A month ago, during the commencement ceremony for our Cumberland School of Law, Birmingham attorney and Cumberland adjunct faculty member Terry McCarthy, selected as the commencement speaker, captivated the audience by reading from cards written by the new graduates when they were in one of his courses as first-year law students.  His humor, gently roasting the students as he read their comments (and adding a few of his own), demonstrated the ways in which our faculty members get to know their students.  The students loved it.  But the story gets better.  Alan Moore, one of our 2016 Cumberland graduates, wrote to me with this additional information a few days ago:

I don’t know if you’re aware, but Professor McCarthy kept those notecards he mentioned and hand wrote a personal note of congratulations to all the graduates, mentioning something we wrote on the notecards.  These appeared by surprise in our student mailboxes a couple of days before graduation.  I thought it was an incredibly kind and personal gesture.  Law schools have this reputation of being impersonal places where no one gets along, but at least at Cumberland, that’s just not the case.  The bottom line here is that one of Alabama’s busiest and most respected attorneys cared enough to personally congratulate every one of his graduating students (and I believe that’s most of our class). 

The world is better because Samford faculty members—full-time and part-time—invest themselves in the lives of their students.