitioners and judges for student placements, so we could experiment with this approach in my seminar. Only problem was, the students didn’t want to do it; it was too much trouble logistically, and they were not going to get paid.
John Murphy joined the faculty at about the same time I did, and Alan Holoch was recruited as the director of the library shortly thereafter. The three of us thought that the intellectual atmosphere of the faculty was mediocre at best, and we, without much support from Dean J. Willard O'Brien – whose intellectual capacity was mediocre at best – we organized a lecture series, in which we brought outside people in to make scholarly seminar presentations to the faculty and in which the faculty also could make presentations to one another.
Villanova was no different from other law schools in believing that the first year needed reform, to expose the students to more statutory material and regulatory procedure.
I took the lead along with Ann Poulin and Murphy to invent a course called “sources of law,” which was a combination of statutory interpretation, constitutional law, and administrative law. It was a required course in the first year. I taught it every time it was offered
The course was quite unpopular with the students, because it was new and different. The faculty took the position – and I surely did – that the students would come to appreciate it by the time they graduated. Eventually we did an opinion survey of all the students and it turned out the students disliked the sources of law course when they were ready to graduate that they did when they were taking it as first years. So we gave up and cancel the course from the curriculum.
O'Brien had been replaced by John Murray. John and I became rather close. He would regularly call me up to his office at the end of the day just to talk about things. He and I very much wanted to strengthen the quality of the students, and so he appointed me chairman of the admissions committee. I introduced a rating system that took into account not only student test scores, but also other factors. It was very much modeled on the system for MIT admissions. Walter Taggart was on the committee and was very much opposed to it. Taggart was smart but was pretty much opposed to any innovation at the school. We did several multiple regression analyses to try to identify factors that would predict success of law school better than the LSAT score, we couldn't come up with anything that was even remotely as powerful.
