Academia

Are law schools and business schools, as well as applicants, obsessed with interdisciplinary education? In my experience, yes, and I have cautioned against what Judge Easterbrook called "Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse" ("put together two fields about which you know very little and get the worst of both words"). Getting interdisciplinary education right is hard.

Now Jeff Lipshaw, a professor at Suffolk Law School and all-around smart guy, has published a paper arguing that interdisciplinarity isn't enough anyway, because someone has to make the judgment call about what goes into that intersection, and how to solve those complexities:

The relationship of pure and mixed business and legal judgment can be modeled in a Venn diagram. The question is who is capable of making judgments in the overlap. Businesspeople are not competent to assess the legal implications, and not inclined merely to trust the decision to lawyers. Lawyers, on the other hand, are usually successors to a particular method of organizing the world, and members of a closed discipline. By nature of the very concept of a judgment, it must occur privately in a single conscious mind, no matter how the judgment is ultimately communicated, shared, or adopted by others. The implication for lawyering and legal education is that some of the old canards about leaving business judgment to the business people must fall away....

Business judgment depends far more on the argument from merit, versus legal judgment, which depends far more on the argument from authority, and a particular kind of authority at that. What, then, does it means to be an expert in the overlap of the diagram? We need to define a new professional discipline: the field of metadisciplinarity. Being a metadisciplinarian takes one to a higher order skill than mere interdisciplinarity: it means being an expert in the making of interdisciplinary judgments.... 

Read more here.

For more casual readers, I asked Jeff how this all boils down, and here's what he said:

There's a skill in deciding things you don't know much about.  Unfortunately, it's not a skill taught much in law school, nor anywhere in academia where strong disciplines govern.

Your point is correct - getting the second degree doesn't help much.  You also have to jump across the divide to make good business/legal judgments, whether you have the second degree or not, just as doubling down in academic disciplines doesn't do much except co-opt you in both orthodoxies!

Those of you who work or teach in one or the other discipline, or at the intersection of both, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Please share.

This week, thousands of law school graduates will sit for the bar exam. The test -- two days in some states, three in others -- is the culmination of the law school experience and one of the final hurdles that you need to clear before you actually get to practice law.

The test itself is a miserable experience. Cramped rooms, students cramming material in the final moments, and mental and emotional exhaustion from months of studying create an atmosphere of stress and anxiety. Going home after the first night knowing that you have to do it all over again the next day (or the next two days if you are in New York, California, or a few other states) makes for a less than restful night of sleep.

A few random bar exams tips:

Tip: Practice and study using ear plugs and then bring a set with you to the exam. It's amazing how loud the sound of a sneaker squeaking on a hardwood floor can be in a room full of a thousand people...

Tip: Avoid the nuts. You will see people in the bar exam using study guides and outlines up to the very last moments before the test begins. Avoid these people like the plague. They will stress you out and ruin your focus.

Tip: Remember that it's not about how high you score -- it's about passing. Your entire law school career (and before that, college and high school...) was focused on not just passing an exam but doing so with perfect scores. You do not need to ace the bar exam, and you need to change that mindset. That's not to say you shouldn't study, but rather than you should resist the natural instinct to panic when you don't know the answer to a question. If you know the answers to most other questions, you're going to pass.

Students often spend thousands of dollars on prep courses and devote 2 months of their lives memorizing obscure legal concepts and mnemonic devices that they will regurgitate on the bar exam. I have relatively fond memories of my time spent preparing for the exam. I remained at law school after graduation and watched the BarBri lectures on video. A number of my friends did so as well. During bar exam prep your life is on a set schedule, so we decided to schedule mental health time by playing golf a few times a week at a fantastic local course. That's one other tip: be sure to schedule mental health time. Just because the bar exam happens in July doesn't mean it should ruin your summer.

With everything going on in your life as you prepare to sit for this test, imagine if you were told -- less than a week before the exam -- that a technical error was going to prevent you from sitting for it?

That's what happened to Sara Granda, a recent graduate of UC Davis School of Law. Sara spent the last couple of months preparing to take the California bar exam. She graduated UC Davis in three years, speaks fluent Spanish, and worked at an immigration law clinic. Fairly typical of a 3rd year law school student -- except Sara Granda is a quadriplegic.

Sara Granda signed up for the California bar exam and her $600 entry fee was paid for by the California Department of Rehabilitation by check. Problem is, the state bar's website requires that payment be made by credit card. Granda apparently did her homework and checked with a representative from the state bar who told her that her application would still be processed.

Unfortunately that never happened, and Granda was notified that because of a bureaucratic snafu, she was not registered for the test. Granda has petitioned the California Supreme Court to allow her to take the test, and even has Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking out for her.

So as you study during this final weekend before the exam, remember that things could be worse. You could be fighting with the mnemonic devices and random Contracts question while also having to fight to take the test.

Questions or comments? We want to hear from you! And good luck on the exam.

 

Gregory Henning is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Virginia Law School. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge R. Lanier Anderson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and then became an Assistant District Attorney in Boston. As part of the Anna Ivey team, Greg works with law school applicants. 

Every day in my work with applicants, I hear from people who tell me, "Oh, I'm a great writer! You don't have to worry about that part of things." And immediately I know we have a long road ahead of us, because what they usually put in front of me reads like a long stream of tweets.

I find it criminal that many college students who have worked hard and moved mountains to attend good schools have no idea what good writing is. And you shouldn't even have to attend a top school to learn the basics of good writing.

It's not your fault. You are not stupid. But you have been allowed to get away with sloppy work. You have been poorly served, and I'd like to take a crack at explaining why that matters.

The best thing that ever happened to me, truly, was when I got a paper back from one of my teachers at the University of Cambridge with the word "facile" scrawled across the bottom.

You should be so lucky. The days of getting back a paper covered in red ink -- correcting all your bad punctuation, fixing your verb tenses, changing "which" to "that," and explaining the fourteen different ways in which your syntax and grammar and argument are flawed -- seem, from my viewpoint, to be over. 

I'm amazed when I look at students' undergraduate writing samples -- ones they want to submit to graduate school admissions committees, particularly for PhD programs -- and the graded copies don't have a single correction in them. I'm not exaggerating; that's been true for most of the papers I've seen.

Even worse, those educators who hand back unmarked papers haven't just failed to teach you how to write; they have also lied to you. Whether indirectly through unmarked papers and easy As, or directly to your face, they have led you to believe that you're great writers. And that particular fiction sets you up for a lot of disappointment when you've left behind the world of lazy As and have to write something that actually counts and will be read with a critical eye.

It's not your fault that some of these teachers have neglected to teach you how to write, but it's also now your responsibility to learn. (Professors themselves are often terrible writers, so perhaps you're actually better off if they haven't tried to teach you how to write. At least you can start with a clean slate.)

Your whole ability to think critically is at stake. In Politics and the English Language -- which anyone who wants to write anything of consequence should read before graduating from college -- Orwell reminds us that sloppy thoughts lead to sloppy writing, and that sloppy writing leads to sloppy thoughts. So bad writing actually makes us stupider: the language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." The good news? "[T]he process is reversible."

So before you start writing, think about what it is you want to communicate -- not just with this word or that sentence, but also in this paragraph, and the next one, and in this essay as a whole. You'll have to turn off the tweeting part of your brain and ask yourself how every single word, sentence, and paragraph ties together. Because admissions officers, BigLaw partners, managing directors, and all sorts of people who hold your fate in their hands will be absolutely merciless about your writing.

Good writing does NOT have to be about blind adherence to conventions. Learn the rules, and then break them to great rhetorical effect. Here's a slice from my ever-morphing reading list for good writing (some are how-to books, others are examples of good expository writing, because you'll also have to read to become good writers). 

• Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose by Constance Hale
• E.B. White's The Ring of Time (I'm not crazy about his Elements of Style, however -- there are some weird and clunky examples in that one.)
• The Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace
• The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates
• What is an Academic Paper, from the Dartmouth Writing Series
• Introduction from Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Gilles v. Blanchard, Judge Richard A. Posner, US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

I'll likely add more as I think of them, but please contribute your own in the comments!

Edited to add: On reflection, and after receiving some pointed feedback, I have edited some of my less nuanced statements to make clear that I do not think all teachers neglect their duties to teach good writing, and that I do not think they are all lazy. Throwing around such categorical descriptions is itself, of course, a form of bad writing, so I've made a few changes.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine who works (as I do) with lots of twenty-somethings. When we got around to the gratuitous praise to which Gen Y/the "Praise Generation" has become accustomed (phony praise that inflates their sense of achievement and rewards them for process rather than outcomes), he had this observation to share:

On all of this, I'll point out that, having worked with a literally never-ending stream of recent college graduates--half of everyone is 22 in my world--I notice that the people who consistently are the best to work with are ex-elite athletes. If you spent a substantial chunk of your life in sports, how could you:

• Think fairness is relevant? Losers talk about fairness.
• Fail to put stock in hard work, hoping to hide in the pack instead?
• Think hard work guarantees success?
• Fail to appreciate the importance of natural talent?
• Fail to focus on outcomes?
• Over-focus on process to the detriment of outcomes?
• Get confused by multiple goals and so fail to achieve any of them?

I say this as someone who frankly is more committed to the arts than to sports, but it has become clear to me that those who live a life in the arts and/or academics are prone to *ALL* of the fatal mistakes outlined above, and these are failures of outlook that wouldn't last past your first varsity season in high school, let alone college.

The difference is simple--top athletes are trained to focus on outcomes, period. Everything else is whining. Business is about outcomes, period. Non-athletes are shocked by that.

As an addendum, I was amazed when I got to [college] how many kids arrived there believing they had genuine artistic talent. They were going to be performers, or artists, for a living. They thought themselves that good.

No similar problem with sports. But in the arts, it's subjective. If you are the best in your high school, well, as far as you can tell, you're Kristin Chenoweth. There's no mechanism -- or incentive -- to level-set. In individual sports, there's no chance of this at all. In team sports, there's a little self-delusion, but not too much. [Anna asks: But what about teams where everyone gets a trophy? Helicopter parents invented that rank stupidity. Makes sense though that *elite* athletes don't suffer from this syndrome.]

Can I speculate that this problem is more an issue in law school, where kids majored in subjective disciplines like Poli Sci, Religon, and other stuff, and that math and physics grad programs don't have these problems? Even med schools probably don't have the problem as much?

Fascinating. Thoughts? Please comment.

I love the question a commenter asked in my last posting called “International Law: Believe the Hype?” Here I’ve been telling you not to fall for the “International Law” hype, but I haven’t told you what areas of the law you should focus on instead. I’ll address that here.

In a perfect world, people don’t go to law school right out of college. They’ve experienced the world, and the working world in particular, so that they have some idea who they are outside of that bubble called school, and they have some sense of their talents and inclinations (and disinclinations!) in the “real” world, which is so very different from the academic world.

In a perfect world, that person gets some experience, say, working inthe compliance department of a big bank, and discovers that she loves the compliance world, she’s psyched about the intersection of banking and finance and the law and the regulatory state. And she can apply to law school articulating that interest in a coherent and credible andpersuasive way (making her application stronger), and she can start law school knowing what she hopes to get out of it, and knowing what courses she wants to concentrate on in her second and third years (making her academic experience, and her career, stronger). Those people exist, and yay for them.

Or, also in a perfect world, that person discovers that she hates banking or finance or the nitty-gritty obsession with details that such laws and regulations require, and she’s just learned something very important: what she doesn’t want to do. That has enormous value as well. Should she go running off to law school? I would argue no – not until she has been able to observe, first-hand, somebody, somewhere, practicing the kind of law that does excite her, and whose life she can envision living (because lifestyle matters too).

You should go to law school only if you like the idea of being a lawyer. A real lawyer, not a lawyer that exists only in your head, or only on TV. If what is drawing you to law school is the adjective rather than the noun -- "international" or "corporate" or "environmental" or something else rather than "lawyer" -- then go explore that world first: work at the State Department or the Peace Corps, work in a corporation, intern at an environmental group. Don’tgo running off to law school until you’ve done that. I’ve written about that more in a posting called “Law School for Non-Lawyers.”

But we don’t live in a perfect world, and most law school applicants do go jumping into law school without having reached that level of self-awareness, and I should have what is (I hope) advice for them too. Here’s what I say to those applicants.

A good legal education – whether you already know what you want to dowith it or not – should give you a set of tools that teach you how to “think like a lawyer.” You’ll hear that phrase a lot among law professors and lawyers. It’s hard to understand what that means until you’re actually doing it, but it’s basically a very particular way of analyzing and solving problems (both legal and non-legal). It rewires your brain – whether for good or for ill, because once you’ve been properly trained to “think like a lawyer,” it’s not really something you can undo. It’s a whole new way of thinking about things, and those glasses don’t come off again. They’re soldered on… if the training is done right.

Those tools should be fundamental ones, and they are typically the ones you learn during your first year. Will you ever again need to know the Rule Against Perpetuities, or the Parol Evidence Rule, or Judge Learned Hand’s formula for calculating negligence damages? Maybe not. But those 1L courses teach you the basic tools of learning how to think like a lawyer, and then you can go explore different pockets of the law in your second and third years, and for your entire career. Here’s one way to think about this: during your first year,you’re learning the law; in your second and third years, you’re learning laws. Big difference.

Laws are going to change before you even graduate from law school. Laws change constantly, and you have to learn how to understand them and use them as they change. You might even have a role in changing them. Your career path is going to take you through many different areas of the law, and it’s almost impossible to predict what those are going to be. There was a time when I thought (along with many others) that IP lawyers were going to rule the roost, but over time IP has become so commoditized that it has even started to wreck some law firm business models. And right now bankruptcy is hot, but that can change quickly.

Those are just examples. You may choose to migrate through different areas of the law over the course of your career, but chances are you’ll be forced to. Just as the law changes, your career will change too, and the odds that you’ll end up doing – for your entire career – what you thought you’d be doing when you applied to graduate school at age 21 or 25 are pretty slim.

In our dynamic economy, with many lawyers changing jobs multiple times over the course of a career, flexibility is crucial. General training enables that; specializations and boutique seminars don't. That’s also an argument against picking a law school because it has some alleged expertise in some narrow area.

For that reason, in your second and third years, take only at most a sprinkling of esoteric seminars. The goal should be to have some specialized knowledge and sustained interest in a particular area or areas that might become hot, or that interest you. But at the sametime, have general training to fall back on.

Also go easy on all those Law & Whatever seminars. I’ve written before about how the law schools' obsession with "interdisciplinary" approaches to the law is also a big marketing exercise (I’m looking at you, Penn, but all the schools do it to some degree, including my own law school, Chicago). Why do applicants love the Law & Whatever courses? Because the Law & Whatever courses look and feel just like advanced courses in the humanities, and lost and confused college students who have no idea why they’re applying to law school are wildly attracted to more coursework that looks just like college.

And guess what? Those Law & Whatever courses are often pretty fluffy. They aren’t terribly respected out in the real world, and they don’t really make you better lawyers. I can’t make this argument better than Judge Easterbrook in his article “Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse,” where he talks about the "cross-sterilization of ideas" ("put together two fields about which you know very little and get the worst of both words"). Read it.

A lawyer friend of mine also put it really well:

I'm firmly with Easterbrook on this based partly on my own experience -- thought I wanted to be a litigator while I was in law school and loaded up on litigation-oriented classes that are of little relevance to what I now do.

My [big NYC] firm and, as far as I know, others like mine, are recruiting for well-trained generalists and have very extensive internal training programs for the specialized stuff that's needed for our practice. I don't expect summer associate interviewees to know anything about cross-border M&A or whatever; the point is that if they're telling me they want to come to my firm to practice international law, they need to at least be able to identify the thing we do that most plausibly could be called international law. Otherwise it's like they're telling me they want to come here to do admiralty law, or dog-bite litigation, or something else that we don't do.

This profession is chock full o’ malcontents and my advice to students is, think hard about all the people out there who regret becoming lawyers or who regret choosing a particular practice. Other than trial and error, the best way to avoid becoming one of those people is to steer toward an area that you'll enjoy practicing as opposed to studying. The fact that a practice area has relatively little demand (trusts and estates), or has clients who nitpick the bills (insurance defense), or results in your making less money than your friends (many specialty practices), or results in your clients being criminals (public defender) are all things that need to be taken into account in deciding how much you're going to like what you do.

To boil all this down:

• If you have observed lawyers whose work life you want, and whose personal life you want, go to law school. Otherwise, don’t. Yet.

• If you’re certain you want to do “X Law,” go experience X before you tack on the Law part.

• Go to the best law school you can get into that will give the best fundamental training. Don’t pay too much attention to a school’s marketing or fame in specialties X, Y, or Z.

• During your first year, learn how to read, write, and think like a lawyer, and learn how to network. In your second and third years, take whatever classes you want, and do specialize in areas you discover that you love (they can be great distinguishing factors out on the job market), but go easy on the esoteric seminars and the Law of the Horse.

 

Recently I posted my reactions to a new book about Harvard Business School called "Ahead of the Curve," by recent alum Philip Delves Broughton. Philip thought I had misintepreted his reflections in the book, and he was kind enough to elaborate on his experiences as an HBS student and let me pick his brain. Here's our email exchange about the value of an MBA for career changers, the HBS culture, teaching leadership and ethics in the classroom, being a humanities guy in an Excel world, and more:

 

AI: I got the sense from your book -- I think you even say so expressly -- that you weren't terribly clear in your own mind about what you were hoping to do with your MBA before you embarked on business school. It sounds as if you went to business school hoping to take more control over your life, and you assumed you'd be able to work out the specifics of a career change while you were there. That didn't seem to come together as neatly as you had hoped -- by the end of the MBA program, you were still trying to sort out what you wanted to do, and you were finding the job search harder than expected. In hindsight, do you wish you had done more planning or soul-searching before starting business school?

PDB: No, I was pretty clear about why I was going. I needed to be. I left a great job to go to business school. The challenge was remaining clear about it under the kind of peer pressure you find at a business school. I wanted to be able to pursue my own interests while controlling my own P&L. I didn't want an employer. I wanted control over my time. Now this is pretty different from a lot of people at b-school. I didn't want a "career change" so much as more power to decide my own personal and economic fate. It's different. The book is not about my failed job search. It's about my struggle to remain on the path I set out on while pulled in various directions.

AI: I've been somewhat skeptical about the value of business school, even a top business school, for career changers, for some of the reasons you mention in the book, and also because the recruiting schedule starts so relentlessly early that you don't really have any time to navel-gaze about your career once you get there. I'm thinking in particular of the hiring interview you did with the Washington Post (pretty dispiriting), and the following:

"But I was not alone in struggling to change my career. Luis, the Franco-Argentine, complained to me that many people felt HBS failed in its promise to give people a new start. 'They say this is your chance to change industry, but very few are succeeding. You see, the problem is that the path of least resistance is to do banking or consulting. Now, if you wanted to do either of those, you probably could. But if you wanted to get out of them, you really have to fight.... If you don't have experience in an industry, they don't want you, so you end up going back to the industries you do have experience in."

Do you think career changers should go to business school? If yes, what can they do to make their time there, and the job search process, less difficult?

PDB: Career changers need to do a couple of things. The first thing, as you say, is to start thinking early about what you want to change to. Even if you're not sure, you must have a vague idea. Then use every resource - especially alumni - to help you do that. The second thing is to regard your first job out of b-school as a bank shot. You go into one of the standard b-school professions - banking/consulting - in order to drop into the career you want in a couple of years. Lots of people do that successfully. But simply hoping the MBA magic dust will transform you into the dream candidate in the career you're after is delusional. The final thing I'd recommend, is to go to places where people know you already, your home town for example - then your career to that point, plus the MBA, plus trust and familiarity will make a career change easier.

AI: In hindsight, do you think you were naive about the HBS culture (I know I was pretty tough on you in that regard in my initial blog posting), and what HBS would be able to do for your career change? Aside from reading your book, what would you recommend applicants do to educate themselves about whether business school is a good idea for them, and whether a particular school is a good match?

PDB: I wasn't so much naive as ignorant of what HBS would be like. I didn't come from a profession where lots of people went to business school. I wasn't surprised that people were like they were - but given all that we heard from the most successful business people, Buffett/Paulson/Whitman, about work-life balance, I thought people should have taken that stuff more seriously. As I say in my book, I made a lot of very good friends at HBS and admired a lot of my fellow students. Anyone reading the book as a whole - and not just the reviews - will see that. I think the best thing to do to educate yourself is find people who have been to business school and ask them. Also ask people you admire - would I benefit from this? Match only really matters if you're fortunate enough to get into a bunch of schools. Otherwise, you go to the best one you can.

AI: You write about some of the difficulties you had as a humanities guy with no quantitative or business background. How can other humanities or liberal arts types best prepare themselves if they think they want to pursue a management or business education?

PDB: Oh, this is just practice. I hadn't done math since I was 16. I had never opened Excel. You have two years to figure this stuff out, which I did. It's a hassle at first, but short of taking an Excel course before getting on campus, there's not much you can do. You pick it up pretty fast once you're there - but just have to swallow your ego while you're trying to catch up.

AI: HBS says its mission is "to educate leaders who make a difference in the world." In your book, Ben asks, "I wonder why the school can't just admit that its job is teaching people how to run profitable businesses? Why does it even think that leadership is best taught through courses on business? I mean, if it is really leadership they want to teach, why don't they have us taking history or religion courses or spending the weekends with the Marine Corps?" Do you agree? Do you think leadership can be taught in a classroom?

(I do know your thinking process changed, and that you found that valuable: "Despite my frustration at being so far behind my classmates technically and in my basic knowledge of business functions, I knew that my intellectual apparatus had toughened. I saw things in the world that I had not seen before. I looked at facts and numbers a different way" -- but that's arguably different than leadership skills.)

PDB: Yes, leadership can be taught. Not in the sense that you're teaching people how to be Churchills or Roosevelts or Napoleons even. Just in the sense of helping people think about managing organizations. Every CEO we heard from said that people management was the biggest part of their job. And this didn't mean making big speeches. It meant hiring and firing, establishing a culture, setting the right incentives - and there is a large academic component to that, in addition to any personal qualities a leader might have.

AI: You took a somewhat dyspeptic view of the HBS culture, which in parts of the book sounds like a cross between American Pie fraternity antics and some kind of EST/Maoist reeducation camp. Do you think that's unique to HBS vs. other business schools? And was perhaps your age a factor? Your non-American-ness? I got the impression throughout the book that the other non-Americans were similarly nonplussed by those parts of the HBS culture. Thoughts?

PDB: Yes, being older made me look at it differently. I was married with a child - therefore not going out to Boston nightclubs midweek. Yes, I'm British, but I've lived in America since 1998, except for 2.5 years, and my wife is American, and my grandfather, aunt and cousins are American.... so I'm not entirely "not American." Yes, I think the foreigners did find it strange. American college culture is somewhat startling to foreigners. I know it's not unique to HBS. But perhaps the contrast between the seriousness in the classroom and the frat-ishness of much of the social life was more glaring. But again, I think this exists in business culture more broadly - you have companies preaching corporate social responsibility in the morning and then doing quite irresponsible things the rest of the day. Would the more exotic nightlife of Las Vegas exist, one wonders, without business expense accounts? I think people outside business are more sensitive to this hypocrisy.

AI: In your book, your classmates come in for quite a drubbing on the ethics front. I'm thinking in particular of the "financial aid BMWs" and the large proportion of the class (3/4 or thereabouts) who thought it ethically permissible for applicants to seek access to an admissions server that they knew to be unauthorized. There seems to be a big disconnect between the values of Dean Clark and his students. Thoughts on that? And do you think ethics can be taught in the classroom?

PDB: Ethics can certainly be discussed in the classroom - but can the ethics of students in their mid-late 20's actually be changed? Not so sure. I did find the discussions thought-provoking though. I'm not sure I give my classmates a "drubbing" about ethics. I'm in no position to do that! What I do discuss, however, is the contrast between what I describe as the rather excessive - and unrealistic - piety of business ethics as we discussed in class and the reality of how most people, business students included, actually behave. HBS took ethics extremely seriously - and kind of sets itself up to be beaten up when its alumni cause the collapse of Enron, and now have their fingerprints all over the current financial mess.

AI: You write in the start of the book that it was not intended as an "inside raid." I hear that some people at HBS nonetheless took it that way. One could argue that you wanted the upside of the brand and the network, but then violated a tacit compact with the HBS community by writing an exposé. In the book you express a lot of appreciation for the power of the HBS network. Do you think you've compromised the value of that network (to you) because you've written the book? Has there been any other kind of fallout? Am I wrong entirely -- perhaps it has increased the value of your network? Why did you write the book?

PDB: I wrote the book because I thought it would be interesting and useful to do so. And because I was offered an advance by a publisher. I knew elements of my experience were shared by many of my classmates. And I think at both HBS and many big firms, one is expected either to be a 100% booster, or a bitter critic. The truth is one can be ambivalent. I say that HBS was about 80% great and about 20% weird. Most people I know who went there agree. I know some people are upset. That's fine. I don't think I violated any compact. I didn't become a Free Mason when I went there. I attended an educational establishment and paid handsomely to do so. And I wrote a book that is honest and true. For every attack I've received from the school, I've received messages from classmates and other alumni thanking me for being so honest about the experience. So I'm ok with that.

AI: You acknowledge that "the Harvard Business School classroom is a safe learning environment, a place to experiment and make mistakes...." and that's why you cloaked the identities of your classmates. You decided not to do so for professors, because you think that they have a "public role." That's not as clear to me. Don't they experiment and course-correct as well? Aren't they entitled to some expectation of privacy in the classroom?

PDB: No. They are paid extremely well for their work at HBS and earn even more from outside gigs linked to their role as HBS professors. Most professors come off well in the book. I'm only actually critical of one. They can experiment and course-correct, fine, but I was paying the school $100 per class. I think I'm entitled to do what I did with the experience.

AI: How would your wife reflect on your MBA? Is she glad you went? Any advice she would give prospective business school spouses?

PDB: My wife enjoyed it, I think. We met lots of interesting people and I was around a lot when our second son was born. The only challenge was going back to a student life and budget after living like grown-ups for so long. But that was pretty easy, and rather refreshing. Advice? Be prepared for your other half to become a navel-gazing egotist while going through the process.

And a nice bonus for people working on their Round 2 HBS essays right now: Philip also had some advice for people writing the "career vision" essay (optional this year, but in my opinion still highly recommended):

PDB: I don't think HBS wants to hear "I want to make VP at 30 and MD at 35 and partner at 40." They want to hear that you have some sense of where you want to go: do you want to be in finance, do you want to manage a factory, do you want to be entrepreneurial? Or in my case, do you want to take your proven skills in writing, journalism and being a foreign correspondent, add on some business know-how and go write your own pay check - somehow. Anyone applying to business school should be able to come up with something which is consistent with their life and professional ambitions.

I'm intrigued by Brian Leiter's rankings of law schools based on the success rates of its graduates in the 2006-2008 law school teaching market. If you don't want to read the rankings, here are some take-aways:

1. Yale was the most successful school (45% placement rate); Chicago was second (43%), followed by Stanford (41%), Harvard (37%), and UVa (35%).

2. Harvard and Yale accounted for 40% of all new faculty hires (90 out of 231).

3. Harvard had 126 grads in the market last year; Yale had 97. (The Yale number is astonishing, since they have a class about one third the size of Harvard's. By comparison, Chicago, which is the same size as Yale, had 28.)

4. DC schools apparently attract lots of people who want to teach, but few of them are successful. Three DC-area schools (Georgetown, American, and GW) had 125 grads in the market -- only 8 were placed, and all of them were from Georgetown. Georgetown alone had 80 grads in the market (placing 10%), while American placed 0 out of 27 and GW placed 0 out of 18.

5. Tulane is a real oddball in the top tier of placing schools -- its 20% placement rate outperformed Berkeley, Duke, Penn, and some other top schools.

Justice Blackmun may be famous for having authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, but he's also famous for the "sappy" 1972 baseball antitrust decision Flood v. Kuhn, which exempted baseball from antitrust laws just because baseball is, well, special:

[Flood v. Kuhn] begins with a hopelessly sentimental ode to baseball and a long list of best players who "sparked the diamond" through the national pastime's glorious history. It was so sappy that two justices in the majority refused to join that section of the decision.

How bad and sappy? The blurb above, from a Tony Mauro article about the decision in today's Legal Times, doesn't really capture the florid wretchedness of Blackmun's writing in this opinion, which deserves some kind of bad writing award (on top of legal reasoning so poor that it stands as an embarrassment to lawyers everywhere):

Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season.... [See entire list of players below.*] And one recalls the appropriate reference to the "World Serious," attributed to Ring Lardner, Sr.; Ernest L. Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"; the ring of "Tinker to Evers to Chance"; and all the other happenings, habits, and superstitions about and around baseball that made it the "national pastime" or, depending upon the point of view, "the great American tragedy."

But I digress.

So along came a controversial and best-selling book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong called The Brethren (if you're applying to law school and haven't read it, you should, along with Jeffrey Toobin's forthcoming The Nine and Jan Crawford Greenburg's Supreme Conflict). The Brethren, which was overall very hostile to Blackmun, included a few sentences about the fact that Blackmun hadn't listed any black players in the first draft of his opinion and added them only at the behest of Thurgood Marshall. We were supposed to conclude that Blackmun was a bigot.

Turns out, "the story is false," according to Ross Davies in a recent interview with the Legal Times about an article he published in the current edition of the Journal of Supreme Court History entitled "A Tall Tale of The Brethren." (Ross is a professor at George Mason Law School, editor of the endlessly entertaining Green Bag, author of a new law school ranking called The Deadwood Report, and my former law review boss.) Ross's research shows that the infamous first draft omitting black players never existed.

Eagle-eyed readers of Ross's article might notice that this is not a battle of anonymous sources, as is so often the case, particularly with Woodward. The authors of The Brethren claimed to have relied on an actual draft of the purportedly all-white document, and they have yet to produce it. (See in particular pages 11-12 and 20-23 in Ross's article.)

What else can we take away from the Flood decision? As Brad Snyder, lawyer and author of a book about Curt Flood, explains in the Legal Times interview: "Even the best judges turn into pennant-waving schoolboys when they decide cases about sports."

 

* Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanela, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganess, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O'Farrell, Lefty O'Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiske, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove.

For an unrelated discussion of Blackmun's list of players by law professor/baseball fan/former Hall of Fame scholar-in-residence, see this 2006 article by Roger Ian Abrams.

The always excellent Penelope Trunk has a great article in today's (technically tomorrow's) Boston Globe about the best timeline for different graduate degrees. Check it out here.

It's been a busy weekend, wrapping up Round 2 business school applications and responding to people whose December LSAT scores came out yesterday. (Admissions officers love to mess with our holidays, don't they?) On the LSAT front in particular, there's been some ecstatic news for some, and some not-so-happy news for others. And for the not-so-happy folks, let me remind you not to wrap your whole identities around this test. It's a big world out there, and you don't have to let one test determine your place in it. (More on that here and here.)

In the universe of workplace issues, I gave an interview recently for a human resources magazine about Generation Y in the workplace. If you want to see what's on their minds over in HR, take a look here (SMB Human Resources). The same issue, at the same link, also has an interesting article about Facebook and MySpace in the workplace, and why some employers are saying, "no thanks."

And while I'll likely be posting again before Christmas, in case I don't, I'll close with one of my favorite pastimes, making fun of the worst of academia. From The Independent (London), "The Snowman: A Tale of Modern Masculinity":

Dr Tricia Cusack, an art historian, has, for the periodical New Formations, discerned inappropriateness in the very nature of Christmas: "Some members of cultural minorities in Britain find the central power relationship of Christmas threatening, not to speak of its whiteness - a white Christ, a white snowman."

It is the snowman that bothers Dr Cusack most - not just his threatening whiteness, but also his masculinity, his "phallic carrot-nose", his location in a semi-public space or garden "to substantiate an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system, marking women's proper sphere as the domestic/private, and men's as the commercial/public." The snowman "animates the garden or field with an anthropomorphic presence, a household god keeping nature in order."

Surely it was no accident that "in view of the western narrative of actual masculine domination of nature/female, ... out of virgin snow a male icon is built."

Merry Christmas, everyone!