From Provo to NEOM: A Lawyer’s Career in Higher Education

**John B. Quinn** (0:03)
This is John Quinn, and this is Law Disrupted. And today, we're speaking with Michael K. Young, who I think I've known for, Mike, how long has it been? I mean, almost 50 years, is that possible?

**Michael K. Young** (0:17)
1973, our first year of law school.

**John B. Quinn** (0:21)
So let me see if I can recap this. You grew up in a small town in California, yes?

**Michael K. Young** (0:26)
That's correct.

**John B. Quinn** (0:28)
And you went to Brigham Young University.

**Michael K. Young** (0:30)
That's correct, yep.

**John B. Quinn** (0:31)
And somewhere along the way, you served a mission for the Mormon Church in Japan and learned to speak Japanese.
Then you went to the Harvard Law School and that's where you and I met. So, yes. And you were selected as I was to the law review in our second year. We got to know each other pretty well then, yes?

**Michael K. Young** (0:55)
Yes, but I was selected because I studied 24-7. You were selected just because you were brilliant, annoyed the hell out of me.

**John B. Quinn** (1:04)
I was good at cramming for tests. So, and you had summer jobs at well-known law firms like Munger Tolls in Los Angeles and Oreck Harrington in San Francisco.
And I expected that you would do the thing, every ambitious young Mormon lawyer to be, ultimately ends up doing, is join some law firm, grinding away for a career in a law firm and making a lot of money. But you didn't do that, did you?

**Michael K. Young** (1:32)
No, I'm a case study in downward mobility. So, as soon as I had an option to make more money, I made less.

**John B. Quinn** (1:40)
So, what you did was you clerked for Justice Kaplan on the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts. That's the equivalent of the Supreme Court in Massachusetts, yes?

**Michael K. Young** (1:49)
That's correct, yeah.

**John B. Quinn** (1:51)
And then you clerked on the United States Supreme Court for, was he then Chief Justice Rehnquist?

**Michael K. Young** (1:57)
He was not Chief Justice then, he was an Associate Justice at the time.

**John B. Quinn** (2:01)
Right.

**Michael K. Young** (2:01)
But he is.

**John B. Quinn** (2:03)
And then you went to the Columbia Law School and joined the faculty there, where you started the Japanese or East Asian and or Korean Legal Studies programs, correct?

**Michael K. Young** (2:14)
That's correct, although I spent the first two and a half years actually in Japan teaching at the University of Tokyo to kind of hold my understanding of Japanese law and so forth. So I was on the Columbia faculty, but it's actually a visiting professor there.

**John B. Quinn** (2:30)
Well, I'm sorry if I sold you short there and I left that out, Mike. I apologize for that, but you did those things at Columbia. And then you went to George Washington Law School to become the Dean of the Law School there, correct?

**Michael K. Young** (2:44)
That's correct. That is in the State Department in between that, but yes.

**John B. Quinn** (2:47)
Oh yeah. Let's not forget the State Department where you had a role in negotiating the terms under which Germany would be unified, correct?

**Michael K. Young** (2:56)
Yeah. And got to work on some trade treaties and international environmental law treaties and human rights treaties.

**John B. Quinn** (3:03)
And then you became Dean of the, as I think you've admitted, you became Dean of the GW Law School and then you became President of the University of Utah, yes?

**Michael K. Young** (3:13)
That's right, yes.

**John B. Quinn** (3:13)
And then you became President of the University of Washington, yes? And then you became President of Texas A&M.
And now you're sitting in a remote corner in Saudi Arabia where you're setting up a educational program, I gather, including a university, in a futuristic city that the Crown Prince has initiated, planned, called NEOM.

**Michael K. Young** (3:45)
That's correct.

**John B. Quinn** (3:46)
NEOM, well, and many who, I mean, we've talked about NEOM before on this podcast, and NEOM, of course, it's more than a city. It's like a whole province. It's an area where there are these incredibly ambitious plans to build incredible, unique projects like the Line Project, which is a building which is to be seven kilometers long and something like 400 meters tall and a walking city in itself where everything you need is within walking distance. And your job is to design on a tabula rasa, a blank sheet, what an ideal education sort of program would be, including primary education and presumably vocational education and the university. Is that basically right?