Academic

In the mid-1990s, I read Edward Deci's fascinating book on intrinsic motivation, Why We Do What We Do. Today I started reading Drive by Daniel Pink. While the core idea in Drive is the same one Deci explained much earlier -- namely, the joy of a task is often its own reward -- Pink is aiming at the business market: "For too long, there's been a mismatch between what science knows and what business does." The book is Gladwellesque in its glibness, but it's gotten me thinking again about the problem of creating school-specific capital.

If you don't remember all of my two-year-old posts, that one was about creating law schools that are wonderful places to work. This is what I wrote at the time:

I believe that some organizations have [a] magnetic attraction ..., and I believe that law schools can develop that sort of magnetic attraction around a culture of scholarship. [T]he key is encouraging the notion that the production of scholarship is not a monk-like experience, but a community effort. If you have ever been part of an intellectual community, you know that they are wonderful places to work and hard places to leave.

At the time I wrote that post, the faculty at BYU had just completed a year in which we read through The Canon of American Legal Thought (see here) ... just for the fun of it. By all accounts, it was fun. One of my senior colleagues wrote to the Dean: "They are the most fun I've had in years. I just wish there were more hours in the day." And I have been surprised at how often our discussions have come up again in other conversations.

Emboldened by this success, I am hatching another reading group this fall. With eight new professors on the faculty -- about one-third of our current total -- and more new faculty hires on the horizon, BYU has an opportunity to create something wonderful, and my sense of the best way to do it is to tap into the joy of discovery that infects new scholars. My experience has been that this joy carries over into the hallways and classrooms and makes for a vibrant community.