Diversity

Nov. 24, 2015 We are witnessing an alarming trend across the nation, where overt acts of racism and dismissive responses to racist conduct continue to plague institutions of higher learning. As officials launch an investigation over last week’s hate crime incident at Harvard Law School, the Society of American Law…

Villanova Law School will co-host a pipeline conference with The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) on Friday, November 13, 2015 from 8:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. The conference will include thought-provoking discussions with lawyers and advocates on the obstacles that marginalized communities face in accessing and…

14-981 bsac Society of Am Law Teachers Nov. 6, 2015 — The Society of American Law Teachers (“SALT”) has filed a friend-of-the-court (amicus curiae) brief in support of the respondents in the United States Supreme Court case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.  The brief was completed and filed thanks to the pro bono help…

The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) joins others in condemning the murders of nine African Americans at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the series of church burnings in the region. But condemnation is not enough. We must use these tragic incidents to prompt and…

By Hazel Weiser Our system of funding higher education through grants and loans might be exacerbating income inequality, especially along racial lines. In the 21st century, a college degree is the new high school diploma, necessary to acquire any economic independence in a post-manufacturing era, although certainly no guarantee. And according…

By George Critchlow A Hispanic student raised in poverty in central California will be the first person in her immigrant family to graduate from college.  Her goal is to work with people of limited means on issues affecting families, communities, and employment.  She would like to be a lawyer…

By Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law I understand people trying to put a positive spin on yesterday’s Fisher decision on affirmative action and today’s  Shelby County decision on the Voting Rights Act of the Supreme Court and I hope I am very wrong…

We are a group of Latino/a Law Professors who wish to address some of the fallacies of the  David Bernstein ScotusBlog Commentary of June 25, 2013, “Hispanics and affirmative action in state universities after Fisher.”   While this complex issue cannot be fully addressed in a short letter, we believe that…

By Lisa R. Pruitt  I don't watch TV or follow much pop culture, and most of the country music I occasionally listen to is on old albums by the likes of Sara Evans, Faith Hill, Martina McBride and Alison Krauss.  But this was apparently a "big week" in country music thanks to Brad Paisley and his new album Wheelhouse.  I was on the road on Tuesday, but by the time I was catching up on email early Wednesday morning, I had lots of messages from friends giving me a heads up on the furor associated with Paisley's new song, "Accidental Racist," which includes a cameo from LL Cool J.  Commentators have varyingly discussed Paisley and his new song thusly: a "middle-age rural liberal reckoning" "well intentioned, if cringeworthy" "cringe-inducing sincerity" "ponderous and lumpy, the worst sort of agitpop" "some kind of elaborate joke" "intellectual undercookedness" "country's ultimate postmodernist" "how we 'do' race in the age of Obama" "a masterwork of camp to heap our snark upon" and, perhaps the most high-brow reference, "a Derridean act of derring-do." In short, as one commentator put it, the song has attracted "an unusual amount of ... sneering." Eric Weisbard did not sneer in his piece for NPR.  His headline references the history of white southern musical identity, and Weisbard touches on biases against the South, as well as white-on-white biases: As you may have heard, Paisley is sifting through some rubble of his own right now, having been declared a national laughingstock by virtually all commentators coming from outside mainstream country. But then, this condescending dismissal is nothing new. There is a history to "Accidental Racist," the history of how white Southern musicians — heatedly, implicitly, at times self-servingly and not always successfully — try to talk about who they are in answer to what others dismissively assume they are. After all, while the Jim Crow South was Anglo supremacist politically, American culture offered a very different dynamic. Ever since white Northerners started putting out their records, Southern whites have represented a backward rural mindset in a national culture of jazzy modernity.  ... Variety loved jazz but scorned the hillbilly in 1926 as " 'poor white trash' genera. The great majority, probably 95 percent, can neither read nor write English. Theirs is a community all to themselves. [They are] illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons."

By Lisa R. Pruitt One of the most e-mailed items in the New York Times for the past day or so has been Claire Vaye Watkins “The Ivy League Was Another Planet.” (The alternative headline is “Elite Colleges Are As Foreign as Mars.”) In her op-ed, Watkins recounts her journey from nonmetropolitan Pahrump, Nevada to college at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her story is that of a kid from a working class family in “rural” Nevada (her description; technically, Pahrump is not rural because, though unincorporated, its 2010 population is more than 35,000) who didn’t know about colleges or how to pick one.  Lucky for her, Watkins went on to get an MFA from Ohio State and is now an assistant professor of English at Bucknell. Watkins writes of getting her wake-up call about dramatic variations in educational resources when she was a high school senior, vying for a prestigious state-funded scholarship. That’s when she met a peer from a Las Vegas high school who attended a magnet school, took college prep courses, had a tutor, and had spent time abroad.  The variations in resources, she realized, were based on geography:  he was an urban kid and she was a rural one.  But they were also based on class.  She doesn’t specify the background of the Vegas teen, but she mentions that her mother and step-father had not gone to college.  I note that Pahrump’s poverty rate is a fairly steep 21.1%.  Just 10.1% of residents there have a bachelor’s degree or better, compared to about 30% nationwide. Even after meeting the privileged teen from Vegas, however, Watkins didn’t know what she didn’t know.  She remained ignorant of the world of elite colleges, a sector that represented the “other planet” or “Mars” of the headline.  Instead, Watkins applied to UN Reno, she explains, because she had once taken a Greyhound bus to visit friends there. As Watkins expresses it, when poor rural kids apply to college (which, I might add, is altogether too rare), they typically apply to those institutions to which they have been “incidentally exposed.”

Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law As I frequently do Sunday’s mornings in Toledo, picked up the Sunday Toledo Blade at the 7/11 (Comenatchi? (Hi!) Paloatchi (Hi back at you!) Gorum! Gorum! (Hot! Hot!) Rodje! (Sunny!) Tanda! (Cool in here!) being the usual…

By Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law (Update:  Other than Romney and Obama, I am avoiding using names of others here to respect their privacy.  I sent a copy of this post to some of my old HBS classmates and one has pointed…

By Olympia Duhart This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post on June 19, 2012. At its core, A Streetcar Named Desire is a story about culture clash and self-deception. The 1947 play by Tennessee Williams is driven by a conflict between those divided by social class, and…

This morning NPR broadcast a report on the millionaire contributors to the various Super PACS which will only fuel the vitriol of this presidential election cycle. The list of contributors, those who have given a million or more and to which PAC, is available on line. Robert Smith, the NPR reporter, focused on Steven Lund, who had set up a phony corporation to hide the fact that he had given $1 million to Restore our Future, the Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. I could have easily slipped into cynicism, believing that Citizens United (2010) was indeed the death knell of our democracy. I could have slipped deeper into despair thinking that the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn Citizens United, but not before the Super PACS had done their damage and gotten Obama out of office. At first I tried to elicit Stephen Colbert’s satire, his Super PAC, Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow. But even Stephen’s wicked humor didn’t help. That’s all I could conjure was a scene of depressed and disappointed would-be voters who might just sit out this election. I was recognizing the symptoms: cynicism, passivity, and victimhood. These are self-government’s deadly enemies.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, I was struck by a comment on a posting of Professor Richard Sander of UCLA Law School about "The Problem of "Science Mismatch"" discussing his ongoing Mismatch Effect work encouraging cascading blacks down to lower ranked schools. The comment was on what benefit comes from this research and replied, "The obvious benefit is that we would stop discriminating against Asians and whites, and those blacks that were admitted would not have the rest of the world assuming that they only attended Harvard/Yale/Stanford because of racial preferences."

Posted by Lisa R. Pruitt The Occupy Wall Street movement has recently drawn national attention to economic inequality, and several new studies and a book just published also invite us to consider the acuteness of this inequality, as well as its causes and/or consequences.  These publications all highlight education, to one degree or another, as a key indicator of class and class mobility. The New York Times, NPR and the Los Angeles Times all ran features this week on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart:  The State of White America, 1960-2010.  Murray, labeled "a libertarian social scientist" by NPR (and worse things by other liberal pundits), is a controversial figure due in large part to his co-authorship of The Bell Curve.  In that 1994 book, Murray described  a "cognitive elite" who, he argued, get ahead in large part because of their superior IQs.  The controversy was understandable given his assertion that whites tend to have higher IQs than African Americans and some other minorities. I want to focus here, however, on some of the less controversial information featured in Coming Apart. By this, I mean to steer clear of the book's commentary on values and related suggestions for remedying the problem.  (I do, however, recommend Paul Krugman's op-ed and Nicholas Confessore's review which offer incisive observations regarding those aspects of the book).  Also, to be clear, I have yet to read the book and so rely here on characterizations from media reports.

It’s hard to imagine that in 1950, roughly half of the practicing attorneys in the United States were not college educated, but had gone to law school from high school or less. Post World War II brought with it an influx of students, thanks to the GI Bill, and most of those students were men. That wartime anomaly—twenty-five percent of law school students being women—ended quickly. Standardization won out, too, according to Robert Stevens in Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, (the basis of this series of articles on how law schools developed into what they are today). There was not that much difference in the content of the curriculum offered at a local or regional law school and that offered at Harvard, Yale, or Stanford by the late 1940s. The ABA and AALS won: four years of college and three years of full time law school was mostly needed to sit for the bar with the noticeable exception of California (and a few other states), which still had state-accredited law schools and an apprenticeship avenue into practice. What did law school look like: large classes, the case method, and no written work apart from a final examination in each course. This was the time when law schools were the cash cows for many universities. There had been some “reform” in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly, introductory law classes, teaching fellows for tutorial help, the introduction of legal skills courses using the problem method, a few specialty seminar classes, and finally, clinical education. The biggest innovation, of course, was the acquiescence that negotiation, drafting, and counseling needed to be taught even if the case method couldn’t be instructive here.

The End of the Pipeline: A Journey of Recognition for African Americans Entering the Legal Profession by Dorothy H. Evensen and Carla D. Pratt (faculty members at Penn State and proud SALT members) is a “must” read for every law school dean, law school admissions officer, and pre law college adviser. Reading this book will deepen our knowledge about the roadblocks African American students face academically, economically, and culturally in order to cultivate an understanding of what help individuals and institutions can provide to these aspiring students along the way. Reading this book, although fraught with indignities and disappointments, is essentially optimistic, because it makes diversity more likely by identifying institutional and programmatic choices that can make achieving diversity more feasible. Evensen and Pratt’s research examines the stories of twenty-eight African American attorneys who graduated from law school after 2000 as the new millennium began. Each participant passed the bar and is working in the profession. Using an analytic/interpretive research methodology, Evensen and Pratt interviewed these “successful” pipeline travelers. The stories reveal what at first appear to be very specific and individual paths through high school, college, law school, the bar exam, and into practice. But Evensen and Pratt found patterns and organized these stories into categories in order to understand what works to navigate through the often difficult and circuitous pipeline. These stories illustrate how much power a teacher, family member, or friend can wield with a comment or a casual attitude—whether encouraging or not. These personal histories also reveal just how much our colleges and law schools have to restructure themselves as institutions to compensate for the educational inequities that isolate and alienate especially poor African Americans. If we want to have a diverse profession, we need to shake up the cultures of our law schools.

The middle tier law schools in the years between World War I, essentially pre-standardization, and World War II, when much had been accomplished to establish a singular way to teach law, were driven to emulate Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, just as they do now. Of course, this desire back then was to get onto the approved ABA list of law schools and an invitation to join the AALS. Now this emulation comes from an additional source: U.S. News & World Report rankings. In the years that the ABA and AALS were on the ascent, to call a law school merely a step to get its graduates through the bar exam was considered a horrific insult. To emulate Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, a law school had to ascribe to the case book method and hire scholars, avoiding experienced practitioners who were considered mediocre in the classroom, perhaps because their intellect had been diminished by pragmatism or worse yet, cynicism.

The first rule of persuasion is to choose when to begin a story. All of this talk about deregulation of legal education and the practice of law as being good for everyone needs some historical context. (This talk sounds dangerously like it was manufactured by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). I started that examination last week when I posted Deregulation is Just Another Word for … . Today I am moving deeper into history to help us understand how the legal profession became a profession. It’s not a pretty story, because it happened here in the United States: a radical, young, immature, racist, and intolerant place that has always had a hard time living up to its aspirations. Looking back to the time when the American Bar Association—ABA—first began to influence legal education, I am once again heavily relying on the scholarship of Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press 1983).