Imagine that once there was a famous golf school, the dean of which believed that everything that needed to be known about golf could be learned on the putting green. Being the head of a famous school, the dean was able to put into place a theory of instruction based on just that theory. Students arrived, were handed a putter, and were told that they were learning to think like a golfer.
To be fair, when the dean launched his method golf schools were in a bad state. The primary method of instruction before he introduced the putting method was lectures, where old golfers would stand before a classroom in their knickers (American meaning), holding their mashies and niblicks, and expounding on the science of golf. By comparison, the putting method was positively experiential.
Putting is indeed a part of the game of golf, and arguably the most important part – drive for show, and putt for dough, and all that. Proponents of the putting method could point out, quite rightly, that almost all famous golfers were good at putting. A course of instruction that had students thinking about putting all day for the better part of three years did have the students graduating with a pretty fair command of how to putt. It seemed far sounder than the lecture method, and pretty soon all the top golf schools were training students to think like a golfer through the putting method.
Over time, however, it became apparent that the putting method didn’t teach all the skills that were actually core to playing the game of golf. There are quite a few other clubs in the standard golf bag, and quite a bit that happens in the game besides what happens on the putting green. The putting method didn’t really prepare the students for those other clubs and the game as it occurs off the green. It’s not that putting is unimportant to the game of golf, but rather that other clubs and skills are needed.
Golf instructors being pretty savvy men and women, this was talked about quite a lot, and proposals were made. At some of the better funded schools, special instructors were brought in, just to take a group of students through a hole of golf from tee to flag. Some of the other instructors, and not a few deans, grumbled about how expensive it was to accompany three or four golfers on a hole of golf, while a standard instructor using the putting method could oversee 60 or more students on a putting green at the same time.
The students who got to play a whole hole of golf, however, generally enjoyed the experience, and felt they were better prepared for their careers as golfers as a result. For a variety of reasons, however, including that everyone knew that thinking like a golfer can only come from extensive practice in putting, the play a hole programs remained at the fringe of golf schools, with instruction still centered firmly around the putting green.
A funny thing happened in the world of golf, however. Golf transformed from an individual sport into a team sport. While a few old timers could remember when a solitary golfer played all 18 holes with a single bag of clubs, and while there are small town courses where that’s still the practice, that’s not the nature of the modern corporate golf game. Rather than contests between individual golfers, golf became contests between rival teams.
At first a team might have had three or four players, but over time a golf team became composed of dozens of specialists. One expert golfer might drive the ball from the green on a long par five with broad fairways, while another, with perhaps less distance but more control, would take the tee shot on a par four with a tricky dogleg. Experts would exist for striking the ball from the long grass of the rough, others for shots where the fairway tilts at an angle, and still others for shots out of sand traps. Outsourced vendors, not golfers themselves, might join the team to find balls lost in the rough or to analyze the break of the green. It was, fair to say, a game that bore little resemblance to golf as it was played when the putting method took hold at golf schools.
It became harder and harder to connect the modern team game of golf to learning to think like a golfer on the putting green, but schools stuck with their tried and true methodology. This was odd, because dozens of articles were written by concerned golf instructors and professional golfers that agreed on one thing – golf students were graduating unprepared for the modern game of golf. It got to the point where recent graduates were having a hard time getting jobs as golfers, and if they did get jobs their time was not billable.
Lately, things have gotten even more different. Despite what some thought were rules that would prevent this kind of thing from ever happening, new kinds of "golf ball movers" have arrived that compete with actual golfers. The outsourcing companies that were vendors to golf teams now wish to compete directly against them in taking the ball from tee to hole. A Google funded company, Rocket Golfer, uses unmanned drones to take a ball from tee to hole, much faster and at much less cost than even the best golf team. Venture capitalists, few of them golfers themselves, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in start-ups designed to compete for golf business. Golf schools have responded by sticking with the putting method of instruction, with just a few optional tweaks, and don’t really talk with their students about how these new competitors might impact their careers.
Golf is just a game, of course, with no important public purpose, and this is just a fable. It is inconceivable to imagine educational institutions in fields of public importance sticking with an educational method that everyone agrees is not training its graduates to play the game.
Why would "professors who are known to the top judges and Justices for purposes of clerkship recommendations" only come from the ranks of scholars rather than practitioners? From where I'm sitting, the most important recommenders of students for clerkships are (a) other judges (current or former), (b) former clerks of the hiring judge, and (c) other personal connections of the hiring judge who know the student. All of those categories contain a host of practitioners (or only practitioners in the case of judges).
Posted by: Former Editor | September 13, 2014 at 05:01 PM