Michael Hunter Schwartz

Before the start of a new school year, Michael Hunter Schwartz begins memorizing the names and faces of up to 150 incoming students.

He uses flash cards.

SELF PORTRAIT

Michael Hunter Schwartz

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: April 18, 1962, Philadelphia

MY HERO IS: Earl Warren

IF I WASN’T A LAW SCHOOL DEAN, I WOULD BE a teacher at some other level. I love seeing students learn.

THE ONE THING I WILL NOT EAT is red meat.

THE LAST BOOK OF FICTION I ENJOYED WAS The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

IN THE SHOWER, I SING Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).”

THE PERSON I MOST TRUST is my wife. And I trust her in every way. I trust her advice. I trust her to have my back. I trust her to always do the right thing.

THE BEST PART ABOUT ARKANSAS is the natural beauty.

BEHIND MY BACK, MY STUDENTS SAY Dean Schwartz has very high expectations.

MY COMPULSION IS: Arriving at the airport ridiculously early.

MY FAVORITE MOVIE: The Shawshank Redemption.

MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW THAT, because I was the parent who helped my daughters get ready for school every day, I am able to do a wide variety of hairstyles, including pigtails and ponytails and various types of braids, and I can use a flat iron to straighten very thick, curly hair (without burning a daughter).

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Enthusiastic

“On the very first day, I tell them I am going to have their names memorized by the next class. And between that first day and the first time I meet them officially for my class, I am crunching through the flash cards. And when I see them in the hall, I practice. ‘Oh, you’re Miss Edgars.’ ‘Miss DeBusk, how are you today?’”

It’s a personal touch that Schwartz thinks is important for the students at the William H. Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Dean of the law school, which on Saturday celebrates ‘‘a 40th anniversary Barrister Gala,’’ Schwartz also is the author of 10 books including What the Best Law Teachers Do.

When asked, Schwartz pulls out the flash cards and takes an impromptu test.

“I can’t believe you are testing me,” he laughs.

He is not stumped, calling out the names of dozens of students.

In What the Best Law Teachers Do, Schwartz addresses “relational skills” — something he says is a must for good teachers.

“It’s things like respect for students, knowing students by name, investing in their success in whatever educational endeavor they are doing, and preparing incredibly hard,” he says.

Schwartz grew up in Southern California with his two sisters and a brother. Their father, Albert, died of Hodgkin lymphoma when Schwartz was 9 years old. After his death, their mother, Alice, went into a “pretty dark place and things were pretty challenging.”

It was around that time that Schwartz came up with his personal mantra: “You have to choose to be happy.”

He and his future wife, Stacey, went to the same high school. He says he doesn’t remember meeting her in school. They “met” several years after, when he phoned her roommate and Stacey answered. They talked for four hours.

“We had an incredible conversation. She told her mom after the call that she met the man she was going to marry,” he says. “She had a list of 16 qualities that she was looking for in a husband that she had written out. She is a very organized person.”

How many qualities did he have?

“She’s asked this question a lot and I have heard her answer it. She says I had all of them and more.”

“I think I was already in love on the phone,” Stacey says. “I told my mother I’d met the man I was going to marry and she said, ‘For crying out loud. Have a date first.’”

At the time of that phone call, Schwartz was dating two women named Lisa. Stacey said, “‘If you are dating two people, then neither one is probably right for you.’ She worked me.”

Schwartz met Stacey’s parents before he met her in person — she was away at college. He went to their home to pick up her mail. Her parents were impressed.

“This is one of those things if the prior boyfriend is bad enough, you look great,” he says. “The prior boyfriend didn’t talk to other people and he showed up at a wedding wearing flip-flops. I could at least be better than that. I had on shoes, closed-toed. Socks even.”

When he first saw her, he says he “thought she had, I know this is going to sound weird, but the most beautiful hair I have ever seen. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God. Her hair is so beautiful.’”

On their first date, he tried to impress Stacey by throwing out the Latin phrase “inter alia,” which means ‘‘among other things.’’ So how does inter alia come up in casual conversation?

“Only when you are trying to impress a date.”

Stacey says her husband is “a lot of fun in a nerdy way.”

“We like grammar,” she says. “We laugh ourselves silly when we see a misplaced modifier in a headline.”

LV2TCH

The front vanity license plate on Schwartz’ Honda Insight reads LV2TCH. And he means it. He has done classroom training programs at up to 100 law schools in the United States and several foreign countries including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and a Middle East country that he says the State Department forbids him from naming.

At some of those schools, only a few faculty members would attend his classes. When he taught a course at Bowen about 2 1/2 years before he accepted the deanship, all but one faculty member attended, and that person was on a sabbatical.

One of those professors was Lynn Foster, who had been teaching law for 30 years when she completely overhauled her teaching method.

“It is so much work to overhaul your teaching toward the tail end of your career because you say, ‘You know, my students could be learning better,’” Schwartz says.

“When the deanship opened up here, it was really easy to say, ‘That’s a place I would like to be.”’

Foster says Schwartz cares “deeply about his students” and their well-being.

“He has put our law school on the national map in a very positive way, and we are lucky to have him as our dean,” Foster says. “His energy level is astounding and in the three short years he has been our dean, with his oversight we have improved our bar exam preparation program, instituted a first-year professionalism course, improved and expanded our attorney mentoring program, and instituted other improvements.”

“Under his leadership, our school also became a co-sponsor of the national and highly respected Institute for Law Teaching and Learning. Our dean is professionally generous in a way that few deans are; when the occasion arises, he offers opportunities to present at conferences and write books and chapters.”

At the Bowen Law School, Schwartz created a mandatory lawyer-student mentoring program; required live-client learning sessions; set up a clinic in the Arkansas Delta where students work with low-income clients; and established clinics in mediation.

“I am very much a person who is a change agent,” Schwartz says. “I really think we need to change education to be much more of a service to our students.”

In January, he flew to Saudi Arabia to teach workshops for law professors at Prince Sultan University, the country’s first law school for women. Many of the professors wore traditional head and body coverings.

“One of the women who only showed her eyes was the most dynamic teacher in the group. You know how people say — and I’ve never really tested the theory — that you can see people smiling with their eyes? This woman was a ball of energy. You could see her lighting up the room and all she had to work with was her eyes. It was really spectacular.”

DEAN’S COUNSEL

On Saturday, inside the ballroom at the Marriott downtown, the law school hosts a 40th anniversary Barrister Gala to recognize its high-profile alumni. The institution started in the 1960s as a night school extension of the University of Arkansas before becoming the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law in 1975, and the UALR William H. Bowen School of Law, in honor of its former dean, in 2000.

Schwartz took over as dean in January 2013, replacing John DiPippa, who is now dean emeritus and a professor at the law school. Schwartz says it is not intimidating having his predecessor around.

“He could write a book on how to be a great former dean,” Schwartz says. “He is amazing. He has been incredibly supportive. He’s been a great resource.”

Schwartz created a dean’s advisory council that includes DiPippa. He uses the council when he needs advice on “tricky issues” like whether something would be a good investment for the law school.

“For me, if I could have created a person to succeed me, I would have created Mike Schwartz,” DiPippa says. “He is energetic, he is personable, he is focused on the students.”

Since Schwartz came on board, DiPippa says, he has changed his own teaching style.

“Traditionally, educators have talked about the right method to teach students without regard to whether or not it is helping them learn, and he just flips that,” Di­Pippa says of Schwartz. “So I ask, ‘Is this actually effective in helping these students in learning what I want them to learn?’”

Schwartz received his law degree from the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. He came to Little Rock from Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kan., where he was associate dean.

Eileen Ma was one of Schwartz’s students at Washburn University. She is now assistant reviser of statutes for the state of Kansas.

“It would not be an overstatement of any kind for me to say that I owe my career as an attorney to Mike Schwartz,” Ma says. “I met him on my first day as a 43-year-old law student, and I hugged him goodbye on the day I last walked through the school’s doors as a law student.

“He has answered hours of questions in lecture and during office hours, handed me handfuls of tissues when the stress of being a single mother and law school student got to be too much to handle, and has offered hours of career advice. And through it all, he never wavered in his belief that I would graduate from law school and succeed as an attorney.”

For all that, she also calls him “uncompromising” and “not an easy grader.”

“It is a mark of personal pride that my grades improved in each class that I took with Mike as my professor. In fact, my work involves drafting legislation and I owe my passion for my work to Mike and his class in transactional drafting. Mike was as excited as I was when the first bill that I drafted was enacted into law.”

HEART ATTACK

Four years ago at age 49, Schwartz and his wife were in a coffeehouse in Kansas when he felt something was horribly wrong. It was a cold day and he was burning up. He told Stacey he thought he was having a heart attack and she drove him to the hospital. He was right.

At the time, he weighed 215 pounds. Since then, he has lost 70 pounds and now exercises and eats lots of vegetables and fish.

“What I remember really vividly as I was being wheeled in for my procedure is feeling really guilty toward my wife and daughters,” he says. “I have a really great life and I did not like that feeling of knowing I could have taken better care of myself.”

Samantha, 23, is a kindergarten teacher for Teach for America in Trenton, N.J. Kendra, 20, is studying psychology at Hendrix College in Conway.

Samantha was given her name because, he says, it is tradition in the Jewish faith to name a child after a deceased relative. They decided to base the name off the first letter of Stacey’s father’s name, Steve, who was killed when a tree fell on his tent. Kendra was given her name because the couple thought it would be cute to nickname their girls Sam and Ken. That worked with Sam but not Kendra.

The family is Jewish but “not particularly religious.”

“There is a wildly feminist Passover that we do every year. We wrote our own version of the prayer book that you use for that holiday. … It’s got a whole feminist slant on the story. We usually invite one or two non-Jewish people to the thing because if you are Jewish, you would be offended by how we butchered the story.”

When the Schwartzes married, they took Stacey’s maiden name, Hunter, as their middle name. He says he always uses Michael Hunter Schwartz professionally to avoid confusion with another law professor named Michael Schwartz. And he says one of his sisters once dated a man named Michael Schwartz.

“There is no other Michael Hunter Schwartz.”

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