Lightening the library’s load

Some of my colleagues entered the building today bemoaning and decrying the giant book burning we are going to have with old reporters and the like. In just one day, we’ve filled a dumpster with law books. It’s going to be one heck of a Halloween bonfire with cocktails on the fourth floor faculty patio. I expect you’ll be able to see the glow as far away as Pinecrest.

All right, all right. We’re not really going to have a book burning—although it would be delightfully ironic given that what finally moved us to get rid of our multiple copies of every reporter and of Shepard’s Citations was an ultimatum from the Coral Gables Fire Department. Seems that our four copies of S.W.2d etc. had to be stacked so high that, in case of conflagration, the spray of our sprinklers would shoot about three inches before being stopped by Butler Produce & Canning Co. v. Edgar State Bank Co., 112 N.E.2d 23 (Ohio 1953), or whatever.

So off they go! If you want a pile of old, dusty books to line your conference room and impress clients with faux erudition, come and help yourself. We are keeping, I am told, at least one copy of each for posterity or for our time capsule or something. I know, I know. Some books are indispensable for research etc. I get it. Believe me, I get it. But it seems to me that we’ve been warehousing books in defiance of technology. Case in point: a few months ago I needed a book published in 1852 for the introduction to this law review article. One of our outstanding librarians had Harvard beam it over here and it was on my Apple Cinema Display in a couple of hours. And to think of all the time my elementary school spent explaining the card catalogue to me. They might as well have taught me how to whittle my own … well, to be honest, I don’t actually know what you could make by whittling. My point is that computers make it so we never have to whittle or read books again and we should just embrace that.

The arithmetic of (legal) reading and writing

I haven’t seen this announced anywhere else, but I’m assuming that by now everyone has heard that Legal Research and Writing is getting a long-discussed revamp. Apparently, we’re moving to a system of permanent instructors rather than the cadre of adjuncts we now have. The upshot is that the students will get more individualized attention at a lower cost to the Law School because we’re going to make these instructors work ’round-the-clock or something. I don’t know. I wasn’t taking notes or anything at the faculty meeting. (I know, I know. Two big decisions announced in one faculty meeting!) All I know is that we are assured that everything is going to be better, and I take comfort in that thought.

Honestly, I don’t really know much about how LRW works now, much less about how it ought to work. But if it were up to me, we would put a bunch of nuns on the payroll to teach advanced sentence diagramming and literary interpretation for an entire semester because that’s the only way anyone is ever going to understand how important words are to the profession. Right now, we have students writing briefs whose primary and secondary schools made little if any effort to teach them how the various parts of speech work—and who actually want to learn this. I can’t tell you how many students have asked me over the past few years to recommend a book on English grammar. You know what would be fun? To teach a course on Legal Writing and Interpretation open to undergraduates and law students where you make them do things like explain the Court’s handling of race in Terry v. Ohio in terms of usage and literary devices. The opinion is far more interesting as rhetoric than as law. (True fact: students at UM invariably intuit that Terry is black, even though no opinion in the case says so; the students I taught as a visitor at DU were surprised to learn this.)

I have no opinion on this

The Powers That Be unveiled at the last faculty meeting a plan to give the School of Business millions and millions of dollars so they can build a new building next to their existing building. I know, I know. It’s always strange when something happens at a faculty meeting. The Business School’s project has undergone several revisions due to the economy and other contingencies, so it may or may not look very much like the big red “L” in the accompanying schematic. The irregularly shaped building below it is the Lowe Art Museum and the pointy thing right above it is the current business school building.

In exchange for the giant pile of money, we get three floors or something. I think some of the faculty are excited. As is my custom, I have no opinion whatsoever regarding the matter. Just questions. Mainly, I’m wondering how easily space that was originally going to be “260 dormitory rooms for undergraduates” can be turned into something that we need. But I’m not an architect or anything, so I don’t have any opinion. As I said.

Also, I’m wondering whether this doesn’t mean that the newly schismatic Powers That Be harbor secret doubts about reuniting the Law School into one new “state-of-the-art” facility. To be sure, they insist that they will. But I can’t help wondering. Not that I have any opinion one way or the other. I don’t.

Putting together the team

The applications started coming in just a couple of days after the announcement. The students seem as eager to appeal convictions to the Eleventh Circuit as Luke Skywalker was to go running off to Cloud City while he was still a student. But what are you gonna do? The fact is that having Darth Vader chop off your hand is way more pedagogically significant than listening to Obi Wan and Yoda pontificate.

But make no mistake: Impetuous youth is never the hero. Just ask Lucilla. Lesser writers try to distract you from that fact by killing off the doddering geezer but having him lurk posthumously. That way, the kids that drive box-office receipts and television ratings can more easily believe that the young, clueless punk is the hero. But it’s Obi Wan who saves Luke from death by sand people, recruits Han Solo, disables the tractor beam, and tells Luke exactly what to do even after he gets vaporized. Deep Space Nine did Star Wars one better by having Captain Sisko’s old, dead mentor live on inside a young, pretty scientist, who always figured out the hard questions but whom he outranked. It’s a clever cheat on the trite old-guy-has-to-die formula. I mean, you just knew Sean Connery’s character in The Untouchables was going to die because he was so much better at everything than Eliot Ness, right? I vaguely remember seeing some old dude in Lord of the Rings and thinking, Oh, that’s the Obi Wan character, so they’ll kill him off before the end. But I fell asleep. I imagine Dumbledore and Potter have the same sort of deal going, but I just can’t get through that rubbish. I would bet he dies and becomes phantasmagorical à la Obi Wan.

The better writers make the mentor integral and sardonic, like Batman’s Alfred or Bond’s Q. But those iterations refuse to confront that being experienced doesn’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with being feeble or decrepit. Without Giles and his library, Buffy wouldn’t survive one week in Sunnydale. And that’s clear even to Buffy. (“Get your books! Look stuff up!”) But Giles mixes it up with the monsters and the demons as well. The archetype of the motif is, of course, Indiana Jones, who teaches that bookish university-professor-types catalyze great adventures and that their young, impetuous charges are forever getting them mired in quicksand and the like. And the series does this recursively, with Indy being both the impetuous charge to the elder Professor Henry Jones and then the steady guiding hand to his and Marion’s illegitimate son. (I know, I know. Indy also has a dead professor-mentor who is the catalyst for everything that happens in Raiders. That just underscores my point, you know, if you really think about it.) The whole thing is pure genius on a dozen different levels—and particularly because Ford and Connery manage to depict exactly what the life of a professor is like.

Blowing the roof off the place

I got involved in a discussion earlier over whether Saturday night’s game was or wasn’t reminiscent of the 1984 championship win over the Cornhuskers at the 50th Orange Bowl. (That one ended 31-30; Saturday’s game was 21-20.) Such exchanges more often than not devolve into a don’t-you-miss-the-Orange-Bowl conversation, which I do—mostly because I saw Bruce Springstein’s Born in the USA tour there as well as U2’s The Joshua Tree, arguably the greatest thing to ever happen there. Back then, you slept out at Spec’s to get tickets on the field. But I digress. The Orange Bowl is so gone that one graduate student remarked the other day that he didn’t even know where we used to keep it. I say used to because it’s still around, though disassembled. The City (I presume, though it could be enterprising vandals) is selling it off in bits and pieces—probably to pay for the ludicrously unnecessary hard-top convertible baseball stadium they are building on the site. A few weeks ago, The New York Times reminded everyone how boneheaded this is. Miami Today did a follow-up piece today. And Canada’s Globe and Mail also has a piece today marveling at the incredible expense and unreasonable feats of engineering we are devoting to something of such marginal utility. Their story reveals that the Canadian company making our retractable roof has never made one before, but they sure are excited about it. Money quote:

“One thing we’ve also had to consider is that there are hurricanes in the area,” Mr. Dussault says. “That poses a real challenge and it’s why we’ve got a plan to stabilize the different sections.”

Given the utter inadequacy of parkland in this town, it would have made a lot more sense to turn the site into a giant municipal park. Maybe someone will sue these people and make them stop.