Cultivating Intelligence: Power, Law, and the Politics of Teaching

In this postmodern version of The Paper Chase, Louise Harmon and Deborah W. Post explore what law school looks and feels like today for two women academics. In the tradition of Patricia Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights, these two women take the reader on an intimate, intellectual journey, exploring the meanings of difference to them and to the academy. The two women - one intuitive, the other more linear; one black, the other white; one more oriented toward metaphor, the other toward narrative - grapple with what it means to teach law as a woman, as a minority, as an activist, in an environment that remains overwhelmingly white, male, and traditionalist. Harmon and Post devote the core of their conversation to the relationship between intelligence, cognitive theory, and professional education. How do people learn? What does it mean to teach critical thinking in institutions where hierarchy is entrenched, where a professor with a "couch-and-conversation" teaching style confronts 100+ students in an amphitheater, where students with the most interested and animated faces in class often fail miserably on exams? In a book remarkably devoid of posturing and intellectual bravado, Harmon and Post provide a refreshing, revealing portrait of women in academia and the conflicts, anxieties, skepticism, and realities any thinking educator must confront.