Soon after
Tom Read became our eighth dean in 1995 (we hope to name our tenth dean
soon), he suggested that a photographer take “head shots” of each
faculty member. Faculty members then were invited to add one or two
quotations or statements to the picture that might reflect something
about that person. These pictures now hang on a wall just inside the
entrance to our law school. These are the same “head shots” that you
will find if you scroll through our online faculty roster. Many colleagues penned their own thoughts, while others quoted from a
diverse collection of famous people, including Woody Allen, Maya
Angelou, Winston Churchill, Confucius, Emily Dickinson, Albert
Einstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Helen Keller, Abraham
Lincoln, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Will Rogers, Mother Teresa, Henry
David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, and Frank Zappa. But the
most popular source of borrowed material came from the Bible. Eight
colleagues quote one or more verses of scripture.
So what
personal statement, or borrowed quotation, would you place beside your
head shot (viewed by your current and prospective students, as well as
numerous online visitors)? And how many folks on your faculty roster
would quote Bible verses? Would the number exceed the 15% at STCL?
My choice of epigram would be easy: "Every lawyer carries inside him the debris of a poet" (from Flaubert's Madame Bovary — «chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d’un poète»). I won't venture a guess as to how many of my colleagues would opt for scripture.