Neal Rubin: Kind words from 45 years ago still resonate at U-M's law school

It was just one sentence in one classroom, 45 years ago. One compliment the professor might not have remembered a week later.

One kindness, Len Niehoff will tell you, that helped shape the life of a kid who had no idea how to apply to college and wound up at the University of Michigan, who had grave doubts he belonged there and now has an office, and who needed to hear he was good at something even if he looks back and thinks he probably wasn't.

A new school year has begun, from Monroe to Marquette and from crayons to labs and laptops. Fresh faces, new clothes, the same old qualms and insecurities.

Niehoff, an attorney and professor, has already welcomed his classes at U-M's law school, and re-read the note that sits permanently in the middle of his desk: "Remember: you have just one job."

That job, he said, "is to make sure that the students know that I love them and I care about them. If you can get there with your students, everything else will work out."

But that's not the sentence that has stayed with him as he pondered the seminary, opted for law school instead and presumably went on to shape lives himself.

That sentence came from Edmund "Ned" Creeth, a professor of poetry who wore tweed sport coats and too-short trousers and once admitted to Niehoff's class before a rousing lecture that he was tipsy because a visiting literary Irishman had brought out whiskey at breakfast.

What Creeth told the class about Niehoff on a non-tipsy day was too specific to bolster anyone else. It's worth repeating anyway, because everybody needs a boost sometime and we're all in position to provide one — if we think to make the effort, and understand how long the words might echo.

Breaking slabs and breaking bread

Niehoff is 65, and however you're thinking a law school professor of that tenure looks and acts, he doesn't.

He's a shaven-headed, broad-shouldered, Harley-riding third-degree Tae Kwan Do blackbelt. He's also a talented chef who still writes poetry and delivers monthly sermons at Suttons Bay Congregational Church, up in Leelanau County where he and his wife own a century-old farmhouse.

For a charity auction the U-M law students hold every year, he offers what he calls his Life Skills Class, a day that always includes self-defense training and some time in the kitchen. To help inspire bids, he takes the stage and breaks cement slabs with his hands.

At the pulpit, he asked the members of the flock last month to consider which six figures from history they would invite to a dinner party.

"Reasonable people can disagree," he said, "but personally I wouldn’t invite to my party any of the great villains of history, like Vlad the Impaler, Joseph Stalin, the emperor Nero, or Mr. Maloney, who gave me a C in my high school biology class."

That would have been at Walled Lake Western, which today launches students to top-tier universities but back then, in Niehoff's telling, was not set up to guide a first-generation candidate for higher education.

He did not find out about the SAT, for instance, until he was walking down a hallway with a friend who asked, "Are you going to take that test?" His entire preparation for what has become a multi-tiered rite of passage, often with tutors and practice exams, involved tracking down a No. 2 pencil.

He did well, but stumbled through the deadlines for admission forms. When he hadn't heard back from U-M after a few weeks, he drove to Ann Arbor and dropped in on the director of admissions, which is a bit like being shorted on your unemployment payment and checking in with the governor.

The director invited him in. Likewise, once he was admitted, he asked a renowned religion professor for the chance to do anything at all and was rewarded with a part-time job.

"You get the theme," Niehoff said. "I keep asking people for things I'm not qualified to get."

He even asked kindly Creeth, respected academic and author or editor of at least four books, to critique his poetry.

Words from the wise

One of the poems was about Yonge Street in Toronto, Niehoff said, "very long and overpacked with symbolism."

There was also a sonnet about the end of a relationship, "and I fear I probably burdened him with many more."

Creeth read them, and wrote notes discussing the parts he liked and the passages he thought might perhaps be improved. That was a staggering affirmation, and then one day the professor told the class that in order to truly understand the craft and difficulty of poetry, one must attempt to write it.

“I only know of one poet in this class so far," he continued, "and that is Mr. Niehoff.”

Niehoff has carved out several nice careers, as a media lawyer with Honigman and an educator with dozens of scholarly articles and editorials to his credit. He coauthored a book. He’s launching a new class this year about Shakespeare and the law, which he's thoroughly excited about.

He routinely says things on his own that others might repeat as gospel. "What you are is what you do, and not what somebody tells you to do,” for example. Or, “It’s completely compatible to be both demanding and kind.”

Or, in contrast to a profession like lawyering that requires a license, "An awful lot of stuff in life you can be just by doing it."

What resonates with him, though, is that he has the power and the ability and the privilege to be able to determine how dozens of young people feel.

On the best, most successful days, he will help them feel the way he did when a man in a tweed coat told everyone in the room that Mr. Niehoff was a poet.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com, or on TwiX at @nealrubin_fp.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Sentence shaped University of Michigan professor Len Niehoff's life