Page 648 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Months before, I had received a call from Joan Wexler, the Dean of Brooklyn Law School, which could not have come at a better time. I was bored at Squire, and the dean had called to rescue me by saying that she wanted me to create and teach a new real estate course at BLS. I hasten to add that my selection was hardly the product of an extensive talent search; Joan had been Kathy’s good friend since their days at Yale Law School, and she knew that I was interested in teaching.
What Joan failed to explain to me was the fact that, although I would be called a professor, I would not be part of the full-time or tenure-track (read “real”) faculty. I would be an “adjunct.” If you were to take a dic- tionary and flip to that word, you would find that an adjunct is a supplement, a supplement that is nonessential, that is subordinate. But that would hardly tell the full story. In truth, an adjunct, properly han- dled, is far more than an appendage for a law school. BLS had three adjunct professors for each real faculty member, and each adjunct was a cash cow for the law school. As it turns out, I would draw approximately sixty students to my two-credit course, Real Estate Finance. Each of these students would be paying tuition charges of approximately $1,500 per credit, or $3,000, for the pleasure of experiencing my brilliance for the twenty-eight hours that they would be trapped in my classroom during the fourteen-week semester (or by failing to experience my bril- liance by signing up but not showing up). I had to show up, and, if I filled sixty seats—or, more precisely, had subscriptions for sixty seats—the arithmetic was such that I would be paid approximately $2.98 per stu- dent per session. That princely sum would not be earned, however, if I didn’t spend the countless hours that I would have to devote to devising and preparing the course and, worse, creating and grading sixty exami- nations, and then struggling to comply with the nearly incomprehensible mandatory “curve,” which I refer to below. So, naturally, I said, “Sure,” and asked Joan to send the Brooklyn Law School teaching manual to me.
That was a classic rookie mistake. Not only is there no manual, there’s no course for teaching at law schools—anywhere, it seems. What to fall back on? True, years before, I had been inveigled (by Flora) into giving a two-hour New York Bar Association lecture to about one hun-
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