by Scott Turow
Walking out of that session, I was as close to tears as I had been in a decade. I wanted to explain to Mann, to all my classmates, that I really wasn’t dumb or indiscreet, that I was able to accomplish many things worth doing. But there was no way to prove that, to them or even to myself.
When I had recovered somewhat, I vowed that I wouldn’t let that feeling overcome me again. But that didn’t mean taking a more balanced view of my feelings or a broader perspective on what . Was going on in general. I was too caught up in all of it by then. I promised instead that I would not talk in class. That meant feeling distant and frustrated while I sat in each meeting; it meant that I was giving in to fear. But I suffered it all, rather than face that horrible shame again, and for weeks I did not let myself be heard.
10/30/75 (Thursday)
Primarily a down week, with a couple of lighter spots—specifically, the lunches with two of our professors. The five of us in the study group went out with Perini yesterday and Zechman today. Both proved mildly interesting events, though I hardly felt I’d achieved anything profound with either man.
Having lunch with faculty members is something of an institution at HLS. It is one of the least painful ways that teachers can try to ease one of the most persistent criticisms of the place that there is not enough contact between professors and students. Most of the professors seem freely available to those who ask for lunch appointments and there are a number who openly encourage small groups of students to join them for a drink or a meal. Peter Geocaris reports that last year Professor Mann went so far as to pick up the tabs.
In Perini’s case, an invitation was issued with typical panache. Earlier in the month he started class by peering up sternly at the tiers of students around him.
“I have an announcement to make,” he said. Then he brightened and turned both palms up. “I am free for lunch,” he told us. “Dutch.”
Since then he’s gone out almost every noon with a group of students. With him we went to Ferdinand’s, a smooth French place near Harvard Square. He remained much the man behind the lectern—probably the most practiced human being I’ve ever met, the person who most desires to have his world in perfect order. He had to turn his lobster salad at the proper angle before he could eat. I watched him rotate the bowl.
Nonetheless, he was engaging, charming in an arid way. He was careful to look each of us square in the eye as he talked; mainly the conversation was about some of the projects Perini takes on outside of school. He does a good deal of consulting with various Republicans in Congress, and a lot of Washington names got dropped throughout the meal: Percy, Rhodes, Fred Graham, various senators. I was surprised to hear that Perini treats senators the way he treats students and takes the same delight in it. He described an argument he had in a restaurant with one politician, the chairman of a subcommittee he’s worked for. “I had him pinned on a point, absolutely pinned. I was standing right over him and he was getting red up to the neck. It was wonderful.”
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, on stage. 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 tog et 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 eduction,” 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 iLs, 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 ha
ve 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 cornplete. 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 finger 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 lLs, 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 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.
11/1/7 5 (Saturday)
November arrives with drizzle and depression. Lord, but I feel bum. It seems as if I’m li
ving in a tunnel. It’s dark when I get up; it’s dark when I go home. I keep moving straight ahead but there’s no sign of light.
At home, things are in a trough. Annette’s patience with the law-school wife bit appears to have worn thin, and we are bickering often. For A., I guess it is hard not to feel cheated. She’s been dragged across the country and stuck in an exhausting job, while I am treated to the glories of Harvard Law. It does not help that in the little time we get together, I am frequently too preoccupied to be fully attentive. And since we are in a new place there is not an established circle of friends who might bolster her spirits. The law school has not provided a community with which we’re eager to get involved. It’s not a social place. On the weekends we’re all just as happy not to see each other. And with good reason. On the few evenings we’ve had law-school friends here, as we did last night, the conversation has centered obsessively on HLS.
For Annette, there is no easy solution, and she’s often left frustrated and alone. During the daytime on weekends she has taken to heading off for outings in the city by herself—to museums, to exhibits, on shopping expeditions. But there are instants when it is plain that she is bitter at how unavailable I am. Last week she told me that I am more intimate with the law than with her, a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that we have been getting together in the bedroom infrequently. (From the drift of conversations around school, I take it that the problem is not unique to us.) All of it leaves me feeling toweringly guilty at moments, and also helpless, since I cannot make the law school and its demands dissolve.
The wearying routine continues there, the work load, the confusion, the relentless, small-minded concentration required to learn the law. And the worse week yet is coming. Legal Methods has hit full tilt, with motions for summary judgment, reports on negotiating sessions, and a research project all due sometime in the next few weeks for each group in the section. In our group the brief must be handed in on Monday and we’ll have oral argument Wednesday. I’ve spent much of the weekend with my partner, Willie Hewitt. In addition, the two semester courses, Torts and Criminal Law, are beginning to move at a panic rate now that we’re into the second half of the term—sixty-page to eighty-page assignments each week—and the pace is picking up in Procedure as well.
