On Retirement to a Deanship

As most of you know, I have been a teacher for more than forty years. I entered teaching at Oklahoma after four years with the Stinson Mag firm in Kansas City, and I have been on the University of Michigan faculty since 1949 except for a four-year aberration as dean at the University of Colorado Law School in the mid-1960s. As you would suppose, I am reaching the mandatory retirement age. (That\u27s what the late Dean William L. Prosser called the age of statutory senility. ) The current year would have been my final year of teaching at the University of Michigan Law School. Wayne State University, in Detroit, had lost its law school dean; and, partly at the suggestion of a member of this group, my good friend James Robinson, I was asked to consider becoming the law school\u27s leader for a term of five years