Osler's Razor

People remember and identified with their small group professors. Mine was Drew Days III, who passed away on November 15. He was a remarkable teacher, a good man, and a profound influence on me and many many others.

He graduated from Hamilton College in upstate New York, where he was a beloved alum. (Kind of like Craig Anderson at Colgate, which, confusingly, is in Hamilton, New York).  He attended Yale for law School, graduating in 1966. He then joined the Peace Corps and served in Honduras for two years before returning to the US and work as a lawyer for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. His principal work was in school desegregation, including the successful desegregation of the Tampa schools he had attended. He then headed up the Civil Rights Division in the DOJ during the Carter administration before starting his remarkable teaching career at Yale in 1981. I learned the basics of law from a civil rights pioneer.

He took a detour from teaching after I was his student-- President Clinton chose him as Solicitor General, the government's top advocate in the Supreme Court, and a job held by Thurgood Marshall, Elena Kagan, and others. 

Then he came back to Yale to influence the lives of hundreds more. All along, he was a singer--a tenor in the Yale Russian Chorus-- and involved in some of the more difficult episodes both locally and nationally. 

I know this for certain: he was kind. He was kind to me, and to many others I knew, at a place and time that was not always that way. 

And that example may have been the most profound for the many of us who teach.

# posted by Mark Osler @ 1:00 AM