As the year winds to a close, it is customary to reflect on the past and look toward the future. For me, the most significant development of this past year was my move to a new city and my start at a new career. Nearly 6 months in, I remain unreservedly happy about both. Being a professor has been my goal for most of my adult life. I’d likely have been happy with just about any academic job; but Elon, where I’ve landed, has proved to be a remarkably good fit.

All of which leaves me scratching my head at the suggestion that law professors, as a group, are unhappy, or at least uneasy, with their careers. Paul Caron, writing at MoneyLaw, suggests an explanation for this ostensible problem, which he derives from a recent book, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job:

The first sign of a miserable job is anonymity, which is the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has little interest in them a human being and that they know little about their lives, their aspirations and their interests.

The second sign is irrelevance, which takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone’s life–a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor–in one way or another.

The third sign is something I call “immeasurement,” which is the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success. Employees who have no means of measuring how well they are doing on a given day or in a given week, must rely on the subjective opinions of others, usually their managers’, to gauge their progress or contribution.

Like Professor Bainbridge (with whom I can’t claim to have much else in common), I don’t think any of these signs applies to my work.

My dean most certainly expresses a sincere interest in me, not only as a faculty member but as a human being. So do the rest of my colleagues, and indeed my students. And I likewise take such an interest in each and all of them. Perhaps this is attributable to Elon Law’s being a new institution. Or perhaps we are successfully developing a culture of mutual respect. Either way, I most definitely do not feel anonymous at Elon.

Nor do I feel irrelevant. Most obviously, my work makes a big difference in the lives of my students, not just immediately, but down the road. The students at Elon have taken a big chance by attending a new law school rather than an already established one. My colleagues have likewise taken the same chance by choosing to teach here. None of us forgets for a moment that we are counting on each other to establish Elon rapidly and firmly as a serious and worthy institution, of which we can be proud to be among the creators.

As for measurement, that’s not something I give much thought to anyway. I’m instinctively suspicious of “metrics” and “benchmarks” and other techniques of questionable quantification. But, for what its worth, I get sufficient feedback to give me some sense of how others think I’m doing. The dean has been generous with his assessment, both in the sense of offering it freely and framing it positively.
I anxiously (in both senses of the word) await my first set of student evaluations. I confess to occasionally peeking at RateMyProfessor.com to see if they’ve posted anything about me (not yet, and I hold out no hopes of a chili pepper).

To my few but loyal readers, I wish the very best of new years.