Interview: John Sexton
Education & Law

Were there lawyers in your family, as you grew up?

John Sexton: My dad was a lawyer -- although he was a Court Street lawyer, and more a politician than a lawyer. And he died when I was young. So I never really knew him as a lawyer.

He had, by the time I was nine -- for all practical purposes -- given up his law practice because of a pretty serious problem with alcoholism that led to a series of degenerative diseases. So, although he was a lawyer, and he was my hero, so I knew that I wanted to be what that was, I really didn't know what it was -- until much later on.

What effect do you think that alcoholism and an early death of your father had on you?

John Sexton: Well, I think that my father's alcoholism is an important part of my personality. First, as a practical matter, I don't drink at all. And I've only had two drinks in my life, and both of them were over 40 years ago and more or less because it was a big thing among my friends to try to get me to drink. And I understand about myself that I have an alcoholic's personality. I say to the students at NYU that I am an alcoholic, because I tend not to do things in moderation. It's just that my alcoholism is ice cream. And I can put on many pounds very quickly, because I won't eat a spoonful, believe me -- or even a dish-ful. So I can feel my dad's personality in that.

On the other hand, he managed to control his problem -- you know, one day at a time. He devoted the last five years of his life to working with Alcoholics Anonymous.

The first times that I saw Greenwich Village or NYU, he and I would drive over in the car -- and you have to remember, I was 10, 11, 12 -- very impressionable; adored him. I mean, he was a good and loving father, never put any limits on me. I mean, never put any limits on his understanding of what I could do. You know, he always expected me to be able to do anything I wanted to do -- as my mother did, which was a great gift. But I remember driving over in the car and sitting in Washington Square Park, and him talking about NYU, and this university. And then we would go down to the Bowery and we would pick up somebody, at random, and bring them out to the house. And for the last three or four years of his life, we never rented upstairs. There were four beds up there, and we would bring these people from the Bowery, and bathe them and feed them and they would live with us -- he called them "handymen," and he was essentially running an occupational therapy program. So that has inbred in me an understanding that we all fall. You know, when you see your hero fall -- but that rehabilitation is possible from the lowest depths; that even a person who -- I mean, it's a very traumatic thing to have your father burst into your fifth grade classroom in the middle of the day completely drunk, and you know, you're there with your classmates; or to find him in the gutter. You know, I'd have to search for him -- sometimes he'd be gone for weeks -- with my mother. But then to see the goodness in that person -- you know, it's a lesson that carries with you -- and, I think, breeds more of a willingness to search for the good in people.

Where did you grow up?

John Sexton: I grew up at the beach in Brooklyn. So this is an unadorned carefully honed Brooklyn accent. And notwithstanding the fact that my dad was a professional, and my mother had gone to college and graduate school -- she came from a very odd family background. There were six children. My grandparents -- my maternal grandparents ran a grocery store, and there were three girls and then three boys. And the three girls, for a reason that has never been explained to me, all went to college and graduate school and the three boys didn't. They stopped their education at or before high school graduation.

Now, the war was a pivotal experience for them. My mother was the oldest of the six. All five of her siblings went off to the war. My aunts went off as nurses, and my uncles went off in the Navy. And my aunts returned from the war and married professional men and moved -- one to Ann Arbor and one to San Antonio. My uncles came back and they, with my mother, formed the nucleus of the family that I know. My father's family dies very young. So my real family is my maternal family.

And because during the war eggs and poultry were rationed, my grandparents had purchased some land from the Shinnecock in central Long Island to put a chicken farm out there. And my dad -- no doubt because he was in the Brooklyn political machine, and if you've read the great political book Plunkett of Tammany Hall, the first chapter talks about the difference between honest graft and dishonest graft, and Plunkett says the key to American politics is honest graft. You've got to get people to the club, and to do that you give them information.

Well, because my dad had information, probably, he said to my uncles: "Buy property around your parents' place out there." So, in all, the family bought 30 acres in central Long Island -- which they own to this day and it's a menagerie of animals, run by my uncles, who are the patriarchs today of the family. Everybody but my mother in this family lives into their 90s, and three digits, even. My mother died in her early 60s. It was 1980 when she died.

When you say to me where did I grow up? -- it was the beach in Brooklyn, which was our family house, but it was this place called Islip -- by what's now Islip airport -- where this 30 acres and 2,000 racing pigeons that my uncles breed, and a Vietnamese pig, and Chinese chickens that look like rabbits, and a horse that broke its back 18 years ago that one of my cousins wouldn't let die, so it looks like a camel. And this wonderful place of love out there is really the center of gravity of what I consider my family. And there are now four generations there, and there are 42 of us at Thanksgiving dinner. And each year when we gather -- it's really only my wife and I and my son that have graduated from college. Now some of my cousins in the next generation are beginning to go to college. But they kind of wonder what it is that I do. So it's a kind of mixed background.

Sounds like city and country.

John Sexton: Well, city -- but city at the beach. You know, we grew up in this two-family house, 40-foot lot, but we had ocean views from three sides of the house. You know, again, it was Plunkett of Tammany Hall -- my dad probably got information that a bridge was going to be built over to this peninsula, and he bought some property right there, and we had this two-family house. And the income from that second unit really saved us.

In the '50s, when I was in high school, we really were very poor, because of my dad's alcoholism and his illnesses -- which weren't insured. And my mother started teaching elementary school, and my sister worked in a butcher store -- more or less to get the income, and the entrails. We ate a lot of the leftovers of animals. I don't recognize liver as a delicacy. It was kind of the high end of what we got in the meat department -- except when my father won at the track. Then we would get steak.

What about teachers, as you were coming along? Are there particular teachers that stand out who really helped you get on your way?

John Sexton: Well, I think -- look, I was captured for teaching by teachers. There's this one spectacular man in my life named Charlie who -- I was formed at this Jesuit high school that hasn't existed since 1972, but each year a group of us get together. Now, this school has not graduated anybody in 33 years, but we have 600, 700, 800 men at a reunion every year to keep its spirit alive. And, you know, one of them still makes sweatshirts for us, and varsity jackets so we can give them to our kids. And at that high school -- now, this was Brooklyn Catholicism in the '50s, so Joseph McCarthy was an icon. My mother thought Joseph McCarthy was the fourth member of the trinity. But one of our English teachers at this high school was Daniel Berrigan. And people like Berrigan said to us, "It's okay to disagree with McCarthy. And it's okay to disagree with us. But you have to have a reason for your view." And this was a very dramatic thing to be said to a pre-conciliar Irish Catholic in Brooklyn. And they gave us this man -- there were 12 of us that were in an honors class, and we had this man Charlie -- and, as I remember it -- we had him every day, five days a week for three years for a course that was really just called "Charlie." And he started with the cave paintings of Altimara, and percussion music, and he worked his way through the centuries, right up to the 1950s, teaching us simultaneously history, music, art and literature -- in this highly mystical way. This was before anybody thought of the word "interdisciplinary," or ethnocentrism.

Charlie always used to say, "Play another octave of the piano." That was his phrase. So if you haven't reached this note, reach out to it. He lived that with us. You know, his house was at 212 Lincoln Road. I still remember his phone number: Ingersoll 2-8054. And we were welcome in his house, which was about four blocks from the school. He had no family. And we were welcome there. But you had to read the extra book that he had posted at the teachers room. That was the price of admission. And you might fall into a conversation, when you walked through the door, on that book; or he might have some Verdi opera on that he was discussing; or one of the kids might have just said, "I've never had Chinese food," so he'd be piling into his car to go to Chinatown. And it was always play another -- and he would take kids -- I never did this with him because I was so focused on debate -- but he would take kids, literally, around the world. And even though he wasn't a priest, he always, in Europe, he always traveled with a Roman collar. He always said, "You never have to wait on a line for a museum or a restaurant if you wear a Roman collar. So that's what I did with my girls -- my high school girls. Every one of those girls saw the 48 lower states, because we would take six weeks in the summer and drive around. Every one of them went down into the Grand Canyon. I mean, I've been in the Grand Canyon 18 times. So, I realized I had to do that with my daughter, right? So I'm with Katie -- she was about 11, so this is about five years ago, and we're climbing the Pyramid of Teotihuacan.

Now, I got a great deal of credit, within legal education, for creating a paradigm shift in the way law is taught in the United States by starting and pressing at NYU something called "the Global Law School Initiative" -- which really kind of broke the boundaries of American kind of ethnocentrism about law. And there were a lot of things we did to implement that. So here I am climbing the Pyramid of Teotihuacan -- terrified, because I have a fear of heights, but I'm going to do this for my daughter. She's scampering up. And I hear Charlie's voice coming back to me, from 1958 -- very distinct memory of him -- we had read the Book of the Dead, he had the Pyramid of Giza on the wall -- and he says, "Boys -- " -- because we were all working-class kids, "Boys, you will never see these pyramids, because you can't drive to them. But there are pyramids south of here that you haven't heard of because the British did not rob them for their museums." And I said -- it was Charlie that first introduced me to ethnocentrism. And he really created the Global Law School Initiative. It wasn't me. It was just growing out -- and he was the one that impelled me into teaching. And when I started with the girls -- I mean, I worked with those kids a hundred hours a week, because I'd put them in a car on Thursday and we would drive off to wherever it was -- the tournament was -- that week, and we wouldn't be back 'til Sunday. And even as a sophomore, or junior or senior, as I was doing college, I was with them from three o'clock 'til ten o'clock every night, and then off on Thursday and back on Sunday. And then off for these six weeks. It was the center of my life -- which, of course, led to a terrible college record.

I mean, Fordham just gave me an honorary degree. Now, I have a Bachelor's and a Master's and a Ph.D. from Fordham. And I got up in front of the students and I said, "The first thing I urge all of you to do when you leave here today -- those of you especially with summas and magnas on your diplomas -- is leave here and as quickly as you can fail at something. Just so you'll understand -- " -- now this is the son of an alcoholic, of course, talking again. "But just so that you understand that there's life after failure." Now, I said, "There's no one in the audience with a grade point average as low as mine, because my grade point average was 2.1 when I graduated from Fordham." I said, "I don't regret what I did. I followed my passions. I took risks. I wouldn't trade what I did for a higher grade point average. But at least those of you that are sitting there with the 2.8s" -- because you can't get 2.1s anymore with grade inflation -- "or the 3.2s -- you know that there's life after failure. And you know that unless you try to take risks, you're not going to really play all the octaves of the piano." So, it was a dominating thing for me to do what Charlie did. And, it affected my life. I mean, it's the reason I got my doctorate. Father Tim Healey, who had recruited me for this honors program at Fordham, but who threw me out of it at the end of my freshman year because my grades were terrible, came up to me in 1963 when I was on the quadrangle. It's May. I'm limping to graduation. And Tim said, "You've been a big disappointment to us." And he said, "But the Vatican Council has happened, and it's going to be important for lay Catholics to understand other religions. And we're starting a Ph.D. program in religion. We'll give you a second chance. We'll give you a fellowship." So, I felt very honored, until I got there in the fall and saw there were only two of us in the program, and he was looking just for somebody that probably didn't have plans, and had spotted me on the quadrangle. So, that's why I got my Ph.D.

Because I knew if I went to law school, which I knew I wanted to do, that I would ruin it the way I had ruined college. So I kind of did my Ph.D. with my left hand, and then, to support myself, since I wasn't being paid for what I was doing with the girls, I started teaching college -- and then quickly became chairman of the religion department at this small college in Brooklyn.

What was your attraction to studying religion?

John Sexton: Well, I think I'm a person who asks himself -- I mean, I think I live in a religious dimension. I think, you know, I take the notion of meaning in life and a transcendence seriously. I don't have a triumphal attitude, like -- my wife is Jewish, all my children and grandchildren are Jewish. But I do rejoice in any attempt -- whatever its cultural form -- at embracing the transcendent. So, I think it's an important subject.

But, I'd be lying to you if I said that I'd planned to get my Ph.D. in religion and aspired to do it. Tim Healey stopped me and offered me a fellowship. And what I knew I wanted to do was continue to work with the girls.

As the debate coach?

John Sexton: Yes.

Yes. In 1972 I turned 30, and I was the single parent of a wonderful three-year-old boy, and a group of my friends got me together and said, "Look," you know, "You've always wanted to go to law school. Twelve years with the girls is enough. You'd better do it." So I applied to five law schools -- four in New York, including NYU. And I applied to Harvard because a friend of mine -- now he's a very, very famous law professor, but then he was just a recently-tenured member of the Harvard Law School faculty, and we were buddies. His name is Larry Tribe -- and I thought that gave me kind of an edge up; Larry would write a letter for me. And I was denied at all five schools, because -- they were right to deny me; 2.1 grade point average, Ph.D. in religion. I'm leaving a tenured position. Why am I abandoning my discipline? This preposterous story about the girls that no one could understand on paper. So, Larry and this group of friends -- there's a group -- I'm blessed with great friends that go back over 40 years. Larry's one of them. A man named Bob Schrumm is one of them. A man named Lee Heubner who was, at that point, I think still in the Nixon White House with Buchanan and Safire heading the speech-writing team. And the three of them went in to the Harvard Admissions Committee and said, "You've got to reconsider this." And a woman named Molly Garrity called me. She died in 1999, but I called her every year to thank her, because it changed my life -- and she said, "You've been accepted on reconsideration." And I said to her, "I can't come." And she said, "What do you mean you can't come?" And I said, "Well, if I'm going to go to Harvard Law School," I said -- you know when I was growing up, my dad, whenever I got sassy, he would say, "What, you gonna be a Harvard lawyer?" You know, it was kind of an epithet. I didn't don't know what it meant. But here I was, about to go -- I'd done my doctoral dissertation in religion on Charles Eliot, who had been President of Harvard for 40 years. I said, "If I'm going to do this," I said, "I can't do this commuting from New York. And that means, since I won't leave the girls -- now, I cannot accept new kids in the program, but some of the kids have given me a commitment, I've given them a commitment, are just becoming sophomores. So, would you consider taking me three years from now?" And she said, "I now believe what you wrote about the girls." She said, "You're the first person accepted for the class of 1975" -- entering class of '75. And I got up there in '75, and I met my wife in Harvard Law School, and it took me two months to persuade her to marry me. So, it was a very good kind of coming together of everything.

What was it like to clerk for Chief Justice Warren Burger on the Supreme Court?

John Sexton: Well, you know, I have to say -- you get these blessings in life. Harvard, of course -- Harvard did me two great favors. They accepted me, which was this transformative experience I just spoke about. And then, of course, they graduated me -- and with all that that required. And they made me a hot prospect in the teaching market, and enabled me to get wonderful clerkships, first at the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, and then with Chief Justice Burger. Every day I walked up the steps of the Court I felt blessed. I mean, for a lawyer to be in that institution, to see its operations from the inside, to see the Justices at work was quite remarkable. It also was quite special for me to clerk for Burger. You know, when I first applied -- nah, you would have thought I would have been more mature. I was 37 years old when I'm graduating from law school. And I was very lucky. The Court of Appeals clerkship I got was my dream -- it was every prospective law professor's dream. That was with a man named Harold Leventhal, who was just a brilliant -- some would say the most brilliant judge of the last century. He died on November the 20th, playing tennis with my co-clerk, who is actually here today. We clerked together for two years, starting with Judge Leventhal. And I got the call from the tennis court that Judge Leventhal had collapsed playing tennis with Elliot. And within a week, I became law clerk to David Bazelon -- David Bazelon, the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, and perhaps the most activist liberal judge of the 20th century. There have been plenty of activist conservative judges now, to counterpoint him -- Judge, now Justice, Scalia for example, among them. And then, I went from Bazelon to Burger, which was quite interesting, because I'm probably the only living Bazelon-Burger connection. They had a deep animosity for each other. In fact, Judge Bazelon, when Warren Burger was named to the Supreme Court of the United States, was quoted in The Washington Post, when asked, "What's your reaction to this?" saying that he expected to be home sick in bed for a week. So this very visible animosity was part of my life, because I revered both these men.

But, interestingly, when I had arrived in Judge Leventhal's chambers, I had only applied for clerkships at the United States Supreme Court with seven Justices. I had not applied to Burger, and I had not applied to Rehnquist. And Judge Leventhal found this out, and he called me in, and he said, "Do you expect me to recommend you to the Supreme Court?" And I said, "Well, I'm hopeful that my work is good enough." He said, "Your work is fine. I'm very happy to recommend you on that basis." He said, "But your arrogance is not fine." He said, "How could anybody, one year out of law school, strike two Justices of the Supreme Court from a list of applications?" He said, "I insist that you apply for all of them, or I won't support your application." So, at that point, at his insistence, I applied to Rehnquist and to Burger. It's interesting because the Judge died. I became a Bazelon clerk. And Warren Burger never interviewed his law clerks before choosing them. He had a committee interview them, and they gave him a slate of eight names, and he chose four from the eight. And when I became a Bazelon clerk -- the committee had told me that I would be their top nominee. But, of course, when I interviewed with them I was a Leventhal clerk. When I became a Bazelon clerk, I called them up and I said, "You may as well cross me off the list." And they said, "Don't underestimate the Chief Justice. See what happens."

I got a call on December the 31st, 1979, from the head of the committee, and he said, "This is the Chief Justice's home phone number. He wants you to call him at home tomorrow between 10 and 12, because he wants to interview you. And I said, "Interview me? He never -- " They said, "You're the only person he's going to interview. And on January the 1st of 1980, I met Warren Burger at the side door to the United States Supreme Court, and we walked through the halls, turning on lights as we went. And he interviewed me for three hours. I had letters of recommendation, of course, from Larry Tribe, from Alan Dershowitz, from Derrick Fell -- I mean, it was an all-star cast of the left that had recommended me. And he probed me on: would they be disappointed, and so on? And then, I left. And he didn't offer me the job. And I got in the car -- and my wife was waiting outside, and I said, "I obviously didn't get it." Because it was not that I was competing against anyone, and he would -- and she said, "Well, let's see." And three days later he called and he said, "I haven't made up my mind on the others," he said, "but I know that" -- my mother was dying, and he knew that -- and he said, "I'd like to take this tension out of your life. Will you be my law clerk?" And I said, of course, yes. And then I called first my wife, then my mother. And then I called Judge Bazelon. And he said four times, "I can't believe it." And then he said -- I've never forgotten this -- he said, "It's the first time the son-of-a-bitch has ever exercised good judgment." And I ended up having the finest year that I could have hoped for, clerking for Warren Burger. Because it turned out that William Brennan, for whom I'd dreamt of clerking, and I would not have disagreed on a single case -- every bench memo that I wrote for the Chief Justice was the way -- when the case was decided, Justice Brennan voted.

But, Warren Burger invited me to write bench memos that disagreed with him. I understand this is not the stereotype of Warren Burger. But he invited it, he welcomed discussion. There was this one great case -- and he authorized me to tell this story -- it was called Michael M. v. Superior Court, it came out of California, the Rose Bird Supreme Court. And the facts of the case were that a young man, 16 years old, and a young woman 17 years old, had had consensual intercourse. And under the California statute, he was prosecuted for statutory rape. She could not be -- even though he was younger, and she seemed, on the facts, to be the initiator of the intercourse. The Rose Bird California Court declared it unconstitutional. Now this was the same year that the all-male draft was being challenged by the National Organization of Women. And I had been trained, you know, at Harvard Law School by Larry Tribe, and I knew an Equal Protection violation -- you know, you stereotype women, even if it's to their advantage -- you know, I knew the whole argument. And so, I wrote my bench memo on Michael M. to affirm the Rose Bird decision. And then I said, "Let me see if there's any case out there that the briefs have missed." And I found a First Circuit Court of Appeals opinion by a very good judge -- Frank Coffin, a person we lionized at Harvard Law School. And, sure enough, his analysis was the same as mine. So, I said, "This is good. I get an A+ on this paper." It's the first bench memo ever I did for the Chief Justice. And I said, "Let me just check to see if they appealed to the Supreme Court." And lo and behold, they had. Coffin's decision had been appealed to the Supreme Court, and certiorari had been denied. But Burger and Rehnquist had dissented from the denial of certiorari -- and they had indicated that they would have granted certiorari to review it, and they would have summarily reversed it. They said that publicly. They didn't even have to hear the case. It was so wrong, in their view, they would have just reversed it without hearing arguments. So here he was, exactly 180 degrees from where I was, on the public record, about eight or nine years earlier. And I had this crisis of conscience: What do I do? And I ended up putting in the first paragraph, "Sir, you're on record on this -- " -- and so on. And I put my bench memo in unchanged. I said, "I hope, on reflection, you'll see this as the better analysis. This is what I would urge."

Chutzpah.

John Sexton: Chutzpah, perhaps. First Monday, of course -- it's always a Monday.

On Saturdays he had the habit of coming in, and he would always make soup for us from leftovers from the night before, and the four of us would get together, and he would tell stories. And he'd already discussed the three cases of my co-clerks for First Monday -- there were four cases. No discussion on Michael M. And as we're getting up after the stories, he said nothing. And I said, "Chief, could we discuss Michael M.?" And he looks at me, he says, "You mean that case you got so wrong?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Sure." He said, "Come on into the chambers" -- into his inner office. He said, "You'll just get me ready for Brennan." And I went in, and he took this piece of my work -- you know, eight-and-a-half by 11, about a 20-page memo. There's a big zero in felt-tip pen on the first page. And as I paged through it, different -- in the margin -- there's these balloon question marks, some big, some small. He says, "You see those question marks?" He says, "Whenever I disagree with something, I put a question mark." There must have been 30 question marks in this memo. He said, "The larger the question mark, the more I disagree." And he turns back to the zero, and he points at it, and he says, "That's the period at the bottom of the question mark." I said, "Oh my God." So I said, "Sir, could we discuss this so that I get instruction, at least." And so, he says, "Oh, of course." He said, "Come on. Come on." And we started discussing it. And I have to tell you, for years -- now the guards have changed -- but for years the guards remembered the shouting match, because they could hear it through the double doors. And I had gone into a zone. I didn't realize what I was doing. It's the Chief Justice of the United States. He's across -- he's closer than we are. And we're shouting, and he's beet red, and I'm shouting back as if I'm in an argument with my brother-in-law or something.

And finally, I make the stereotype argument. And he pounds the desk, and he says, "I don't care if it is stereotype. The fact of the matter is that female virginity is different from male virginity. And someone's got to stand up for basic values. And I'm going to draw the line, and this is where I'm going to draw it." And he's beet red. And, I mean, his argument sounded to me preposterous. And I looked at him. And without realizing what I was saying, I said, "Sir, is that why you feel the way you do about this case? Or is it because guys like you wanted to marry virgins?" And I had no sooner said the words -- I said, "Oh, my God, if he fired me on the spot, he would" -- and I could see the white come down his face as the blood drained. And it seemed like an interminable length of time. And he looked at me and he said, "Didn't you want to marry a virgin?" And it just broke the tension. And he looked at me and he said, "Stereotype. Stereotype." He said, "Don't stereotype me." And he didn't change his vote on Michael M., but it changed our relationship. And I knew from that moment on that he welcomed disagreement. And a book like The Brethren overemphasizes the importance of law clerks, because law clerks were the source of the book that Woodward and Armstrong did. But I'll tell you, I know of cases where conversations he had with the clerks -- and, in one case, with me -- where he did vote differently, even after he had cast his vote in conference, and had assigned the opinion to himself. When he struggled with the opinion, the conversation continued. He switched from 5-4 in one direction, to 5-4 in the other direction, from the initial -- he said, "I'm going to keep the opinion," and it ended up being 7-2; in other words, two other Justices, also upon -- and that gave me great belief in the dialogic process of the Supreme Court at that time -- which has lived with me. You know, it's a genuine process. And it's not what happens in so much of our society, where people are just exchanging slogans, and voting conclusions, and then looking for the reasons and the answer to it.

Do you still hold that view?

John Sexton: I have to say that I do hold that view. I can speak to the judge with whom I worked. I can speak about the Justices that I know. I think I know the methods and the thoughts and the thinking of someone like a Sandra Day O'Connor, someone like a David Souter. These are people that engage in the kind of dialogic process that I'm thinking of.

And, by the way, I would say that most of the present Supreme Court, if not all -- I can't speak to all -- but I feel comfortable saying that most of them approach their work with an open mind, and with a sense of the importance of the institution and the rule of law in what it's doing.

How did your appointment to head NYU Law School come about?

John Sexton: Well, I really hadn't done much when I was chosen as Dean of NYU Law School. I was a high-risk choice. I graduated from law school in '79. I clerked for the two years in Washington. I came to the NYU faculty in '81, and I was named dean in '88. So I was really, when I was named, only eight years out of law school. I was one of the three or four most junior members of the faculty.

And NYU Law School already was a very good law school. It was clearly one of the 15 or 30 schools that could claim to be in the top ten. And it felt good about itself. And my message was not very popular to the faculty, because the school had undergone a tremendous movement and transformation in a positive direction to get to the point where it was, and it therefore understandably was content and satisfied with that.

But I had come in relatively new, and I said, you know, "We could be still better, and we're probably not as good as we think we are, because people tend not to be sufficiently self-critical. And the way to do that is for us to come together as a community, and that means not being out of the building." And this meant that the faculty had to be present all of the time, and that we would move away from the practice of faculty being out as of-counsel to law firms -- which meant that the faculty, by giving those positions up and returning to be with their students and their colleagues, it meant huge financial sacrifices. Many of them were making multiples of what they would be paid as professors. But it was a calling to them -- it was a calling to them to the wonderful rewards of being in a learning and creating community. It wasn't a call out of the world of practice. I said, "Do all the cases that you want to do, but do them in the building. If you're good enough, the cases will come to you -- whether they're pro bono cases or remunerative is inconsequential, as long as you do them with colleagues and with students as laboratories of learning and you're engaged in the building."

And, it was very interesting, because this community of men and women responded to that. It was not obvious in the beginning that they would. And that began to develop a kind of social compact theory of what it was to be a faculty where, instead of acting as independent contractors -- I mean a tenured professor can, if he or she chooses to be -- be the ultimate independent contractor. I mean, you literally don't have anyone to whom you report. You report to your conscience. And this was a call to become reciprocally obligated to each other: to be present, to read each others' work, to be there for students, and so on. And the bet was that there were a sufficiently large number of the very best people in the country who wanted that community, and the dividends of a social compact. And it turned out the bet was a good bet. And it stimulated a migration of faculty from the leading law schools in the country to NYU of people who cared for that, and didn't find it as much as they liked in their home institution. So, over the course of a decade, because of that migration -- and then what followed from the observation of what came from that community. I mean, what I'm good at is being a noticer. You know, I notice sometimes what people are doing before they do. And I can make some connections between what people are doing, sometimes before the people make the connections. And then I'm a good storyteller, so I would create a story, or a mythology -- in the best sense of that word "mythology," the Aristotelian sense, where myth or poetry carries the real truth. And it created a terrific move for NYU Law School to where, today, some people outside NYU would call it the leading law school in the world.

I think everybody would say it's one of the leading law schools; one of the small handful of four, five, or six leading law schools -- depending upon what your interests are, this is the place to be -- either as a faculty member or as a student.

When you took over as NYU President, you made the analogy in a speech, "We have to be a symphony of faculty, not individual soloists." As President of the University, do you find yourself dealing with some of those same dynamics?

John Sexton: Well, the same dynamics do exist at the university level, and it's the same call. And NYU, in a way, is -- well, a man named David Kirp, who is a professor at Berkeley, wrote a case study of NYU and, in the opening paragraph, the last sentence is referring to the time -- the 20 years before I became president -- he wrote, "NYU is the" -- and he italicized "the" -- "success story in contemporary American higher education." And I think that's a fair critique of the university that I inherited. NYU is the -- and he italicized "the" -- success story in contemporary American higher education. So, that's the university I inherited.

Now, the interesting thing about NYU is it carries in it the kind of blood of immigrants. It's very much -- it was founded by Albert Gallatin to be, in his words, "In and of the city." I mean, we embrace New York -- which tends to be a tremendous locational endowment for us, that we have, in a unique way -- I mean, Columbia, you could take Columbia and put it in Iowa and it would be a great university. If you took NYU and put it in Iowa, we would die, because we are symbiotically tied to the city. We're the second largest property owner in the city, I think. And yet we don't have a single gate. We don't have a single blade of grass. You walk out of our buildings, you're on the sidewalk. Except for Washington Square, where many of our buildings are but not most, the building next to an NYU building is likely not to be an NYU building. We're eco-systematic with the city. So this wonderful place has in it the blood of the immigrants. And, of course, the characteristics of that blood is never to be satisfied. I mean, immigrants come yearning for a "better." And the wonderful thing about NYU is it never will proclaim that it's in its golden age. Each generation seeks to be better in the next generation.

So even in this moment, when I became President -- you know, when David Kirp was declaring us the success story in contemporary higher education, there was a yearning to do something beyond that. Now, there was a cacophonous feature, to pick up on the symphony metaphor, to NYU. So the entrepreneurship challenge for NYU, and for a leader at NYU, is to create more synergy, more connection -- without stifling creativity. So, it's very much the same drill. It's in a different modality completely. The big difference in my life is a movement from retail, where I knew the name of virtually every student -- and certainly of the family members of every faculty and staff person -- to wholesale, where half the community doesn't know my name, and 90 percent of them wouldn't recognize me. And that's a different kind of leadership challenge. But it's the same issue.

Where do we stand now with regard to tenure and academic freedom -- two of the hot-button issues that you have been grappling with in recent years?

John Sexton: Well, both tenure and academic freedom are highly complex issues. What I've begun to do -- and have done -- when you're dealing with this huge community that is NYU, and when you feel a burden to be able to articulate mission and goal, but you don't have the hubris to think that that's something you have the right to do ex cathedra; that you have to listen to the community -- what I've done is put out a series of what I call "reflections." And these are not postcards. These are 40 to 60 pages long each. And I've now done seven of them on different topics about the university. I put them out, and people respond. The whole community gets them, and people respond, obviously with e-mails, but I have town halls, Saturday sessions with faculty. And then regularly I revise them, based on what I've heard, in a way of kind of saying, "Is this it, yet?" "Is this it, yet?" But, it forces a conversation. One of the reflections I did, I did on the role of faculty in what I call "the common enterprise university." And I try to disconnect the notions of tenure and academic freedom in that piece.

Academic freedom, it strikes me, is something that everyone in the university should have, not just the tenured professors. It may well be that tenured professors get a job security that looks like academic freedom. But we wouldn't want a university where only those people enjoyed the benefits of academic freedom. So, to the extent that you make academic freedom depend on tenure, it seems to me, you're being seriously under-inclusive. So, I think that we have to safeguard academic freedom generally and robustly, severed from the notion of tenure.

On the issue of tenure, I of course believe that in a research university especially, the core faculty -- and therefore the core governance of the university -- reposes in the people who made, with the university, a reciprocal commitment that's lifetime. And there are standards associated with that that are very high and rigorous and, if applied correctly, demand a lot from the professor and, in return for that, the university makes its commitment to support his or her research.

I do think we will be introducing, in the research universities, other modalities of being a member of the community. Some of them are obvious, like part-time people -- adjuncts, they're called. I mean, if you're in New York and you don't take advantage of the ability to bring in someone like you to be part of a media and communications, you know, on a part-time basis; if you have Marty Lipton, the leading corporate lawyer in the world, and you don't bring him in as an adjunct to the Law School, you're really not doing your duty.

But there are other modalities I spell out in this paper.

It's been controversial, because you're talking about teachers without the promise of tenure.

John Sexton: Well, it was initially controversial, because I think people thought what I was saying was a devaluation, or even an attack on tenure. I think as people came to understand what I was saying, it was allowing career choices in different ways. You know, I have a number of people who have left tenured positions to come to NYU into a position where they are master teachers -- which is a five-year appointment, renewable. But, now you say, "Well, why would a person do that?" Well, if the only norm you use in answering that question is, "Why would you give up lifetime job security for a five-year renewable contract?" -- then that's a good question.

On the other hand, if you introduce other norms -- for example, if you're dealing with a person who is strong enough that he or she isn't worried, ever, about not being wanted -- it's just not an issue in their lives -- the lifetime security means nothing. More important to that person might be a connection between the expectations associated with the title and what that person wants to do at this particular moment in his or her life.

So, for example, if I would prefer, in a period of my life, to move away from the life of creativity and research as being a kind of co-equal modality with teaching, and I'd like to throw myself more fully into teaching, and I want to be honored for that, well then doing this master teacher assignment seems more appropriate than to be a tenured professor where, frankly, the expectation is that the modality would be the same.

One of the problems with tenure is the fact that it protects those people who we ought to be shaming, even though we have tenure. We don't use honor and shame enough.

So, if you broaden what's important to people, you could see what I've seen, which is that some outstanding people, who could have whatever status they want, opted to choose. In the same way, by the way, that Marty Lipton opts into being an adjunct professor, even though he would qualify for tenure at virtually every law school in the world, if not every law school in the world. Why? Because that's what describes his life preference in terms of mixing teaching with the other things he's doing, namely, practicing law. And one can think this out and see why one would choose one or more of these categories.

Were you a great reader as a child? Are there particular books that stand out?

John Sexton: No, I'm actually not an easy reader. Whether I'm dyslexic, or -- I mean, I've never been diagnosed. I read at one speed. So, I read exegetically -- I read very well, slowly, the meaning of text -- which is terrific for my two disciplines -- remember, I have a Ph.D. in religion, and I have a law degree. So, if you're studying a scriptural text or a legal text, this very slow but totally comprehending style of reading is exactly the right thing. And I'm capable of doing that very well. On the other hand, when one tries to read a novel -- you know, my wife reads a novel every day -- it can take me a month to read a novel. And I really have to force myself to that joy. My formative years in teaching were spent with high school students in debate. And I do what I call "debate reading." I can read a book in an hour -- and really get it -- if I'm reading in concentric circles. The first book I read, I'll read very slowly. The second book, a little more quickly. By the time I get to the fourth or fifth book on the same topic, I can read extremely quickly, with almost complete comprehension. So when I do that kind of vertical reading, I can read very quickly. But I'm embarrassingly unfamiliar with a set of canonical books that people would assume that I've read.

Did you read anything for pleasure growing up?

John Sexton: In the tenth grade, I got involved in inter-scholastic debate -- so I did it myself in sophomore, junior and senior year. And then, I created a high school debate team for young girls at my sister's high school that I spent the next 15 years doing. So in those 18 years, there was a single topic, and either myself or with the girls, you had to read literally everything that was out there -- every article, every book, and whatever -- if you were going to compete at the national level.

So that is the kind of reading that occupied most of my time. If you measure my lifetime reading hours on a bar chart, non-fiction, fiction, it would probably be 95 percent non-fiction and 5 percent fiction, but an enormous volume of reading. I mean I've, in effect, written 19 doctoral dissertations, because the 18 debate topics and then, of course, my own doctoral dissertation. There are very few people who have gone that deeply into different topics the way I have as a reader. But not a lot of recreational reading, simply because there weren't a lot of hours in the day, and I do it so slowly. I've returned to recreational reading, now. Now, I'm constantly reading something for recreation.

What do you like to read for recreation?

John Sexton: Well, I like to read authors. One of the courses I teach is called "Baseball as a Road to God," and the first book by Pete Hamill that I read for that course was his book, Snow in August. And then, of course, I read The Drinking Life, which was his own autobiographical story of himself and alcohol. And I've just finished reading his terrific book, Forever, which was a task for me, because it's a 600-page book. But it was such a riveting story. It's the story, as you might know, of this young man who grows up in 1720 in Ireland, and his father and mother are killed by an English earl who migrates to New Amsterdam. And under a Druid obligation, he follows the earl on a slave ship to get revenge. And he does a favor for what he thinks is one of the slaves, who turns out to be a shaman. And in return for that favor, he's given the gift of eternal life -- but on the condition that he never leave Manhattan.

And Pete proceeds to tell the story of the next 300 years, right up to September 11th, through the eyes of this character. And it's just -- for a person who has the love of New York that I do -- and, you know, I'm an Irish Catholic -- it was a wonderful book. So, I'll take an author and read an author like that. Graham Greene was the author I read just before Pete's stuff. It's interesting to see how authors will repeat themes and moments -- even unconsciously, as I talk to Pete about it.

For people who look upon teaching as a very noble calling, but not a very glamorous one, what can you tell them about your own experience -- your own passion for teaching -- that has kept you teaching through many years when you didn't have to teach any more? What is it about teaching that is so rewarding?

John Sexton: I was taught that teaching is the noblest vocation. And I've now been in the classroom -- I started teaching when I was 17, so this is my 45th year of teaching. I've never had a sabbatical, never wanted a sabbatical. I never had a semester where I didn't teach at least one course. The rewards of teaching are remarkable. And they're almost ineffable. I mean, some of the most important of the rewards of teaching are ineffable. To be here today, for example, and to be surrounded, after the panel on which I and Larry Summers and the others participated, and to catch, out of the corner of my eye, a woman who was my student in 1987, and to remember specifically the conversation where she decided to come to NYU -- to get the hug from her, to feel that I was part of what created the being that she is, with the extraordinary work that she's doing -- to be just a small part of that; to have her just say, "Thank you." This is an amazing thing to a teacher. But it's something that happens, if you've been teaching as long as I have, and have had as many thousands of students as I've had, it happens with some regularity. And it just -- it's something that keeps you young, it's something that reminds you that what you're doing -- if you test yourself on the proposition, "Am I living a useful life?" -- it's useful. And it just keeps you happy all the time.

It's also important because it keeps you humble. I've never made it out of the first class of a semester without doing less well than I would have liked to have done for my students. I've never had a perfect semester. I've had some classes that I wouldn't try to do over again, but of course that's a different -- I've had some semesters I wouldn't try to do over again. That's a different test. That says, did I do -- you know, in the upper register of my capacities. But it's wonderful always to be reminded how one could do better. And, of course, I feel that deeply now because I'm not able to do as much with my students as I am because of the constraints that are on me all the time. But there's this wonderful kind of uplifting, energizing part that comes with teaching, and to be excited about ideas yourself, to see the excitement develop in others. And then there's this humbling part. But it's a beautiful kind of humbling. It's not a painful humbling.

You said you were "captured" to teach, in a way.

John Sexton: Yes, well, I guess that's the right word. I was surrounded by wonderful role models in my life who caused me to want to be like them.

We ask people in this program their concept of the American Dream, and I wondered if you might give us a few thoughts about that? What is the American Dream in 2005?

John Sexton: Well, I'm not sure that I view the American Dream positively. I was in a conversation last night with some very thoughtful people about Tom Friedman's book The World is Flat, and I had just come from two days with the Federal Reserve in Washington. And a lot of the conversation last night was about what's going to happen if we keep seeing the drain of jobs and talent and so forth that Friedman describes in his book.

And, you know, I said to the group -- and it was a very special group of people about which you could say this without fear of contradiction -- I said, "This is a group that embraces the other. This is a group that is acutely conscious of American racism and ethnocentrism and so forth. Why all of a sudden is this group speaking in the voice of 'we'?" You know, 'we' lose when jobs go to India. Why aren't we thinking about the people of the world as the 'we' and why aren't we recognizing the fact that there may have to be some reconfiguration -- hopefully, with the pie getting larger, but certainly some redistribution of the wealth in the world -- in the same way we realize there has to be redistribution of wealth in this country? That thought didn't receive universal acclaim, even in the audience last night.

I would hope that the American Dream, increasingly, will become not a dream that is self-serving, but is a dream that can lose the adjective "American." Okay? Because what is the dream? And there will be an embrace of the other. I think -- my great teacher said to me this great maxim -- another musical metaphor -- play another octave of the piano. I think Americans, especially, have to become more acutely aware of the need to be humble, the need to listen, the need to embrace the other. And I think that there will be a transformation, gradually, if things work out as I hope they will, to different kinds of satisfactions that aren't so tied up with the material satisfactions. This connects to the life of a teacher, again. And, you know, when we get to a world where people can understand that it's a more fulfilling life to be a teacher than to be an investment banker, then maybe we'll be closer to a world where we can understand better that the American Dream should be a dream that raises the standard of living in Delhi, and that there's nothing wrong with that.

Thank you very much.