Meet-and-greet/book signing thing at Harvard went fine, it was a very low-key thing, I was just in the corner of the room where there was a regular Law School happy hour, and pretty much the only people who I talked to were people I already knew, and we didn't have any books to actually sell right there (which was a mistake), so I only signed three or four books that people had bought previously. But it was fine, didn't hurt, gave me some ideas for how to make sure these things get planned next time to really make them useful for the book.
Someone asked me if it was weird to be back on campus, but it really wasn't. It all looks the same, it could just as easily be two years ago and I could have been going to class. In a way, it felt like I was just in school a few days ago, even though it's been almost a year and a half. It's interesting, I sat in on a medical school class about a week ago, and it was at a school without a real campus -- just a building, people go to class, and then they leave -- and it was such a different feeling from what I've experienced at Princeton and then at law school, just in terms of feeling like there's a community there, and being able to feel like what you're doing is somehow relevant and you're not just alone in the world. I'm not talking at all about the education people are getting -- just about the feeling you get being on a campus, surrounded by other students, as opposed to parking in a garage, going to a classroom, and then leaving and sitting in an apartment all day studying. It seems like it would be really lonely going to a school like that, for anything -- and even teaching at a school like that. It's hard, at Harvard for example, to feel like it's possible that the professors would feel anything but relevant, surrounded by students and each other and part of some campus community. But it's easy to imagine that if all a professor did was drive to class three times a week and talk for an hour, and then go home and do research, it would feel pretty disconnected from anything larger. I don't know, maybe I'm just thinking about this too much, and the existence of a campus matters less than I imagine, but the different feelings I had, at the medical school and then back at law school, were pretty profound.
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