Verma, Goodwin take new jobs in higher ed leadership

Two friends and colleagues, Professor Manish Verma and attorney Kristine C. Goodwin, are moving into exciting new positions in higher education.

Dr. Verma has joined the University College of Bahrain as Vice President for Academic Affairs.  The university is a non-profit, English-language institution in the Kingdom of Bahrain, modeled after U.S. and Canadian higher education in the liberal arts tradition.  The university's leading programs are in business administration, information technology, and communications and multimedia.

Prof. Manish Verma
(LinkedIn photo)

An accomplished scholar himself in mass communication, Dr. Verma has been a friend and stellar colleague of mine for many years.  His enthusiasm and determination to collaborate across borders is almost singularly responsible for sparking my enduring interest in communication law and policy on the Indian subcontinent and in the Middle East.  I've been privileged firsthand to witness Manish's intense devotion to his students, and they respond with adoration in kind.  I expect that that teacher's spirit will animate his service in administration, where such spirit is so often sorely needed.

Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf
(map by TUBS CC BY-SA 3.0)

Closer to home, for me, attorney Kristine Goodwin has been named Vice President of Student Affairs at Western New England University.  Located in Springfield, Massachusetts, Western New England is a vital provider of access to higher education in its region.  In addition to the WNE School of Law, led by the talented Dean Sudha N. Setty, the university boasts colleges in arts and sciences, business, engineering, and pharmacy and health sciences.

Kristine Goodwin
(WNE photo)

Attorney Goodwin has more than three decades' experience in higher education.  That career was already well underway when she went to law school, so I cannot quite claim that my Torts I and II classes made all the difference.  It was rather my privilege to have around her magna cum laude appetite for learning.  She was a university administrator in my home state of Rhode Island while she went to law school.  She generously provided me with guidance and resources when I served on a university committee formulating personnel policy.

I hope leaders at University College of Bahrain and Western New England University, and students in Bahrain and Massachusetts, know how lucky they are.

Public-domain materials take legal education by storm; law librarians trace history from casebooks to 'OERs'

OER Is Sharing by Giulia Forsythe (CC0 1.0)

Law librarians Emma Wood and Misty Peltz-Steele, my brilliant colleagues (and 50% my spouse), have published Open Your Casebooks Please: Identifying Alternatives to Langdell's Legacy.

The work discusses the revolutionary contemporary movement of open-educational resources (OERs), a term, I learned, coined by UNESCO in 2002, particularly in legal education.  Here is the abstract:

Nonprofits, academic institutions, and educators have collaborated, at all academic levels, to create quality Open Educational Resources (OERs) since that term was defined by UNESCO in 2002. These open-source educational materials are in the public domain and published under an open license, meaning that they can be freely copied, used, adapted, and re-shared with the public. They include not only textbooks but supplemental educational materials in various media formats. Their value is such that even federal and state legislatures are taking note and passing laws to incentivize the creation and use of OER in both secondary and higher education. Despite the momentum in academics toward the adoption of open textbooks and supplemental materials, legal academia has been slower to embrace open casebooks. By design, OER offers a great deal of flexibility for educators and the promise of cost savings for academic institutions and students. This paper examines the modern history of casebooks and the OER movement, as well as the various OER platforms ideally suited to create open content for law courses. The authors posit that a greater understanding of OER will give law professors and students a wider range of choice and ownership in course materials.

When I joined my first casebook, published in 2006, it was still important to attach one's project to a prominent publisher, for the purpose of enhancing one's CV and bolstering the tenure-and-promotion application.  Thankfully, legal academia has started to recognize the needlessness of conventional publishing as a gatekeeper for legal educational materials.  The analysis was hastened by student sticker shock at textbook prices, which, I can attest, do not relieve authors of our day jobs.  I myself am, mercifully, no longer at a point in my career at which I need to impress anyone.  So I'm teaching Torts this year with "Tortz," my own OER in progress, at no additional charge to students.

The Wood & Peltz-Steele article will appear in 43 Western New England Law Review (2021).