 All right, folks, if I could have your attention here, please. Thank you for being here. We're here to celebrate the career and professional legacy of our colleague and friend, Professor and Dean David Logan. Turn out it's fantastic. This is for you. So I will say that my third year is Dean and it is not always a good thing to have not just one but two former deans on the faculty. But I have been truly blessed to have two former deans on the faculty who are wonderful colleagues and advisors and mentors and be friends. David, I have so appreciated and so benefited from your counsel and your thoughts and your insight, humor. We're going to miss you. So David didn't have to come to Roger Williams University School of Law. He had a pretty good gig in North Carolina at Wake Forest. It's an okay school. Gladiks! He was already a nationally renowned scholar, talented, dedicated teacher, beloved by his students. But he came here because there's something about this school and our public service mission, making the world better one student at a time in our own special way. He chose to come here and help take a very good school and help make it even better. And it is better. It's better now than when you came, David. We will continue to try and make it better every year. And we thank you for that. And if you look around this room, this is your legacy. I'm proud to be a part of it. We are all your legacy, right? And the future of all these fantastic students who are going to be the lawyers and leaders of the future, this is your legacy. And when you come back to visit and you see new students and new faculty and new staff, we will be your legacy. You have done something here that is great and makes a difference. And we all hope to leave things a little better than they were when we started. You made things a lot better. One of the things I admire most about David is that he is a person of deep principle. He walks the walk and he talks the talk. And he tries to always do the right thing for the right reason. And a good example of that is something that many of you may not know about. When David stepped down from the Dean's ship, what was it, eight years ago? Yes, eight years ago. Plus. Yes, eight plus. David and his wife, Ginny, established a next generation law student scholarship at this school. And he didn't want it advertised because he did not want that to be somehow maybe awkward for students who were in his class who might have benefited from that scholarship. Doing the right thing for the right reason. So as David concludes his teaching career as he goes into retirement in North Carolina with family and loved ones, one of our focuses over the next year and more is going to be to raise more money for that scholarship. So David, I'm going to turn the mic over to you. And thank you. And you may be moving on to a new chapter. But please don't be a stranger. So I'm blocking my John Fetterman outfit today. You've never seen me dressing anything but a shirt and tie. Sort of old school that way. But I pulled the sweatshirt out. I said this was sort of an inappropriate thing. So they say to begin talks with a little joke. I've never really adhered to that but I'll do this one. I can try to be brief but for obvious reasons at six foot nine I can't be short. So just, you know, here's the backstory. By the time I was in college I knew I wanted to be a teacher or coach. I wanted to be around younger people. I'd done some coaching in summers and I played on athletic teams and admired a lot of my teachers along the way. And so I went up to graduate school after college and I was in studying political science at the University of Wisconsin. And it was a world that in this respect isn't that different from the world now which is there were a lot of PhDs in social sciences that couldn't find decent jobs. And so I was talking to my advisor and it's talking about whether to finish up and my master's were to push on and do something different. So why don't you go to law school? Of course you can be a lawyer and maybe you can become a law professor. You're interested in the government and stuff like that. And so I ended up in my program and went back to DC, worked in DC for a few years and then went off to law school. And I was lucky to choose to get into the University of Virginia. I was in state and they just increased the capacity for the first year class where you'll like this from 250 to 360 to a new building. And that's why I got in because I would not have gotten in if it was the 250 size. And that was significant for a bunch of reasons but one of them was it was a place that even though it was fancy and everyone was highly ambitious and whatever, students seemed to be at the center of the institution. And we can talk a lot about why that might be even though it's a big state land grant institution but individual students I think felt valued there. And there was not a big gap between faculty and students and so I started stalking some of the faculty and I said, you know, how do you go from being a law student to doing your job? And they said, well, get good grades, court for a federal judge, work at a big firm and then apply. And that was the, probably 95% of the faculties were being built that way. So I checked all the boxes, went off to DC in practice and started teaching on the side of American University as an adjunct. And so my first course I taught was a tip to our LP people. I was a legal writing teacher and the joys and perils of that particular responsibility. And then the next year, Colleen and Jonathan, I taught remedies which I didn't know nothing about but I would basically stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning the night before class and then we semi-prepared the pages that I had to cover. It was a nightmare. And the students did not get a quality education but I got a financial. So when I went to the market I was a relatively experienced and pre-level teacher and I got hired by White Forest and I was just lucky because much of what White Forest was like without the national orientation was students were at the center. And that doesn't mean that teachers were easy, doesn't mean that students could coast, all they did have a tradition of 3Ls getting drunk on the ground the last day of classes and that sort of once muddled against drunk driving got involved that went by the board. So I started teaching White Forest and I did that for 21 years and then I got this itch and actually started some people called me and said do you want to be a candidate, to be a dean and you know I checked a bunch of the boxes I've written some stuff and I've been involved in the ABA and the last stuff like that and I was getting sort of tired of the same old same old and wasn't crazy about living in a red state Jesse Helms was my senator and for those of you that don't want to know that was like finger nails on a blackboard every time this name was mentioned and so they had to go on to a blue state and to a start up law school by the name Michael was in the faculty here and you were probably the point man recruiter Lauren Nerschel and Bob Ken and I said wow this place has got tons of potential and no one's given them credit for it they were getting hammered in the projo and there were all these stories about our students who were dumb and they couldn't pass the bar exam and I said you know I think we've got some raw material but done right we can turn this around and make it a student centered place where success of our students was the most important and not the ego of the faculty or God forbid the dean so I did that for 11 years 7 years ago came back to the faculty and during that time I continued to teach torts but I realized this was the perfect job for me to be able to teach fall 1Ls the difference between a tort and a tart to tell students about all of one go homes and about Benjamin Cardoza and learn in hand these titans of the law from the generations before me that sort of paved the way for the intellectual tradition that we all are part of now and to deal with homicidal patients and falling barrels and plates being grabbed from a black man in a motel and of course many many many banana peels some of them brown red sips it but also when I came here I had a chance to teach some upper level students and I had this ground being board class and to introduce students to sort of in depth character studies of really interesting people like Felix Frankfurter Hugo Black and remarkable visionary leaders like Thurgood Marshall and Laura Warren that floats my boat almost as much as doing the tort stuff because again these are people that shaped the law and I was sort of on the back end of I saw these changes coming and I felt it was my obligation to pass on to the next generations more of an appreciation for this law but it happened because of courageous people with law degrees making tough decisions and I wanted you to know about it so wow so my life's work has been a true pleasure and it rarely felt like a job except faculty needs and this is truly a bittersweet moment there's an old saying the days pass slowly but the years fly by I turn 73 next week and 40 plus years and the classroom would pass in what seems like a blink of an eye but it's important to know when to leave the stage before the audience wants you to leave the stage and you can't do it and that was the lesson Bob Kent he said you know, Bob was 80 or so when I got here and he kept teaching and he said when I lose my fastball, tell me and he did I said when it came and he retired gracefully he happened to have that conversation thank you for your service doddering around the classroom but I'm clear-eyed about this and this is the right juncture so North Carolina was the logical next place to move many of you know I've been living in North Carolina commuting from Asheville here since middle of August and there's a bunch of reasons for that primarily both of my sons lived in with the second and uh this was by big reveal our first grandchild was born on Saturday night so pops and so I'll be two hours away and God willing be able to watch him grow in my dotage so I packed up my Subaru, just about all done thank you to Shirley and Catherine in particular and I'm ready to head south you know forward to Greg Paul's next chapter I'm excited by move to Asheville great beauty and more bears and more breweries than any city in the country so if you're ever in Asheville shoot me an email and we'll pop a cold one and you can join me on what will be my primary job in the next years which is to sit on my deck looking at the Blue Ridge Mountains and finally I wish you peace thank you very much