Calvin Pang
University of Hawaii

In the plenary session, speakers talked about how students differ as we enter the 21st century. In some respects, students never change, in others, they have changed in significant ways. Then there are differences that come from the intensity or the frequency at which phenomena long familiar to us are now occurring. This seems true in the case of law students who increasingly must deal with family, work and other concerns while keeping up with the rigors of law study.

In this session, we explore what our responses might be to the competing demands on students’ time and attention, and the different roles they assume. We’ve always recognized that students are not just students and that they have other roles to play, other demands to juggle. In an earlier time, the conventional wisdom was to place the onus on students to find their own way. If they could not, the thinking was that perhaps they weren’t suited for the rigors of life in the law. The question for all of us today is: Is that kind of thinking still valid? Are there other ways, either personally or institutionally, to respond?

On our panel today are Dean Kent Syverud from Vanderbilt, Professor Shauna Marshall who is presently the associate academic dean at Hastings and Professor Calvin Pang from Hawaii. As a starting point, we will use the following structure. Shauna will start by giving voice to student concerns. In her role as academic dean, Shauna has heard it all, and will draw on her experiences to paint a picture of student distress arising from competing demands and concurrent roles. After this, Kent will draw on his experience as a law school dean to comment on how law schools as an institution might respond. This will be followed by a discussion on individual faculty responses to the picture Shauna paints. This discussion will actually be a conversation moderated by Calvin who will ask the audience to join in. Both Shauna and Kent will then share their thoughts on what tends to work and what tends not to.

If we have time, we’ll consider one last question: Who is responsible for knowing the whole student? Again, we will rely on the audience to develop some ideas.