About closing more law schools....

Yesterday, TaxProf Blog posted a story about the closing of Indiana Tech and raised the question of whether other law schools might close as well.  I think more will, and I said so in 2012, in Changing the Modal Law School: RethinkingU.S. Legal Education in (Most) Schools, 116 Penn St. L. Rev. 1119 (2012):

The world doesn’t need as many ABA-accredited law schools as it has already, just as the world has figured out that it doesn’t need as many U.S.-based BigLaw firms as it once did, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some law schools closed over the next decade or so.

Id. at 1150.  For more about what in legal education needs to change, see, e.g., Rethinking U.S. Legal Education: No More .“Same Old, Same Old,” 45 Conn. L. Rev. 1409 (2013).

So proud of Rice University and of Rice's Jewish Studies Program.

See here.  I'm really glad that this program is thriving and that Dad, Jeff, and I have the opportunity to support its growth!

R.I.P., Malcolm Gillis

So sad to hear about President Gillis's passing.  He served Rice exceedingly well.

Great way to start the day.

Sent to me by my wonderful colleague Linda Edwards (here).  Enjoy!

The power of a great teacher.

This lovely WSJ essay about a great teacher (here) triggered a couple of thoughts:

(1) I still believe that it's possible (and more common than people might think) to be a strong scholar and a strong teacher, but I'm glad that people who have particular strengths can get rewarded for doing what they love.  The essay reminded me about one of my favorite teachers at Rice, Dennis Huston, who took my breath away when I was a student.  First, he intimidated me; then he challenged me; then he encouraged me.  So many students loved him, in fact, that when he needed blood transfusions, several alumni lined up for the privilege of helping.  Want to get a glimpse of this marvelous professor?  See here.

(2) We need to remember that great teaching can have the same ripple effects as great scholarship.  Yes, great scholarship can live on long after the author has died; but great teaching gets carried on, person to person, as well.  (The opposite is also true:  weak scholarship doesn't even make a ripple, and weak teaching does nothing to enrich students' lives after the course is over.)

What a great opportunity for us to thank the great teachers in our lives!

A good reason to be proud of the University of Houston Law Center (10th anniversary of doing something very good).

See here.

Proudest moment of my time at UHLC.

I had so many good times at UHLC, including (surprisingly enough) the post-Tropical Storm Allison time, when everyone at the law school -- including those inside the school and our alumni and other supporters -- pulled together to rebuild just under $50 million in damage.  But probably the high point was working with UH's then-president Art Smith, with Sondra Tennessee, and with Seth Chandler on the decision to move Loyola-New Orleans's law school INTO UHLC after Katrina.  Loyola's community became wonderful neighbors and friends.  As we remember Hurricane Katrina, it's a chance for me to thank again all those who made that temporary arrangement seamless.

BRAVO, Team DRC-Hubo @UNLV!

Taken directly from our announcement--couldn't have written it better myself:

On behalf of Dean Rama Venkat, the Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering is proud to announce that our team DRC-Hubo @UNLV finished in eighth place among the world’s best robotics teams competing in the 2015 U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Challenge Finals, just a few points below universities such as Carnegie Melon and MIT.

Launched in response to a humanitarian need that became glaringly clear during the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, the DARPA Robotics Challenge consisted of three increasingly demanding competitions over two years. The goal was to accelerate progress in robotics and hasten the day when robots can enter areas too dangerous for humans and mitigate the impacts of natural or man-made disasters.

UNLV’s team, led by Lincy Professor of Unmanned Autonomous Systems, Paul Oh, performed six of eight tasks in 57 minutes and 41 seconds, giving the team the eighth place spot. The team performed better than competitors from Lockheed Martin, Virginia Tech, University of California, Los Angeles, Seoul National University and more. Joining UNLV on the team are students and one professor from Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea, as well as professionals from robotics company Praxis Aerospace.

Driving was arguably the most challenging task in the completion, but Oh hoped that UNLV would emerge as a leader in that area.  Metal Robot drove in less than 60 seconds, ranking among the top teams in the competition.

In case you missed it, please check out this UNLV slideshow, highlighting some of the most exciting aspects of the competition.  

During the competition, Oh and members of the team were featured in Computer World, U.S. News & World Report, Armed with Science(the U.S. Department of Defense science blog) and Popular Science.

You can see a play by play of the event on the COE Facebook and Twitter feeds.

We also worked with several other media outlets on larger projects that will be aired in the near future. Outlets include NOVA on PBS, The Economist, GQ Magazine, Daily Planet/Discovery Channel Canada,  Inside Unmanned Aerial Systems Magazine,  RAI Italian National TV, Robo Nation TV, Tech Biz Geeks blog and more.

Oh and team members also will be featured in several documentaries including “My Life with a Robot,” by French company Belotta films, a project by screenwriter Michael Bacall and a move production by To the Stars media.

Thousands of spectators visited the two-day competition, which also featured a large technology exposition. UNLV’s College of Engineering had a booth in this expo, attracting hundreds of people to follow us on social media, as well as hundreds of prospective students who filled out cards seeking additional information on our robotics programs.

Overall, it’s an epic success for our Engineering Program to be featured with the likes of Carnegie Melon, MIT, Lockheed Martin and more. We couldn’t be more proud of our team.

Wishing Professor Paul Oh and his team the best of luck in the DARPA Robotics Challenge!

Not that very long ago, UNLV was lucky enough to persuade Professor Paul Oh to join our faculty.  He and his team are about to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and I'm rooting for Hubo (now the "Metal Rebel") to win.

I've been fascinated by Hubo ever since Jinger Zeng of Skyworks Aerial Systems told me about how amazing Professor Oh was and how well he mentors his students.

Here's an excerpt from UNLV's official announcement about the finals:

The Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering robotics team is just a week away from the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) June 5-6 at the Fairplex in Pomona, California.  UNLV will compete against 24 of the world’s top universities and research agencies in an attempt to show how robots could assist first responders in disaster relief – with millions in prize money on the line.  

UNLV’s “Metal Rebel” – a 5 ft. 5 in., 175-pound humanoid robot - will test its mettle against the likes of MIT, NASA and Lockheed Martin in simulated disaster courses where it may have to:

·       Drive a vehicle

·       Climb stairs

·       Traverse rocky and/or debris-filled terrain

·       Turn valves and use power tools

Our student/faculty team is led by Dr. Paul Oh, Lincy Professor for Unmanned Aerial Systems and a renowned expert in robotics and autonomous systems. Oh is a former program director for robotics at the National Science Foundation and is helping UNLV and Nevada become a national leader in the booming autonomous systems industry.

We'd love to see you in Pomona cheering for our team in the grandstands and representing UNLV in scarlet and gray, but if you can't make it out to Pomona, we'd still appreciate your support.

Teams will compete both Friday (6/5) and Saturday (6/6), and the competition will stream live at roboticschallenge.org The competition schedule will be finalized just before the competition, and we’ll follow with details next Thursday afternoon on when to you can see Team UNLV in action.

Best managerial advice ever (UPDATED).

There's a great article by Paula Krebs in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education's Vitae section (here).  In it, she talks about the importance of working on difficult issues by first imagining why the person sitting across the table from you has formed her views.  The idea of assuming that the other party to a negotiation has principled reasons for her position is a good way to see any difficult issue as an issue to be solved collaboratively.

Here's my favorite quote from her essay:

Since transitioning out of the faculty and into administration, I've had to work hard to learn how to shut up and listen.  My job, I've discovered, isn't to solve the problems.  It's to understand them and then work with the people affected to come up with ways to solve the problems.

Every time I have tried to solve a problem when it's presented to me, I've created more problems.  So I'm learning to talk to more people, to ask more questions, to listen to the answers.

That's darn good advice for us all.

UPDATE (5/4/15):  This post also gives good advice, as does this article.

Want to change a student's life?

One way to do it is to fund awards like this one, this one, or this one.

Congrats to Randy Gordon and Maks Del Mar!

Maks's new book (co-edited with William Twining), which has an essay by my buddy Randy Gordon in it.  You can get the book here.

Best line in today's NYT op-ed about the value of college.

The op-ed is here.  And my favorite bit?

That brought [Professor] Hall to her own answer about college’s mission: “It is for developing the muscle of thoughtfulness, the use of which will be the greatest pleasure in life and will also show what it means to be fully human.”

R.I.P, Marvin Chirelstein.

Just heard the sad news.  Marvin Chirelstein made Federal Income Tax comprehensible for me when I was a lost law student, trying to figure out how "philosophy of tax" (interesting, and the bulk of the course that I took) meshed with "actual Federal Income Tax" (which is what I knew would be on the exam).  I read his Federal Income Tax paperback (now in its 12th edition) and made a vow to myself that if I made it through the course with a decent grade, I'd name a child after him. (That little factoid probably explains part of the reason that Jeff and I don't have kids:  Marvin Rapoport Van Niel?  Chirelstein Rapoport Van Niel?  See--that's quite a burden to put on a little tyke.)  Lighthearted remembrance aside, I just wanted to go on record to say that Professor Chirelstein was one of the greats, and I know he'll be missed.

Really cool workshop on conducting empirical legal scholarship coming up this summer at CERL/Wash U.

See here for info.  I can't make it to this one, but I'm hoping to do one in the future.  I've heard great things about it.

I'm pretty sure that's not the correct use of the word.

Now that I'm back from the AALS Annual Meeting, I remember what I liked about going in years past (seeing old friends; making new ones) and what I didn't (a lot of puffery and jockeying for status).*  But the topper this year was the indiscriminate use of the word "scholar," as in "I'm a scholar of ______."

I'm comfortable with people self-identifying as professors (after all, that's our title), or saying that their area of study is X, or suggesting that they're focusing on X.  I love hearing what someone's researching, just as much as I love hearing about what that person's doing in terms of teaching (or, for that matter, his or her hobbies).  And I love batting around ideas just as much as the next person.  I got some great suggestions about some of my projects from friends at the conference. 

But saying "I'm a scholar"?  Um, that's something that the person reading the scholarship gets to decide.  

Why is it that I think that we can call what we do "producing scholarship," but that referring to ourselves as scholars is a bad idea?

Answer #1:  It's pretentious.

Answer #2:  Just as you can't make something "interesting" by declaring it thus, you can't be a scholar just because you're writing something in a particular area.  Trust me:  the best scholars don't toot their own horns that way.  Some of the most amazing folks in academia are jaw-droppingly modest.  Let your readers decide how good your work is--not you.

Just sayin.'

_____________________
*  I seriously went through Faculty Recruitment Conference flashbacks when I checked into the hotel this year--and my own FRC experience was way back in 1991.

Steven Davidoff Solomon's interesting take on why law schools won't close.

Here.  I especially liked his point about why incentives favor bailing out law schools rather than closing them:

[A] closed law school is worth little, or most likely nothing, to creditors. The value is only in the revenue stream it produces and perhaps its building. (You could say the books also, but these are increasingly fewer.) And these days, that revenue stream is down 20 to 40 percent, meaning that if law schools were for-profit businesses, most would be failures.

A troubled law school is like Dracula: hard to kill. Creditors will not do so because even keeping a struggling school alive means there is some possibility of repayment.

On the other hand, those closed law school buildings might be valuable to universities, as they can be repurposed for other uses, freeing up different space on campus for things like expanded research space.  So law schools that aren't free-standing should still be nervous if they're underperforming. Now is not the time for complacency.

I loved this post about the boycott.

See here.  (Hat tip to my dad for sending it to me.)

A nice shout-out in a book review.

See here.  Thanks, Sue Liemer!

UNLV's State of the University Address.

It's here.  And for my buddies, the stuff about me starts around 1:24:18 or so.