Showing posts with label Character. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Character. Show all posts
Monday, November 10, 2014
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Life lessons for all of us--from the Navy SEALS and TaxProf Blog.
See here. Worth reading all the way through.
Sunday, October 06, 2013
Our latest book, Law Firm Job Survival Manual, is out now!
Friday, April 26, 2013
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
A "user manual" for a person is a great idea. Here's a first draft of mine.
This piece in Sunday's NYT (here) got me thinking: most people are mysteries to each other, except maybe to their loved ones (and, even then, there's still some mystery left). So here are some random thoughts about my working style, and my friends and colleagues are more than welcome to tell me that my opinions of my working style bear very little resemblance to reality. Of course, I'm a lame duck dean at this point, and perhaps this manual would have been of more use at the beginning of my term.
__________
* Except with my friends and relatives. I love hearing their voices.
- My favorite colleagues are the ones who keep me from doing dumb things (at least without thinking things through first). Please give me your real opinion, not what you think that I might want to hear. Make suggestions, both about ideas and about how I might communicate them. I promise you that you'll get my deep loyalty in return.
- I am much happier with "direct" and "blunt" than with communication that beats around the bush. I'm tougher than I look, so direct and blunt language will not bother me. Waiting for 30 minutes for you to get to the point will bother me.
- A sense of humor is a wonderful thing. I love being in a workplace that can produce a belly laugh at least once a day, even if the laugh is triggered by being in the middle of a crazy situation.
- If I've worked with you for longer than a month, it's because I'm happy with what you're doing. It's totally OK to make decisions without checking with me, but it's also OK if you want to bounce ideas off me. I operate on a "clearly erroneous" standard on most decisions--even if it's not the choice I would have made, if you made a reasonable choice, then I'm going to support it.
- I prefer email to telephone conversations.* I like in-person communications, too. I've just never been much of a "phone" person; phone conversations make me antsy. I think that texting is brilliant as a communications medium. (Note to students: I don't think that texting professors is a good way to communicate.)
- I believe that meetings should have a purpose beyond presenting data. Meetings are for brainstorming or for making decisions (or for keeping me from making a dumb mistake--see point #1 above). I'm not a fan of folks going around the room in a meeting to tell me what they're doing. That information is for day-to-day, talk in the hall stuff.
- One of the things that I've loved about my colleagues this year is that everyone in the administrative suite recognizes that we're all on the same team, and there's not one complainer in the bunch. Everyone here is busy. Everyone here is trying hard. Everyone here is overworked. And yet, each morning, people come in cheerful, with their sleeves rolled up. It just doesn't get better than that.
__________
* Except with my friends and relatives. I love hearing their voices.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Rats. I hate reading about stupid Marines.
I love my Marine Corps. (And I love my hubby, brother-in-law, father-in-law, and friends who have served.) So it bothers me when I read op-ed pieces, like this one in today's Wall Street Journal written by a former Marine, that argue that women shouldn't be in combat. According to the author, the reason that women shouldn't be in combat is ... well ... poo:
Women really are as capable as men when it comes to being willing to defend our country, and it irks me no end when folks ignore one of the benefits of letting women serve alongside men. Those combat experiences that make people eligible for promotion and more responsibility need to be open to everyone willing to serve.
So, Mr. Smith: maybe it's time to rethink your priorities.
Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation's military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?OK, Mr. Smith: POO is your concern? The fact that those who serve our country are willing to do so, knowing that many of them (1) won't come back alive or (2) will come back with severe injuries, is what makes me so proud of our troops. My guess is that the more serious risks are what our people think about before they go into battle. Not about poo. My hubby has not even once listed "poo" among the serious risks that he and his colleagues faced.
Societal norms are a reality, and their maintenance is important to most members of a society. It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.
Women really are as capable as men when it comes to being willing to defend our country, and it irks me no end when folks ignore one of the benefits of letting women serve alongside men. Those combat experiences that make people eligible for promotion and more responsibility need to be open to everyone willing to serve.
So, Mr. Smith: maybe it's time to rethink your priorities.
Wednesday, October 03, 2012
It's not just anonymity that provides a cover for cowardice.
I thought that yesterday's WSJ piece, Why We Are So Rude Online, was particularly apt. It's easy to treat online communications as something other than "real" writing, but what we put online (and in texts and emails) is just as real to those reading it as something that's hard-bound and on a shelf. That's why we--especially those of us who are law-trained--need to be very careful about what we commit to paper, even if the "paper" is just a bunch of pixels.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Which women do you know, Mr. Kilcullen?
"Made my blood boil." I'd heard that phrase, but I had yet to experience it fully. Thank goodness for Stephen Kilcullen, who was able to provide that experience by writing this column about why women shouldn't serve in the Army Rangers (here).
He trotted out these hoary old saws: "it's not about the individual, it's about the military" (as a reason why women shouldn't bother asking to serve in the Rangers as a way of increasing their experience and raising their odds of promotion); "women get to do almost everything else" (so they shouldn't be presumptuous enough to ask to do what their male colleagues do); "it's all about morale" (yep, that worked equally well when folks in the military said that it would wreck morale to have (a) minorities in the military, (b) gays in the military, and (c) women in the military); and "it's an all-volunteer force" (which means, I guess, that people who serve shouldn't feel bad if there's an unbreakable ceiling on their careers).
I don't know which women you know, Mr. Kilcullen. The ones I know who choose a military career are perfectly capable of planning and executing missions. They're not any more squeamish than their male counterparts are, and they understand that military careers include a lot of bloodshed, risk, and sacrifice.
My sister-in-law, for example, was just as capable as any of her colleagues were in the Air Force and would (in fact, did) happily volunteer for some pretty scary missions during her military career. My guess is that she's still working for the military, albeit now as a civilian, because the military recognizes her value. With a Van Niel, pretty much all of them can be equally dedicated and aggressive against enemies, both foreign and domestic.
So, Mr. Kilcullen, look around you. I'll bet that there are a lot of women out there who would do a better job as a Ranger than you would.
He trotted out these hoary old saws: "it's not about the individual, it's about the military" (as a reason why women shouldn't bother asking to serve in the Rangers as a way of increasing their experience and raising their odds of promotion); "women get to do almost everything else" (so they shouldn't be presumptuous enough to ask to do what their male colleagues do); "it's all about morale" (yep, that worked equally well when folks in the military said that it would wreck morale to have (a) minorities in the military, (b) gays in the military, and (c) women in the military); and "it's an all-volunteer force" (which means, I guess, that people who serve shouldn't feel bad if there's an unbreakable ceiling on their careers).
I don't know which women you know, Mr. Kilcullen. The ones I know who choose a military career are perfectly capable of planning and executing missions. They're not any more squeamish than their male counterparts are, and they understand that military careers include a lot of bloodshed, risk, and sacrifice.
My sister-in-law, for example, was just as capable as any of her colleagues were in the Air Force and would (in fact, did) happily volunteer for some pretty scary missions during her military career. My guess is that she's still working for the military, albeit now as a civilian, because the military recognizes her value. With a Van Niel, pretty much all of them can be equally dedicated and aggressive against enemies, both foreign and domestic.
So, Mr. Kilcullen, look around you. I'll bet that there are a lot of women out there who would do a better job as a Ranger than you would.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
R.I.P. Gary Hartman
I just heard about Gary Hartman's passing (here) and my heart goes out to Susan and the rest of his family and friends.
Gary was one of the first people I met at UHLC, and what I loved most about him was his ability to tell me the truth, even when he knew I wasn't going to like hearing it. He cared passionately about the school and his colleagues.
He was especially good during emergencies. In the aftermath of Tropical Storm Allison, when Houston was hard-hit and our law school was among the hardest-hit, he was there, on the ground, making sure that things were working and solving the problems that come with every natural disaster. But for the work of Gary and a few others, not only would we not have had a physical site for the school but we would also not have had a way of communicating with each other. Many people might have been discouraged to the point of giving up, but Gary used his creativity and his wicked sense of humor (the obituary says that better than I ever could) to keep up morale and give us perspective.
Deans have very few people whom they can trust, and few in whom they can confide. Gary was a trusted confidante. For those who knew him, their lives were the better for it. R.I.P., Gary.
Gary was one of the first people I met at UHLC, and what I loved most about him was his ability to tell me the truth, even when he knew I wasn't going to like hearing it. He cared passionately about the school and his colleagues.
He was especially good during emergencies. In the aftermath of Tropical Storm Allison, when Houston was hard-hit and our law school was among the hardest-hit, he was there, on the ground, making sure that things were working and solving the problems that come with every natural disaster. But for the work of Gary and a few others, not only would we not have had a physical site for the school but we would also not have had a way of communicating with each other. Many people might have been discouraged to the point of giving up, but Gary used his creativity and his wicked sense of humor (the obituary says that better than I ever could) to keep up morale and give us perspective.
Deans have very few people whom they can trust, and few in whom they can confide. Gary was a trusted confidante. For those who knew him, their lives were the better for it. R.I.P., Gary.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Blaming the wrong person.
As I'm reading this story, I'm getting deja vu. Some students at U Conn's law school somehow believe that the soon-to-be-former dean caused a drop in U Conn's rankings. How, exactly, would he have done that? Let's guess:
1. He called up future employers and told them not to hire U Conn graduates.
2. He told his dean of admissions to pick some applicants on the basis of things other than UGPA and LSAT.
3. He conspired with the 779 other people receiving the academic reputation survey to make sure that U Conn was not rated as highly as, say, Yale. He also made sure that everyone who received the USNWR survey actually returned it.
4. Ditto with the judges, lawyers, and law firms ranking the schools.
5. And he cratered the economy, which dried up budgets and donations as if they were so many plums in direct sun in Death Valley.
The problem with the rankings is that deans have horrible choices--and very little power. They could lie about their statistics. They could make choices solely designed to maximize their USNWR rankings, without regard to any other effect those choices could have on the school. Or they can work with their team to run the best school possible with the students, faculty, staff, alumni, and budgets that they have or could reasonably be expected to get.
If reputation is 40% of the score, then deans also have to wrestle with the halo effect, which will give some schools more of a bump than they might otherwise deserve. ("School X must be better than School Y, because School X has been ranked more highly than School Y for years.") Deans also have to wrestle with the fact that the other 194 schools being ranked aren't staying static, either.
So when I read about Dean Paul stepping down, I think that he's being scapegoated. U Conn students, remember this: at some point, each of you may be in a position with a lot of responsibility but not a lot of power to effect change. You'll be blamed for things that are not your fault. And you'll feel just as frustrated as Dean Paul feels now.
1. He called up future employers and told them not to hire U Conn graduates.
2. He told his dean of admissions to pick some applicants on the basis of things other than UGPA and LSAT.
3. He conspired with the 779 other people receiving the academic reputation survey to make sure that U Conn was not rated as highly as, say, Yale. He also made sure that everyone who received the USNWR survey actually returned it.
4. Ditto with the judges, lawyers, and law firms ranking the schools.
5. And he cratered the economy, which dried up budgets and donations as if they were so many plums in direct sun in Death Valley.
The problem with the rankings is that deans have horrible choices--and very little power. They could lie about their statistics. They could make choices solely designed to maximize their USNWR rankings, without regard to any other effect those choices could have on the school. Or they can work with their team to run the best school possible with the students, faculty, staff, alumni, and budgets that they have or could reasonably be expected to get.
If reputation is 40% of the score, then deans also have to wrestle with the halo effect, which will give some schools more of a bump than they might otherwise deserve. ("School X must be better than School Y, because School X has been ranked more highly than School Y for years.") Deans also have to wrestle with the fact that the other 194 schools being ranked aren't staying static, either.
So when I read about Dean Paul stepping down, I think that he's being scapegoated. U Conn students, remember this: at some point, each of you may be in a position with a lot of responsibility but not a lot of power to effect change. You'll be blamed for things that are not your fault. And you'll feel just as frustrated as Dean Paul feels now.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
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