By Eric Wang '06
Columnist

Last month was a tale of two bigotries for America’s law schools. On one hand, the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR) fought tooth and nail for law schools to be able to exclude military recruiters because of their alleged bias against gays. Meanwhile, the American Bar Association’s Section on Legal Education passed sweeping new “diversity” requirements.

If ratified by the full ABA this August, the measure would force law schools to adopt a mockery of diversity that is skin deep. Unlike their opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” however, law schools will likely fall all over themselves to carry out the ABA’s discriminatory marching orders. Oh the irony.

Under the ABA’s revised Standard 211 for accreditation, all law schools must “demonstrate, by concrete action, a commitment to providing full opportunities… particularly [to] racial and ethnic minorities, and… having a student body that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.” By restricting diversity “particularly” to race and ethnicity, the ABA presumes individuals act and think in diverse ways merely because of the way they look.

To put it bluntly, the ABA uses race and ethnicity as proxies for diversity under the assumption that minorities will act in conformity with racial stereotypes. Thus, admitting more of them will bring greater diversity to the classroom and the profession. Perhaps next time the ABA should also include as a diversity factor phrenology – the discredited theory that one’s head shape determines personality.

As someone who lives, breathes, and walks diversity, I am deeply offended by the soft bigotry of racial assumptions that passes for “diversity” among the social elites. I am diverse because of my inherent personality, philosophy, values, beliefs, interests, activities, and hobbies. They make me unique because no one else shares this identical set of characteristics.

What’s more, I can honestly say that these traits are not in any way linked to my race or ethnicity. If anything, they defy all social expectations thereof. Yet, groups like the ABA persist in trying to reduce individuals to nothing more than representatives of their respective racial groups. What gives?

To give the ABA the benefit of the doubt, there are two plausible reasons that might justify its warped view of diversity. First, many people in our society do in fact act in conformity with racial stereotypes. From the way they talk to how they walk, many individuals are pressured into conforming to social expectations about their race. Although this is especially true among minorities, it applies to whites as well. To that end, the ABA should not reinforce this phenomenon unless it believes this is healthy. Perhaps it does; this is, after all, an organization that used to exclude black members.

The second reason that might justify the ABA’s racial generalizations is that most law schools refuse to make individualized admissions determinations to ensure true diversity. Every reader of this column knows from having applied that law schools don’t care a whit about individual diversity. Otherwise, they would conduct personal interviews just as most good medical schools all the way down to selective preschools do.

In response to an e-mail inquiry, Law School Dean of Admissions, Jason Wu Trujillo, stated that most law schools do not offer interviews because of a lack of manpower. “[Associate] Dean [for Admissions Susan] Palmer and I are the only two full-time professionals in the admissions office, and we get between 5,000 and 5,500 applications each year,” Trujillo wrote, adding that Assistant Dean for Administrative Services Bill Bergen occasionally helps.

Be that as it may, the shortage of admissions staff is probably more of an effect, rather than a cause, of the short shrift law schools give to individual applicants. If the ABA really wanted genuine diversity, it would not simply follow along with law schools’ laziness. Instead, it would impose an interview requirement by decree in the same way it imposes its “diversity” requirements.

Ironically, the ABA would have no need to pay lip service to diversity now if it didn’t also consistently require law schools to overemphasize high LSAT scores at the expense of looking at applicants holistically. Yet, only a week after the ABA’s new diversity requirements had passed, John Sebert—one of their key architects—was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, continuing to insist on high LSAT scores as “sort of a consumer-protection issue.” Has this guy ever heard of estoppel?

The ABA’s new “diversity” requirements wouldn’t be so objectionable were it not for the stranglehold it maintains over law schools and much of the legal profession. To wit, in most states, applicants of the bar must have graduated from an ABA-accredited law school. In light of the organization’s new requirements that law schools make sweeping and bigoted racial assumptions about applicants, will FAIR now sue the ABA to protect their constitutional rights? Since suicide is a crime, I won’t hold my breath waiting.

Email: ericwang@virginia.edu