I was on campus this week to return regalia, get physical therapy for my knees, and say goodbye.  Transition is the norm, with rental trucks lined up outside dorms and apartments, double-parked cars with non-Massachusetts plates, students wheeling large hospital-laundry hampers filled with clothes, computers, and other belongings down the street, more U-turns and confused drivers than customary.  It does not feel like summer–it was cold and rainy from Tuesday afternoon until yesterday evening.  It doesn’t feel like spring semester, it doesn’t feel like summer session, people are leaving but have not completely left, people are coming but have not all arrived.  It is unsettled.

Or maybe it’s me.

The text of my address at last evening’s commencement:

Welcome parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, extended families, friends, deans, faculty and staff, my wife Judy, and the reason all of us are here: the Boston University School of Management Class of Two Thousand Ten.

First, I must note the passing last December of our law-faculty colleague Jeffrey Beatty. Some of our students know Jeffrey’s extraordinary gifts as a teacher. All of our students know Jeffrey as the talented co-author of our law textbook. I would not be teaching here, but for Jeffrey’s call eleven years ago to tell me of an open faculty position. I am forever indebted to him.

Next, this is Dean Lataif’s final School of Management commencement ceremony. Thank you, Dean Lataif, for your support over the years, and for your inspiring vision of the social role of management education. You made this cynic a believer.

Recently, one of your classmates had occasion to see an old picture of me [full-size image]. I am about 23 years old, sitting on the battered wooden stoop of a dilapidated apartment building—for those who’ve heard the story, the same building where I was on rent strike for over three years.   The numerals “one eight three” are painted freestyle on the front door. In one hand I’m holding a pocket knife and orange; with the other I’m pointing at a newspaper. My narrowed eyes stare at the camera behind chronically unkempt hair and a thick beard. Your classmate studied this picture, saying repeatedly “that is not you.”

She was right. The young me in that picture had a life plan guaranteed not to include teaching law to business students. When I graduated in 1976 from what was then Boston University’s College of Liberal Arts, I planned to continue working for a few years as a paralegal handling prisoners’ rights issues, to attend the country’s best public-interest law school at Northeastern University, and to use my law degree to represent society’s have-nots. Five years later I graduated from Northeastern Law into Plan B: representing society’s haves, as an associate at a corporate law firm. Today, many changes later, I am eleven years into what may be Plan Q, although I lost track of the labels long ago.

Some say there are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t. I’m the latter, one wary of binary explanations to complicated problems. I’m a lawyer, inclined by nature, and accustomed by training, to deal with complexity, nuance, and changing facts. To lawyers, the answer to every question begins with two words: “it depends.”  [Actually, before getting to “it depends” we say “my rate is $500 an hour and I’ll need a $10,000 retainer.”]

A few years ago one of my students struggled with his inability to find black-and-white answers to legal questions. Frustrated by my explanation of the first exam he yelled at me and stormed out of the room. For the next few weeks he sat in the front row mumbling “ridiculous” and “multiple choice” and “picky” to himself, and glowering at me while I taught. Then one day he ran into my office to share an epiphany. “I understand!” he yelled. “We have to think in the space between black and white. We have to embrace the gray!”

Unfortunately, he never did figure out what that means.

Many of you believe that everyone, but you, knows what they are doing with their lives. Everyone doesn’t. Many of you believe that everyone, but you, is moving ahead with certainty. Everyone isn’t. Those with step-by-step career plans will discover that there are plans on paper, and then there are plans in the real world. Plans on paper rely on binary assumptions: if I attend a top-tier law school, then I will have a lucrative career in corporate law. If I work on Wall Street, then I will earn enough to work for Teach for America. If I live at home to save money, then my parents will treat me as an adult and let me come and go as I please.

It is difficult, even scary, to cut the moorings of black and white choices. Whether or not you embrace the idea that your future is uncertain, it is the nature of plans to encounter the convoluted world, and to change. My plans changed because of love, marriage, real estate, mortgages, children, youth soccer, the 1990’s savings-and-loan crisis, business opportunities, innate restlessness—and love, again.

This last love affair does not involve another individual. (Remember, my wife is here.) It includes you, and my thousands of other students. It encompasses what I feel, teaching in a college classroom. It is the deep connection teaching creates between who I am and what I do. It is devotion to sharing my passion for learning. It is ardor for exploring life’s complexities through law, for encouraging students to pierce the deceptive ease of black-and-white resolutions.

Years from now, you may see a picture taken of you today, smiling in your regalia, flanked by family, holding your empty diploma cover. You will look across the years into the eyes of your younger self. You will see someone who was focused, or uncertain, someone employed, or looking for work, someone seizing life, or someone who wanted to defer graduation’s reckoning for three years—that is, someone going to law school. You may reflect on the path you’ve traveled since the moment captured in that picture. And perhaps your path will have delivered you, as mine has delivered me, to a place both implausible and natural. Implausible, because 34 years ago that idealistic future lawyer would have never imagined he might one day teach business law at Boston University. Natural, because being a part of your experience at the School of Management is the most rewarding and satisfying thing I have done with my professional life.

Embrace the gray.  Thank you.

999 words!  I cut all the articles from one paragraph.

I practiced my commencement address at Agannis today, to get a sense of the acoustics and feel of the room.  Empty of bodies, it’s cavernous.  The delivery was fine, if weird without eye contact.  I scanned the empty chairs imagining them filled with students.  I keep tinkering with the speech, rearranging clauses, adding and subtracting words. A few days ago weighed in at a trim 962 words. New transitions and reinforcements of theme have brought it up to 1,017 words.  I wanted very much to keep it under a 1,000.  We’ll see.  I have 23.5 hours.

The theme?  I hate that question.  It’s about graduation, what else?  Not specific enough?  It’s about rejecting black-and-white answers and embracing gray area.  What does that mean?  You’ll have to hear the speech.

Some career-driven folks jump right into the belly of the beast after graduation.  Others take the leisurely route, like many who graduated college in the early- to mid-1970s.   I was focused on a career as a public-interest lawyer; I satisfied my need to meander when I left college after my sophomore year.  The writer of the NY Times May 1 Op-Ed titled “The Pink Floyd Night School” wandered for five years after college.  Worth reading, whether you are one of the driven or one of the aimless.

Facts, insights, and musings from the spring 2010 semester.

• Average grades:  Real Estate Law 87.9/3.35; Internet Law 88.9/3.41; Intro to Law 86.9/3.30
• Number of A/A- grades: Real Estate Law 14/10 (27%/19%); Internet Law 19/7 (37%/13%); Intro to Law 16/7 (31%/13%)
• Number of students who elected grading option B:  Real Estate Law 5/9.6%; Internet Law 5/9.4%; Intro to Law 10/21.3%
• Number of students whose letter grade increased because of option B: Real Estate Law 4; Internet Law 2; Intro to Law 5
• Number of students whose letter grade decreased because of option B: Real Estate Law 0; Internet Law 0; Intro to Law 0
• Number of students who complained about or asked for the chance to do extra work to increase their course grade:  0  (this hasn’t happened in years)
• The number of students who visited office hours was historically low this semester.  Some of my law faculty colleagues had the same experience.  Previous posts have speculated inconclusively why this is so.
• I plan to scrap and rebuild real estate law by discarding the Jennings text and shifting to a case- and problem-based curriculum.  Real estate law does not pose as many broad and cutting-edge policy issues as Internet law, but it is filled with juicy family squabbles, obnoxious neighbors, vile slumlords, nasty tenants, greedy developers, over-reaching regulators, and other human-interest drama that was lacking from the text.  I’ve not resolved who best to feed the law to students–a custom outline of the relevant terms, concepts, and principles?  That will require lots of work for me to prepare.  A canned commercial law-school outline of real property law?  Possibly too broad, technical, and dry.  A Nolo.com law-for-non-lawyers handbook?  Good materials but too topic-specific, e.g. they deal only with landlord/tenant law, or buying a house.  Topic-specific web-based content?  I’ve not located one good authoritative site, so the material will be of piecemeal quality and consistency.  Right now I’m leaning towards the custom outline while continuing to explore the alternatives.
• I completely overhauled Internet law last summer.  Changes for the 2010-2011 academic year will be less dramatic, mostly updating existing cases, blending more cases into the text (like Krinsky v Doe in the Anonymous Speech chapter), finding more recent and more interesting cases for a few topics, and adding transitions and expository material to the casebook.
• Internet law topics that deserve more course time:  privacy, the DMCA, and licensing (including Open Source, Creative Commons).
• I’m going to move the order of Intro to Law topics to put more course time into business organizations.  Some other topics will have to move to make this happen, although I don’t know what.

Exam week is in the air. I finished writing the Internet law final about an hour ago and am, at 9:30 on a Saturday night, still at the computer. (If you wonder why my wife is putting up with me being such a rocking bundle of fun, she is away for the weekend.) All day–well not really all day, the emails didn’t start until after noon or, as it is known to college students, the crack of dawn–I’ve been hearing from students with I’m-planning-to-study-soon questions (“when will you be in your office?”), I’m-studying-right-now questions (“can you confirm my understanding of generic marks is correct?” [yes, it is], I’m-just-now-encountering-the-material-for-the-first-time questions (“can you explain copyright law?”), and I’m-not-studying-right-now-but-I’m-also-at-my-computer-on-Saturday-night commentary (an interesting and entertaining discussion of ethnic identity and the best cannoli in Boston).  The full range of study-period expression.

Anyone got extra hyphens?  I’m running out.

In my early years of teaching Internet law I thought the course would be relevant for a decade or so.  No longer.  These days I tell my students that someday all law will be Internet law as our lives become more entangled with network and digital technology.  The wave is still building.  The effects of network technology (admittedly a vague term, it’s a stew in which I throw telecommunications, digital content, mobile computing, the Internet, and whatever else is on hand) on my current and future students fascinates me (see, for instance, My Office Minutes are From 2 to 2:05, Redefining Sexting, Massachusetts on Verge of Anti-Bullying Law).  I want to understand the effects because I need to know how to reach these students, because it’s relevant to Internet law, and because it’s inherently interesting.

Teaching About Web Includes Troublesome Parts from yesterday’s NYTimes captured my attention.  The story centers on classes developed by Common Sense Media to teach younger students “to consider their online behavior before they get into trouble”:  ”identity (how do you present yourself online?); privacy (the world can see everything you write); ownership (plagiarism, reproducing creative work); credibility (legitimate sources of information); and community (interacting with others).”  This fact in particular stood out from the article’s references to cyber bullying, the blurred line between virtual and real life, and the Internet’s amplifying effect on “typical adolescent behavior.”

The average young person spends seven and a half hours a day with a computer, television or smart phone, according to a January study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Considering that the time is mostly outside of school, the results suggest that almost every extracurricular hour is devoted to online life (emphasis added).

The referenced study is Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds.  Based on a survey of over 2,000 3rd to 12th-grade students conducted between October 2008 and May 2009 the 85-page document reports that:

• “The increase in media use is driven in large part by ready access to mobile devices like cell phones and iPods. Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in ownership among 8- to 18-year-olds: from 39% to 66% for cell phones, and from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players. During this period, cell phones and iPods have become true multi-media devices: in fact, young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33).”
• “Top online activities include social networking (:22 a day), playing games (:17), and visiting video sites such as YouTube (:15). Three-quarters (74%) of all 7th-12th graders say they have a profile on a social networking site.”
• 7th-12th graders report spending an average of 1:35 a day sending or receiving texts. (Time spent texting is not counted as media use in this study.)”

I look forward to dealing with these strange new creatures.

Today’s guest speaker in Introduction to Law posed a hypothetical to explore bias.  He asked students to imagine walking down the street at 2 am and seeing two groups walking in the other direction.  One is composed of young men of color dressed in stereotypical urban garb of baggie pants and hoodies.  The other is composed of young white men dressed in tuxedos.  The question was, which group do you choose to meet?  A few students responded as expected. Then one student said–dryly, with just enough sarcasm to convey his true meaning–that he would walk towards the group in tuxedos because “very few times in history have rich white men hurt anyone.”  Raucous laughter ended further exploration of that particular hypothetical.

Touché.

Spring break begins officially on Saturday.  It begins for me when I leave school today at 4 pm.  Most students have at least one mid-term exam this week, many have more.   My real estate law exam was at 9:30 and my Internet exam is happening while I write.  (It’s a tough morning for the handful of students in both classes.)   These classes, combined, have 107 students.  I was available in my office for about 11 hours this week.  My exams are reputedly hard–”tricky” is the adjective preferred.  Nine students , roughly 9% of  the total (discounting those in both classes) visited or emailed with questions.

I must be good.  Damn good.

On the other hand I literally spent hours talking with a few students.  Sometimes we even talked about course material.

This is a funny business.