Transcription of Danielle Conway for the show Maine’s University #267
Lisa: My next guest is Danielle Conway, who is dean and professor of law at the University of Maine School of Law. She joined the law school officially in July of 2015, and is nationally known as a leading expert in public procurement law, entrepreneurship, and as an advocate for minorities and indigenous peoples. Thanks so much for coming in.
Danielle: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: I guess, as it usually the case, I always have to ask the things that I don’t know about first. I don’t know what public procurement law is. What is that?
Danielle: It’s okay. Public procurement happens all around you. It’s what makes society work. It is the means by which the government regulates itself in the purchasing of goods, services and construction, for all the things that we need to do as an organized society.
Lisa: How did you become interested in this?
Danielle: I became interested in public procurement because of my military obligation. I was an ROTC cadet. That’s how I paid for my university schooling, and I had to fulfill my obligation as an Army officer. The Army said, “If you would like, you can go to law school. We’ll give you an educational delay.” I delayed, went to Howard University School of Law, earned my law degree, passed the bar, and I was summarily called back to government service, as a captain in the U.S. Army. They said, “You will be practicing public procurement law.” That’s how it happened.
Lisa: I thank you for your service. It’s amazing, you’re in the Maine Army National Guard. You were sworn in in 2015, and you have more than 25 years of active and reserve service with the U.S. Army?
Danielle: That’s exactly correct, and I have to tell you, I got a wonderful letter in the mail last week which alerted me to my eligibility for retirement. I’m announcing, with you today, that I am going to be retiring with 28 years of service.
Lisa: Wow, that is amazing. You’re a lieutenant colonel at this point.
Danielle: That’s correct.
Lisa: You’ll retire, I’m assuming, with that same rank.
Danielle: Yes, it’s been an honor to serve, and I have to thank all of my mentors, but more importantly all of my fellow soldiers who made it possible for me to do 28 years, and do the good work that I believe I’ve done for the government.
Lisa: This is an important thing, and I don’t know that as many people know about the military and legal connection as they do, say, doctors in the military. Is this called the JAG program? Is this part of that?
Danielle: Yeah, our corps is called the Judge Advocate Generals Corps, and we are the largest law firm in the nation. At last count, we had about 1,600 lawyers represented in the JAG Corps. We do everything from criminal law to defense work, from public procurement to environmental regulation. We write policy. We advise commanders. We make the military engine work, and we make it work according to the rule of law.
Lisa: How did this prepare you to become a dean and professor of law at the University of Maine School of Law?
Danielle: I am very fortunate that as a military officer for 28 years, I have learned from some of the best leaders in the business. Many people think about the military as this authoritarian organization. In fact, it’s an organization that promotes teamwork, collegiality, respect and dignity. It’s those characteristics that I bring to the deanship. Having spent 28 years learning from the best leaders in the business, something had to wash off.
Lisa: You also have done, you’ve authored numerous books, chapters and articles. You’ve delivered numerous speeches. You’re really sort of a multi-communicational individual. How does one get good at all of these different aspects?
Danielle: Great question; one gets good at these things by saying “yes” to everything. I made it a rule when I started practicing to always say yes, not because I was trying to meet particular stepping stones, or get to a particular place. Something about the law and something about leadership makes you always want to try something new. By saying “yes” to tasks or assignments, you learn something. That’s how I’ve progressed in my career, to actually learn a lot about a lot of things.
When you do that, you begin to see how everything’s interconnected. There’s really nothing you’re not exposed to. If you say “yes” to it, learn from it, transfer that knowledge to the next task.
Lisa: This must serve you well in your, I’ll say your job, as a mother of a 5-year-old son.
Danielle: Yes, he is a task.
Lisa: What has that been like for you, to have such a strong intellectual and communication background, and now you have a 5-year-old?
Danielle: See, it’s a problem, because I’m looking at this 5-year-old and trying to talk to him like a 25-year-old, so that’s my fault. It’s been a journey, and an extraordinary journey. He is fun. He is excited. He is a diva. He breaks down, he gets right back up. He’s resilient. It’s teaching me a lot about who I need to be, as a leader, a mother, a friend, a parent. There’s a lot of forgiveness that goes with being a parent, because they teach you that you are completely fallible, but all you have to do is keep coming back to them with love and encouragement, and they give you another chance every time. It’s amazing to me.
Lisa: Yeah, I’d have to say that that’s true. There’s so much about parenting that’s just about showing up-
Danielle: It is.
Lisa: … And being willing to engage.
Danielle: It is. Some days you show up with your A game, some days you show up with your C game. You just show up.
Lisa: It’s true. My kids are now older, so sometimes … They’re all great kids, and most of the time they will tell me all of the great things they learned from me, and every so often they’ll slip in something about my C game. I’m like, “Thank you for keeping me humble. That’s really very sweet of you.”
Danielle: They are very good scorekeepers.
Lisa: Yes, they absolutely are. You have an interest in minorities and indigenous peoples, and specifically I think you have an interest in people who are seeking asylum. Tell me about that.
Danielle: As you can tell, and your listeners will learn, I am an African-American woman. It has been a very interesting row to hoe, being who I am and being in the places where I found myself. I say “interesting,” sometimes interesting means challenging, other times it does mean disappointing. Most of the times, it just means being resilient and successful and thoughtful about all the privileges I have, and how those privileges should be communicated to others.
I’ve had great successes in my life, and I believe that those successes are going to be best recognized when others can share in them. I’m very interested in immigration, asylum issues, not just facing Maine but facing the nation, how we grow our nation to be inclusive, to respect diversity. These things are critical. It’s critical because it’s how this country, how this nation was founded.
Sometimes you hear things today that make you think people are forgetting that. With the privileges, the challenges, the successes I have, I want others to experience that and understand, it comes from being part of this collective. That is what we are. We are a collective in the great nation that is this United States of America.
Lisa: It seems like we are now at a place where people are, where there’s more friction, there’s more conversation happening. I think that that makes many people uncomfortable. There seems to be more people who are willing to speak their peace about being a minority, or maybe not being a minority. Maybe people were speaking their peace about disliking immigrants. I think this discomfort is probably good, because I think there was a lot of stuff that went unsaid for a really, really long time.
Danielle: Exactly, I think people have to speak. Part of the thing that is most important to me as a teacher, to communicate to my students, is you can speak, but speak with respect, and speak with a belief and a veracity in what you’re saying, but then also listen with the same intent. Listen with the same kind of strength and respect for which you propose your own statement or comment or view of the world. If you can listen as well as you speak, then the friction and the angst and the anxiety that we experience when we disagree will be a learning opportunity.
Lisa: How do you feel about the current climate of, say, micro-aggressions that have come up on university campuses, and students saying, “This university professor said something that, maybe it seemed very small to somebody else, but to me it felt very deep and hard.” What kind of a climate is that to teach in, and to be a dean in?
Danielle: I’m a person who has approached the pedagogy with an interest in exploring some of those issues, not in wiping them out. If you are feeling like there has been a micro-aggression lodged towards you, my response is to make that known and then to discuss that. Make it available as information to the person who’s teaching you.
I think on college campuses, it is important to have discourse. It should not be a place where political correctness rules the day. Rather, if we learn how to speak and listen to one another, we can actually work through these things that we call micro-aggressions, we can work through what we may identify as white privilege or economic privilege, and find out why those things do cause oppression to certain segments of our community. Then, start figuring out solutions; how do we address it? I am all for the discussion and the discourse, and I would actually counsel people not to jump to a place where we cannot speak about all of these issues, to find solutions.
Lisa: I do think that that’s an interesting conundrum, that people now feel boxed in by all the things that they don’t know how to say in a politically correct manner. That creates its own set of problems.
Danielle: One thing I learned when I was studying the theory of teaching, from a woman who has been a fabulous mentor to me, Jill Ramsfield, she first taught at elementary and then high schools, and then got a law degree and taught at law schools. She always said, “As a teacher, you have to be genuine in how you listen to people. You have to listen with integrity, and you have to listen with honesty.”
That’s what I’d like to proliferate on campuses. Many of us speak, but how many of us listen? Then, listen with good faith. If someone is presenting a topic to you, and it feels bad, and it feels negative, keep listening. Open your mind, open your soul to it, and try to understand the person’s perspective. Then, try to intervene in that perspective with your own. Each requires a good faith listener at the table.
Lisa: Do you think that we are educating attorneys these days, or really any professionals, but because you happen to work with attorneys, on how to listen?
Danielle: I think that we have implied we taught this skill. I think that there are several courses that have entered into the curriculum that actively teach it. We have negotiations courses, we have skills-based courses where we interview clients now. It’s not the stodgy, stale classroom that some of us may have learned a lot of these techniques from books.
Rather, we’ve actually elevated to a place where we practice these trainings and skills, and we call them experiential learning. Yes, law students are actually getting explicit practice with how to listen. Can we do better? Always. Listening is hard work.
Lisa: You mentioned that you had an interest in law school at least in part because of your ROTC background. Your interest in law school actually goes even further back than that. Tell me about that.
Danielle: I had this wonderful toy, and it was one of those I think Fisher-Price toys, where you would have a plastic record on a little turntable. I don’t know where my mother got this toy, but on this toy was a speech from Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream.” I used to play that Fisher-Price record all the time, and listen to this man’s melodic voice, just resonating in my ears.
I’d listen, and I’d listen to my mom, I’d listen to her friends that would come over. Of course, they’d be talking about politics and civil rights. I kind of put those two things together and I was like, “I think this gentleman, Martin Luther King, Jr., was all about civil rights. Let me find out a little bit more about him.” My mom had these wonderful Encyclopedia Britannicas. This was all before digital. I would go to these encyclopedias, and I would find out everything that it had to say about Martin Luther King, Jr., about civil rights. It was like self-learning, and then listening to all the people around the table.
That’s where it started, and I was about eight years old when I had that toy and first started on this journey of reflection on what these words meant. All of the work I came up with was that lawyers really helped Martin Luther King, Jr. in his march to freedom, and his march for civil rights. It was lawyers who did it, and so I fused those things together, civil rights and law, and look, I started practicing procurement, you’ve got to love it.
Lisa: You say that your role models include your mother.
Danielle: Yes, so my mother, she has a great story and I’m really happy you’re asking about it. My mother was a person who consumed undergraduate degree on a part-time basis. My father was not very supportive of her studies. She had four children, “You should be home taking care of these children.” My mother would study anywhere she could. I would find my mom studying in the bathroom.
It took her ten years to get an accounting degree and then she said, “You know what? I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I want to do more.” She decided to go to law school. I was in high school at the time, so I watched my mom go to law school at night. I watched her study, I watched her pull her hair out, I watched her go to the racetrack to get more money to pay for tuition. It was terrific.
My mother, at night, she did this thing called law school, and she was amazing at it. Her perspective was amazing. She wasn’t trying to get the best grades. She was trying to learn the information. She’ll tell you she got an “Oh, Lordy” degree, not a cum laude degree.
She was an older woman, so she could not go to the law firms like so many of us have the opportunity to do, so she opened up a law firm in her basement. She represented community members. She represented our neighbors who were involved in the criminal justice system. She represented everyone, and it was such an impressive display of community organizing, her being available in our North Philadelphia community, to people who had never laid eyes on a lawyer.
She eventually began to work for a union, and then she got the gumption to actually run for municipal court judge in Philadelphia, and she won. The latter part of her career was spent on the bench, doing her work as a judge. I think she is the most amazing, flawed human being that there is. She is my role model.
Lisa: We had Sue Roche on the radio show, from the Immigrant Legal Aid Project. She also did “Maine Live.” I’m always interested to think about lawyers, because you described your mother, and obviously we had Sue Roche on. You were talking with me early about Deirdre Smith, who also does legal aid in the community. Lawyers, they give a lot. There are a lot of good lawyers out there, who are doing a lot of good work. You don’t have always the best … For some reason, lawyers don’t always get the best kind of reputation.
Danielle: Yeah, the narrative, especially these days, is not good around the law, the legal profession, or lawyers. I think lawyers are partly responsible for it. Many lawyers have to work so hard and so long on complicated, sophisticated issues. They don’t pay attention necessarily to the narrative and the rhetoric around them.
I did a survey that I introduced to lawyers involved with the [inaudible 00:52:20] of court. I asked them, “What’s your responsibility in policing the narrative around the legal profession?” A good percentage of them thought, “That’s not my responsibility. My responsibility is to serve my client, to act with integrity, and let my actions define me as a lawyer.”
Unfortunately, because of the digital world we live in, because of the significance of media in our society, we have allowed the narrative about lawyers to be spun by some people who are other than lawyers, and the narrative is not a good one. We need to begin to take that back. We need to explain the relevance and significance of lawyers to our community, and that we are defenders of the constitution. We promote the role of law, and we represent people who are unable to represent themselves. This is the view of the law that I will be promoting, and am just committed to promoting as the dean of the University of Maine School of Law.
Lisa: That leads me very nicely into a question for you, which is what would you like to have happen at the University of Maine School of Law under your tenure?
Danielle: Two programs in particular are quite important to me. We have several priorities, but these two are really important. As I came to Maine, I am a newcomer to Maine myself, I recognized that the bench and bar really needs to diversify, because the community is diverse.
We don’t have lawyers in every segment of the community where we need them. There is a challenge in rural communities. There is a challenge in the newest Mainers accessing affordable legal services. A program that I started when I got here, with the help of my faculty and staff, is the pre-law undergraduate scholars program. It’s an immersion law program, where we bring undergraduate students into the law school for a four-week program, so that they can see themselves as law students, but also receive a program of study that primes them to be the next generation of leaders that this state needs.
The beneficiary group for this is quite broad. We have brought in people who are from rural communities, people who have grown up in poverty, people from the newest Mainer communities, as well as people who have been traditionally under-represented at the bench and bar. We brought them together for this four-week program, 25 deserving students, to teach them about the legal profession, its importance to the community, and how they can use it to actually transform the state of Maine.
Lisa: What would you say to yourself, as a person who’s now along in her career and has achieved this great responsibility, what would you say to yourself as a child, if you had a chance to go back?
Danielle: That’s a great question. What I would say to myself is, “You don’t always have to do everything right. You don’t always have to be perfect. You do have to learn what your voice sounds like, what that voice tells you to do, and you have to be true to that voice.”
As I told you before, I’m an African-American woman. I embrace that, in all of its beauty, in all of its vision. When I walk down the street, everybody knows it. You have to embrace who you are, and that took a long time for me to get there, and I’m sure it takes a long time for other people to get there, regardless of their racial background, ethnicity, socioeconomic situation. I would listen to my voice, and I would tell myself, “Sit still. Learn that voice. Honor that voice. Respect that voice.”
Lisa: I appreciate your sharing your voice with us, with me, today. It’s really been a pleasure to speak with you.
Danielle: Thank you.
Lisa: I’ve been talking with Danielle Conway, who is the dean and professor of law at the University of Maine School of Law. I’m sure that what you want to have happen with the law school, will happen.
Danielle: Thank you, it will.