Artifact « Tower Talk

Artifact

	Desk The wood background of this blog is a close-up photo of my teak desk. I brought it with me from the Law School. Kim and I found it at an antiques store in Austin. We believe it’s from colonial Indonesia, most likely the desk of some mid-level bureaucrat. I appreciate all its scratches and scars, and I’ve contributed my share.
	Books Books have been very important to my life and my career. I teach a freshman seminar called “What Makes the World Intelligible?” The goal of the course is to show students that they interpret the world through the lenses of different belief systems. The reading list includes: Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, Plato’s The Republic, The Divine Comedy, the Book of Job, the Book of Genesis, Steven Weinberg’s On a Piece of Chalk, and John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
	Boots I grew up in California, studied chemistry at Berkeley, served in the Persian Gulf in the Navy, and went to law school at Harvard. But within a month of arriving in Texas in 1977, I was a Texan at heart. These boots were a gift from the UT Law faculty when I stepped down as dean to become president in 2006.
	Crossword Puzzles Crossword puzzles are a hobby. I especially enjoy The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. If you’re interested in crossword puzzles, I highly recommend the movie, Wordplay.
	Family This picture of our family was taken a few years ago on my 60th birthday. In addition to these three children, I have two older children as well. I’m proud of all five of them, and my grandkids too.
	Golf Golf is a metaphor for ethics. Once you kick your ball out of the rough when no one is looking, you’ve started down a path that renders your score, and your integrity, meaningless. At Enron, people started by kicking the ball out of the rough. Then they shaved off a stroke here and there. Pretty soon, their accounting practices—and ethics—were meaningless. Golf gets me outdoors with good friends. It requires enough concentration so that by the second hole, I’ve left my worries behind.

UT Austin