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From the Dean |
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I AM SOMETIMES REMINDED UNEXPECTEDLY ABOUT THE JOY OF BEING DEAN AT THIS TIME IN OUR HISTORY. Yesterday, I was walking head down and with furrowed brow thinking. Then, just before entering the dean’s suite I noticed them. On each side of the door leading to the classroom side of the building, someone had set snake plants (in a less politically correct era, called Mother-in-Law’s Tongue, but technically known as Sansevieria Trifasciata). My purpose, though, is not to celebrate botany. Rather, it is to relate that seeing those plants made me understand more fully Tennessee Williams’ declaration: “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.” You are right to suspect that those plants didn’t simply appear, as it were, in full bloom. Weeks earlier staff at the law school had asked whether a modest investment to place a few plants around the law school wasn’t a wise outlay. The way they put it was close to, but not quite as eloquent as Vita Sackville-West’s observation that, “A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking; but even one solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.” So, there I was. It had been weeks since the initial investment and now I was unexpectedly enjoying the benefit for which we had hoped. That’s a decanal moment! And I thought about those flowers again, when I read the proof for this issue of Legal Times. I thought about how each page represents the kind of investment we have made in ourselves over the last 137 years in the hope that the effort would flower like the stories reported here. Each story not only has a distinct beauty, but the closer we look the more they reveal about our own willingness to invest in and nurture ourselves. That’s the real meaning of the discussion about the faculty tradition of service expressed in Professor O’Neal Smalls’ work with the Julius Rosenwald Schools Workshop and Reunion; the work of Professor Alan Medlin with the Real Property, Probate, and Trust Journal; our students’ energy and commitment in creating the School of Law Advocates; the message from outgoing Student Bar Association President Timothy Clardy; the honoring of lawyers who have made (and continue to make) contributions as Compleat Lawyers; and the instant nostalgia of photographs from recent School of Law Reunions. There is, of course, more reported here, but a field of flowers does not exist to count. This is a report that in its own way celebrates our flowering and challenges us to ask along with Maurice Maeterlinck: “Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?” ■ |
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