My editor recently wrote to ask if I had dropped off the face of the earth. Not quite, but reading and correcting close to 4,000 pages of motions, memos and other legal prose this past semester for 50 students, with seven graded exercises—some pretty complex—no page limits and a very tight time schedule, turned me into a bit of a recluse. It's all in the rearview mirror now, and before the craziness begins again, I've enjoyed a few weeks of sanity.

Returning to the academy after a few years doing bar leadership and other things, such as working as a prep cook in a wonderful soup kitchen, was exhilarating and frightening. I taught one day and one evening session. I really liked the evening folks. (Full disclosure, I attended four years of night law school; I never took a day course.) They were a bunch of accomplished adults with incredibly varied backgrounds and interests. One guy is on the U.S. Parachute Team. Others run businesses, travel extensively, teach, design and build things. Many are married with kids. (Some kids attended class. That must have been fun at show-and-tell.) How they do it all is a mystery, but they're learning good skills in time and resource management that'll make them good lawyers.

The day students don't seem to like me much. I think I am kind of a Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. (see "The Paper Chase") in a world expecting Fred Rogers. I take solace in the fact that they'll one day figure out how much I made them learn, but right now I'm parking off campus.

My faculty colleagues, a few of whom taught me over 40 years ago, welcomed me back. I've been teaching full and part time for the past 20 years, so I understand the rituals and protocols and enjoy the intellectual give-and-take. I am in awe of their collective brilliance, though some of it does get a bit theoretical. I took part in a regional symposium, pontificating on the ethical issues addressed (or not) in the soon-to-be-released new Restatement of the Law of Liability Insurance. The amount of work that goes into one of these publications is beyond belief. I cringed when some of the audience questioned whether we really needed it.

Our school, UConn, is looking for a dean. It recently came down to four or five finalists, and we expected to be hearing from them soon. That should be interesting. Here's a fun thought experiment: How would you design/redesign/lead a law school? Imagine trying to balance theory and practice, breaking the whole enterprise into chunks of 26 class sessions of one to two hours each, with limited space for large lecture classes, ABA mandates as to time and content, state and federal rules and requirements, incredibly complex and challenging financial issues, limited faculty, staff and administrative resources and a mother university structure that seems to define complexity.

How do you equip the next generation of lawyers to deal with the pressures of globalization, competition from internet-based service providers, and a public that refuses to hire lawyers for some pretty important things such as defending debt collections, fighting evictions or prosecuting divorces? How do you teach them how to make a living in a profession where the pie is shrinking and the pieces are getting smaller and smaller, when everything is so complex that the idea of a generalist lawyer is really a thing of the past? Everyone has a plan. Even President Barack Obama weighed in on that, suggesting a few years ago that law school should be two years. Think about how much you knew (or didn't) after your second year of law school. All I can say is that I admire anyone willing to try to figure it all out. It's no wonder that the average dean lasts five years.

The top 10% of our grads will find a home in the big firms, though they're experiencing their own challenges. Another 10% to 20% will go into government or public-interest work. Some will go in-house for big businesses. The remaining group will try to figure out how to earn enough to retire the crippling debt they took on to finance their education. I read the other day that the California state schools, Berkeley, Davis, Irvine and UCLA were thinking of upping their out-of-state tuition to $75,000. Four years of UConn cost me $4,000. Not a year—total. We cost a bit more than that now, but it's still a bargain compared to private schools.

I think this will be my last year teaching. I was telling one of my friends on the doctrinal faculty that we needed some young blood to replace folks like me. She argued that there was a value to experience. I reminded her that a "young" professor, in her 40s or 50s, with a full career ahead of her, would still be 20 to 30 years younger than me.

Mark Dubois, Connecticut's first chief disciplinary counsel, is on leave from Geraghty & Bonnano of New London while he teaches at UConn Law. He can be reached at [email protected].