In law school, I was editor-in-chief of our Public Interest Law Journal, which meant that on any given week I had a stack of manuscripts on my desk and a red pen that saw a fair share of action. One week, a piece came across my desk written by Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor Nixon fired in the Saturday Night Massacre, by then an elder statesman of American law.
I did not know that at the time. Well, actually, I knew it, but it didn't register. I was in the flow of editing and I simply went to town on that piece: circling, cutting, scribbling questions and comments in the margins. When I was done, it honestly didn't look all that different from the papers I used to hand back to my students when I was teaching 11th grade English.
I took the edited article, put it in a manila envelope, dropped it with Cox’s assistant, and went on with my week.
And then it hit me.
This wasn't a teenager's English paper. This was Archibald Cox. And I was a third-year law student who had just unleashed a torrent of red ink on the writing of one of the most respected legal minds in the country – in the 20th century. Who, exactly, did I think I was? Had I lost my mind?
So I did what any mortified 26-year-old would do. I wrote him a note, apologizing that my critique had gone too far, and told him not to bother revising.
He wrote back – snail mail style with a hand written letter.
"Dear Ms. Kelly," it began.
No apology for your personal note was needed. Far from it. No other kind of note could do as much to warm an old professor's heart by enabling him to say, “Well, maybe I added a little”… your changes are wholly correct.
Archibald Cox — special prosecutor, Solicitor General of the United States, a man who had stared down a sitting president — took my edits, sent the piece back, and then turned around and thanked me for the privilege of doing so. He didn't tolerate the feedback. He didn't merely accept it graciously. He told me, in writing, that receiving it had warmed his heart.
I did the final edit and brought the pages to his office during his posted office hours. When I opened the door, he stood up — all six foot two of him, though he seemed taller still with his straight back and bow tie — and he could not have been more gracious if I'd been a colleague he'd known for twenty years rather than a third-year student who'd just marked up his prose suggesting he could do better.
I kept his note. It's framed and hanging in my office today, a few decades later. Not because of anything I wrote to him — I don't even remember the specific edits — but because of what he wrote back. The black cursive, the warmth, the graciousness. That's what stayed.
We spend a lot of professional development energy teaching people how to deliver feedback with care, as we should. But far less energy goes into teaching the harder skill: how to receive it, especially from someone with far less standing than you.
Cox had every excuse to bristle. He could have found my margin notes presumptuous. He could have quietly ignored them, or worse, made sure I understood — subtly, politely, the way powerful people often do — that a third-year student's opinion of his writing was not exactly welcome. Instead, he did the opposite. He made me feel like I'd given him something valuable rather than something impertinent. He turned the entire transaction around: what could have been a moment of my embarrassment became, in his hands, a moment of genuine collaboration.
That is a specific, learnable move. It is not the same thing as being nice. It's the decision, in the moment someone with less power than you offers you something honest, to receive it as a gift rather than a challenge.
Every school is full of small versions of my manila envelope moment. The first-year teacher who tentatively suggests a different approach to the department chair who's taught the course for fifteen years. The parent volunteer who raises a concern with the head of school. The student who tells a veteran faculty member that an assignment didn't work. The junior colleague in a meeting who disagrees, carefully, with someone much more senior in the room.
In each of those moments, the person with more standing has a choice usually made in a fraction of a second, often without even noticing they're making it. They can let the junior person feel the size of the gap between them. Or they can do what Cox did: absorb the feedback, take what's useful, and make the other person glad they spoke up at all.
The second path costs nothing and it is, in my experience, rare enough that people remember it for decades. I certainly have.
So here's what I'd ask school leaders and faculty to sit with this year: think about the next time someone junior to you — a new teacher, a student, a parent who is new to the school — offers you something honest. You don't have to agree with it. You don't even have to use it. But you can choose to receive it the way Archibald Cox received a third-year law student's red pen: not as a presumption to be tolerated, but as a note that warmed an old professor's heart.
That's the whole lesson, really. It fits on a single page, in black cursive, in a frame on my office wall.