Memoir excerpt describing early academic career at Harvard in the 1960s

4.2.12 WC: 191694 Chapter 4: Beginning my life as an academic—and its changes over time I moved to Cambridge with my wife and two sons during the late summer of 1964. We rented an apartment, first in Brookline and a year later in Cambridge. I began my teaching career at Harvard at the age of 25. Some of my students were older than I was, and a lot more experienced. I was called the “Boy Professor.” It was intimidating and scary. Preparing for classes that I had never before taught was a full time job. When I began teaching in 1964, the two “best” teachers were reputed to be Clark Byse and Ben Kaplan. I wanted to learn from the best, so I asked them if I could sit in on some of their classes to observe their teaching techniques and styles. They both refused. Professor Kaplan asked me, rhetorically, whether I “allowed people to watch while you make love with your wife?” I replied, “of course not.” He smiled and said “well, I make love with my students and don’t want anyone watching.” I was tempted to respond that if I had 160 wives and made love to them all at once, I wouldn’t even notice if people watched, but I accepted his rebuke and had to figure out how to teach based on trial and error. There were no classes at Yale Law School on how to teach law—and no instruction books. For the first several years I did nothing but teach and write. It was a full time job, and I had no time for cases or other outside activities. That was soon to change, but not until after I learned how to be a professor. My first assignment was to teach the required first year course in criminal law. On my first day of teaching, I encountered 160 eager faces. The men were dressed in shirts and ties; the handful of women wore skirts. The teaching style of the day was Socratic, with the teacher posing difficult hypothetical questions based on cases the students were assigned from a case book. The “Socratic Method” came naturally to me because of my Talmudic background and argumentative nature. Right from the beginning I sensed that the traditional case books did not give the students an appropriate balance between the theory of law and its real world practice. I decided to write my own case book, along with my criminal law mentor at Yale, Joseph Goldstein. I also decided to supplement my case book on a weekly basis with materials about contemporaneous developments in the law. My goal was to keep the students current while also preparing them to practice, teach, judge or legislate about criminal issues until the end of their careers a half century hence. I also wanted to introduce my students to other disciplines—psychology, sociology, economics, biology, literature—that would enrich their lives as lawyers. It was a daunting task, but one that I approached with enthusiasm and eagerness. I rejected any sharp distinction between “theoretical” and “practical” approaches to teaching, believing that theory must be tested by practice, and that practice should be informed by theory. To this day, I bring my practice into the classroom and my theory into the courtroom. I immediately loved teaching, particularly the Socratic exchange with my students. But I noticed that even though several of my students were older than me (William Bennett was among them), many of them were intimidated by the fact that I was the Professor. The “Paper Chase” professors were still the rule at Harvard and students were terrified of making a mistake. I wanted very much to loosen up the students and so I decided on a ploy. About a month into the 0 Harvard Law Record, October 22, 1964, p. 3 71 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017158