Kent Syverud, currently chancellor and president of Syracuse University and previously law dean at Vanderbilt (1997 to 2005) and Washington University (2005 to 2012), has been named president of the University of Michigan.
Congratulations to him and to Michigan. I write to share a note about his legacy. More below the jump.
To the best of my recollection, I have met Kent Syverud once and only once: in the Summer of 1998, at the New Law Teachers workshop organized by AALS. I was moving from a Climenko Fellowship at Harvard to my first year of teaching as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Kent Syverud was one of the presenters at the workshop. I remember the names of several of the presenters, and because I am a pack rat, I have the list – on paper – of the other attendees. But Kent Syverud’s comments are the only comments that had a tangible impact on me then, made a material difference to my teaching from the moment I started at Pitt Law, and continue to frame part of how I teach each and each one of my courses to this day.
At the workshop, he said that he organizes readings and assignments for courses that he teaches by class session. Day 1 of the course is “Day 1” on the syllabus, and “Day 1” on the syllabus identifies the topics to be covered and the associated readings: cases, statutes, and any associated secondary material. “Day 2” on the syllabus does likewise for that day. And so on for the entirety of the term, which might be semester-length or quarter-length or other.
Further, at the end of each class session, there is no need to advise students as to what to prepare for the next session. If Day 1 of the course is “Day 1” on the syllabus, then by default, and unless otherwise discussed or announced, Day 2 of the course is “Day 2” on the syllabus. Students learn to prepare for the next meeting by preparing the next “Day” on the syllabus. There is no scrambling at the end of a class to figure out what to do or what to read next.
This is all a bit more complicated to pull off than it sounds. And maybe it sounds complicated. To me, initially, it sounded pretty simple, which is a big reason why is implemented the method right away. From the standpoint of simplifying organizational matters from the students’ point of view, doing this sounded like a no-brainer.
Regardless of its actual or apparent simplicity or lack thereof, once you learn to pull off this technique – and I have been organizing my courses using Kent Syverud’s recommendations consistently ever since 1998 – it has any number of benefits.
One, it really does simplify students’ ability to keep track of what is happening and when in any given course and class meeting. Student feedback has always consistently praised the consistency and clarity of my presenting the course material in this way.
Two, it forces the teacher to engage in a lot of conceptual time and effort before the course begins in order to figure out what “chunks” of material look like on a day-to-day basis and also, relatedly, to figure out the best “chunk by chunk” sequence to follow. (Also, hierarchically, what “chunks” should be “chunked” into bigger “chunks.” (Conceptually, this turns out to relate to Herb Simon’s concept of “near-decomposability” as a technique for decision-making in complex systems.) In other words, I make every effort during course preparation to map out and publish the full term’s worth of “Day” by “Day” chunks. That is especially important if you use a casebook (usually, these days, I do not) and if, as the teacher, you do not subscribe to the sequence that the casebook authors have adopted.
Three, in my case it has largely eliminated the age-old problem of running out of teaching time at the end of the semester. “I put together a magisterial syllabus but did not get to the last two weeks’ worth of material because we ran out of time” is long-standing teacher’s complaint. Figuring out to use Kent Syverud’s technique to avoid this problem took a little bit of trial and error, understandably. For a long time, however, I have known how to “spec out” a term’s worth of “Days” and teach the complete syllabus. I bake in the possibility that one “Day” will spill into the next “Day”; I account for the fact that students sometimes will want to spend an uncommon amount of time on one topic or another. Nevertheless, I promise my students on Day 1 and “Day 1” that we will arrive at the destination identified on the syllabus as “Day [last].” And I deliver
To say that this is part of Kent Syverud’s “legacy” might give the appearance of my celebrating his retirement. And anything but! It is important nevertheless to call out the living and continuing benefits of his guidance, even as he shifts into a new chapter of his career.
