Certainty and Indefiniteness
The Evening Program
If this is your first foray into Examining Competence, you’ll want to start from the beginning instead. It’s better chronologically. No guarantees though, at your own risk either way.
In law school, besides my fellow students, I encountered a slate of professors who could (seriously) teach anywhere, but who chose to teach at this HBCU. NCCU is one of the finest law schools anywhere because of them. So today I’d like to tell you about two. One has retired and I was not able to check with them about the article, so I’ve given them the pseudonym “Posner” (which is a compliment to the well-known Jurist of that name.) The first is Adrienne Meddock, Dean of the Evening Program. The second, Professor “Posner” was an iconoclast terrifying legal genius of the University of Chicago lineage. It was a privilege to learn from both.
The competence of Dean Meddock is in her overall capacity to manage probably the finest evening law program in the country, quietly and with little drama. When you get mid-career professionals, all competent their own right, and a crop of professors (including many judges and expert attorney adjuncts) who are all there by choice and know it, the level of influence necessary to keep things in line is enormous. But Dean Meddock is an unassuming, incredibly nice person. (Not counting her final exams.) Nothing about her affect shouts her capabilities. She’s an example of competence in action. She quietly and consistently makes things happen, and if you interact with her you would never guess how much she has going on.
One personal example, I had a slight timing issue with the arrival of my child. Working full-time, a new baby, and law school was going to be a bit much. After being informed that I couldn’t just return the baby (buyer beware) I decided it had to be law school to drop off the table. Well, when I went to talk about withdrawing, Dean Meddock told me to give it some thought, and kept that door open. I missed a semester, but she singlehandedly arranged my re-entry, worked out day classes to catch me up, and handled substantial red tape to make it all happen. The last article talked about Resilience. Competent people create resilience for others. Dean Meddock created it for me.
As a Property professor, Dean Meddock was a bit of a paradox. That layer of “nice,” of seeking at all times the success of her students, covered an iron backbone and mountain of expertise. Teaching a subject legendary for detail, this is the professor out of all of them who most associate with a mastery of nuance. (Which is why her final exams are known for demonic hypotheticals.)
Dean Meddock likes to leave questions open. A popular book recommended to new law students is “getting to maybe.” In legal work, certainty is rare. What we learned from this professor is how to be (somewhat) comfortable with ambiguity, open questions, and making arguments out of the rules and facts given.
In at least superficial contrast, my other subject today is Professor Posner. By tradition, his former students are allowed to call him by his first name after graduation. I’m not aware of any former students with the temerity to take him up on that, and I don’t plan to be the first. Posner could have walked straight out of a movie. John Houseman in Paper Chase, or Professor Stromwell from Legally Blonde might have been modeled on him. Posner had a classroom persona of absolute mastery of subject, fearsome personal presence, and utter dedication to stuffing our ill-formed heads with knowledge. More importantly, he was determined to help us think better, with more structure; to understand why it all matters.
Posner boiled the teaching of his subject down to a science. Anyone, according to him (and with considerable weight of evidence) could learn his chosen challenging area of law, widely regarded as a “weeding out” class in most schools, if they just paid attention in his classes and did exactly as he said. Those of us who did reaped the benefits.
His teaching of the classes was formulaic in that he’d made it repeatably, predictably, and reliably successful. Even his jokes were known to be in the same places in the curriculum from year to year. He did not surprise us. We had a seating chart, and he made it known that he would go down each row to call on us to brief cases in class. By having well-prepared presenters we learned more, no one was embarrassed other than by their own sloth. And if people chose to slack on other briefs knowing they would not be called, that was on them. We were adults. Systematization is a hallmark of Competence. Optimized systemization.
Posner would keep current on the law and update his content of course. He would innovate where it could improve. For example, he was fascinated by the possibilities of technology. The very first among his peers to adopt classroom technologies in order to make things better. But once something was optimized (like his lectures) he repeated it flawlessly. Knowing I came from an IT background, when I would stay after class to ask questions, just as often I would be grilled about this or that new technology and how to apply it. A win-win.
Originally I wrote this as an aside, thinking it’s an observation not strictly to do with Competence. But on reflection I see it is directly applicable. In these troubling times so few people are any more capable of debating or even examining ideas. I’m not a pie-in-the-sky “things were once wonderful” sort of person. I think things are better, not worse. But I do think people have less patience for digging into ideas with each other and more tendency to tar each other as incorrigible for thinking differently.
I’m grateful for the lessons Posner offered, but perhaps most especially for his model of fearless examination. He and I have very limited overlap in political or legal philosophy. A true Federalist (not a neo-Federalist) and fiercely brilliant, it might seem daunting for a student to challenge his ideas, but he welcomed it. We all understood that. He would sharply inquire into your challenge, would tear your ideas to shreds, but it was not personal. Not ever. From the first day of our legal education he granted us the respect of (junior) colleagues. Never calling us by first name, only by <Title> <Last name>. He modeled for us the way our system of law was intended to work. Respectfully, diligently, and with fearless debate.
Even though our classes ended late, after we’d all worked our regular jobs all day, I took every possible opportunity to stay after class to ask questions and debate with Professor Posner. The chance to test ideas with someone who thinks well, who is an expert with broad knowledge and decades more experience is an opportunity not to miss.
Many years ago I heard a statement (I don’t know the origin): “if something is true, it will not become less true by examining it.” Posner’s subjects were my favorite. The agreements people make in the course of economic activity are crucial to making a society work. Posner and I saw eye-to-eye on that point. The economy is where fairness and justice and community welfare all occur. (Those are words that might make Posner squint and shake his head. Aside: I’m an Elizabeth Warren fan. I would love nothing more than to see Senator/Professor Warren and Posner locked in a room until they figure out how the economy should operate. We should implement anything they agree on.)
Learning from Posner shaded my whole view of the law. In regular life you can still hear me saying things he emphasized in class. I have a shuddering aversion to the term “consideration” because he did. We are having deplorable debates now about ideology in classrooms. About professors “indoctrinating” students. But because that is not how real education works, I am not a Federalist though my admired Professor was one. Far (very far) from it. I am however more well-informed and able to see weaknesses in my views because of that. Decent teachers and professors can make you think and question your own views without “converting” you. We shouldn’t be afraid of rigor.
Somehow even though he knew I was a flaming liberal, possibly a Socialist or worse, I still managed A’s in the several classes I took from Posner. He diligently prepared me to go out into the world knowing I would advance my progressive values. He might shake his head and explain my wrongheadedness to me tiredly, but his province was ensuring I could think well and had a rock-solid foundation in the underpinnings of the areas of law he taught. I’m sure he hoped that if I just knew how things worked that I would be less prone to the errors of thinking that plague most of my political ilk. True teachers take the time to debate those who care to look at their views with rigor, regardless of their views. That’s what education should look like.
The element of Competence each of these professors demonstrated to me is that Competent people care a great deal about the work and the ideas, rigor can be the goal. In one case it’s rigor through controlling chaos. Dean Meddock teaches and demonstrates applying arcane rules to modern fact patterns. She keeps an important program on track, and people on task to achieve their goals. Her rigor is in seeing a path through that chaos and it comes in many forms in her teaching and her administrative responsibilities. In Posner’s example it’s a traditional sort of rigor. Relentless implementation of frameworks. Challenging students to expand and form their minds into skill at rigorous structured thinking. Not the sort of professionalism where people keep tempers cool. Coldly and civilly pretending but not engaging in a real way, though there are contexts for that too. When I say “it can be about the rigor,” I mean that it’s not about sides at all. It’s being so focused on the ideas, or the work, that the rest just drops away. Justices Scalia and Ginsburg were fast friends, and shared almost no judicial or legal philosophy in common. But both had rigor, in spades. They had the ability to work together tearing apart fact patterns and rules to get at both the fundamentals and the complexities. The work was collaborative, though their views were incompatible. They had such shared commitment to higher ideals that they could see each other as people who shared something more important than viewpoint.
That’s an important trait for attorneys. Maybe for any professional. The professional work matters, not who it’s done for, or done with. Defense attorneys are an oft-cited example of idealistic professionalism. Many of their clients are dislikable, often they’ve committed the crimes they’re accused of. Defense attorneys are frequently demonized for doing the work of representing people society doesn’t like. But a just society provides competent assistance to anyone accused of a crime or we end up with a whole lot of not-guilty people railroaded. Justice demands rigor and professionalism. Competence provides it.
There’s an underlying philosophy of our legal structure that one can find truth through this adversarial method of sending highly-motivated people to each side of the problem to tear apart each others’ arguments. That aligns with the “sifting and winnowing” “Wisconsin Idea” inculcated in my upbringing and my undergraduate education. If people are focused on the ideas and the arguments, collegially and impersonally eviscerating them, truth can be had. That’s a dying philosophy. But it’s a philosophy of people who love law and justice as ideals. I think it’s a philosophy held in some degree (whether they realize it or not) of Competent people generally. “It’s about the work” or “about the goal.” I think it’s how you can find Competent people in bizarre places. In a little pocket of a corporation you might find someone so focused on doing something with rigor that the context in which it’s done isn’t a big deal to them.
That’s this idea I’m describing today. A love of rigor, which can take many forms, but that supports the structure of Competence. When looking for Competence, differentiate the person who gets his back up when you ask questions about his work or spot his mistake, from a person who welcomes challenge with curiosity or even delight in improvement. Or look for the person who can keep the eye on the prize and handle an avalanche of nuanced detail to keep things on the path. The person who can let extraneous things drop away to focus on what matters.