colleagues [at the bench, bar, and academy]. It is the joy
from thinking, researching, writing, serving, and helping
to build a living learning community. And, ultimately, it
is the joy of working together to create new links in the
eternal chain of teaching and learning, in order to help
our students find themselves as lawyers, so that they, in
turn, will reach beyond themselves, with intention, using
both their heads and hearts, to make a difference in this
world – one conversation, one client, one case, at a time.
Professor Alleva with
former UND President
Charles Kupchella upon
receiving the Lydia and
Arthur Saiki Prize for
Graduate or Professional
Teaching Excellence on
February 23, 2006.
place I did not know at all in order to transition from practitioner to
professor of law. Of course, I made painful choices and gave up any
number of could-have-beens. Such are the natural consequences of
a major life shift. But I also learned, with equal intensity, that the
choice itself brought a new world of possibilities and promises. After
all, it was North Dakota that gave me my first opportunity to teach
full-time – a precious opportunity I simply couldn’t refuse because I
knew I wanted to teach, and this was my chance.
I sometimes marvel at the porousness of it all –
teaching, learning, living, being. Each flows in and
through the other. Teaching is really learning is really
living is really being. After all, what is life but learning –
a continuous feedback loop of action and reaction which
requires constant adaptation to new challenges. So,
learning and lessons are everywhere, for the taking and
for the teaching, at any time – and especially for lawyers,
who ultimately must themselves become expert teachers
and learners to do their jobs well.
And I am not saying that my work is my life, though it often feels
like it is. I am actually trying to convey the opposite – that teaching
for me has been one very important manifestation of being alive, a
subset of living that taps into my basic life forces for its energy, and
So, it has been one of the great honors of my life to work alongside
my law school colleagues in this noble pursuit. And I can barely
bring myself to say that this is my last semester of teaching at the law
school. Though I may teach again someday, somewhere, and – who
knows – maybe even here, I will never again teach in this way, never
again be at the end of the wondrous ride through the three-plus
decades of teaching and learning and living that North Dakota made
possible for me. My time here is embedded in my soul and will be a
part of me whenever and wherever I go.
There are moments when I am overcome by the thought of leaving
– when I stare straight into the darkness and feel the emptiness of
what it will be like to be without the haven of a typical law school
work day – without Civil Procedure or Federal Courts or Professional
Visions, without that knock on my office door by a curious student
with a question, without that faculty meeting to discuss and adopt
a curricular improvement, without that co-author conference call to
decide upon draft article refinements, without that conversation with
a judge or lawyer about an exciting new initiative, or without that
helpful discussion with one of our dedicated staff colleagues.
And, then, as I relive these countless experiences in my mind and
heart, the emptiness succumbs to a feeling of fullness, as I think of
everything over the years that we have learned from each other and
created with each other, and I am filled with a joy so sublime that I
am powerless to describe it. But know that this joy is real. And that
it is sustaining and multidimensional. It is the joy from students and
Professor Alleva in
2003 in the law school
faculty office area.
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