Rory Bahadur sees the lamented but entrenched US News ranking system as an insuperable bar to racial diversity at elite law schools. It is, he writes, a caste system that perpetuates itself. I get it. My first wife Margo J. Anderson has spent her career studying immigrant social mobility as an historian at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Here's how it came to be. We grew up in the fifties in entirely white towns - she Oceanside, me Levittown, and Massapequa, Long Island, NY. We were spoon fed the myth of individual upward mobility.
When we graduated from college (she Bucknell, me Holy Cross) we joined the Peace Corps and went to a seacoast town just north of Bombay[Mumbeiमुंबईला in Marathi]. Staring us in the face was the caste system. I was assigned to a Catholic fishermen's co-op - just past St. Peter's school - across the road from the Sri Siva cooperative on the road to the old Portuguese fort where only the lepers lived then. On the seaside of the fort was the fishing village - Christian and Hindu. Each of the co-ops had an ice factory and a fleet of lorries.
Another Catholic community raised sugar cane - and looked down their noses as the fisherfolk whose saris and lungis they wouldn't be caught dead in. The women crossed themselves at roadside statues of the Virgin like you could have found on the road to Fatima.
We saw that Bassein (Vasai) was like Brooklyn, or Worcester, Mass. Clan and ethnic ties demonstrated that social mobility - and immobility - were governed by caste structures. Like Brooklyn where I went to high school in Crown Heights at a Jesuit school - Brooklyn Preparatory. The Catholics at St. Ignatius next door on Rogers Avenue were as distinct from the Orthodox Jews in black suits shopping on Nostrand Avenue as were the castes and clans in India. We Catholics had our own schools - and they did too. Mobility was social, not individual.
What is the connection to law schools? Well Harvard College recruited heavily from three sources: historically Protestant prep schools, Boston Latin High School, [not Jesuit B.C. High] and the sons of Harvard grads. That is the financial and academic elite and their heirs. Not much has changed. The law school? More of the same but the academic elite are more broadly drawn. They have the pick of the litter. What are the odds of African American and Latin American students hitting the testing stratosphere? Pretty low. We know why.
Do the academically elite deserve what they get? Well, mainly I guess. When I applied as a grad student of left wing historian Howard Zinn at Boston University my 760 verbal/490 math GRE score and 650 LSAT carried no weight at Harvard especially in light of my unremarkable undergraduate record. BC and BU seemed dull to me. So I turned them down and went to Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey, following the pied piper Arthur Kinoy of civil rights movement and Chicago 8 defense fame. There I found the People's Electric Law School - 20% minority, 25% women at a public university with nominal tuition. ($500/year). How did Rutgers do it? Leadership - Dean Willard Heckel recruited Ruth Ginsburg, Arthur Kinoy, Frank Askin (Rutgers grad later a GC of ACLU), Paul Tractenberg (founder of the Education law Center), Alfred Blumrosen (counsel to the EEOC), Rutgers grad Alfred Slocum - a Newark native who, like Askin, was sent for the one year Ivy gilding at Yale (later Public Advocate - a cabinet level agency in NJ).
Now over 50 years old, Rutgers Minority Student Program recruitment has persisted. Why can't Fordham do it? Brooklyn or Cardozo? Rankings and financial necessity. And let's be frank - African American students who reach the 90th percentile on LSAT- are well positioned to get into a higher ranked and richer school eager to diversify their student body. Aspiring lawyers of strong academic skills go for the highest rank school they can get into - calculating that job prospects for graduates further up the food chain are better. And since there are generations of lawyers from the elite schools who prefer to hire from their fellow alumni, the system perpetuates itself. Caste and clan do that.
Rory Bahadur, below, discusses the structural obstacles to minority recruitment.
-GWC
Law School Rankings and The Impossibility of Anti-Racism by Rory D. Bahadur :: SSRN
By Rory Bahadur //Washburn University School of Law
The U.S. News and World Report Law School Rankings invoke ideas about excellence and high achievement in the legal academy, but under the surface, they also operate as a catalyst for systemic racism. They do this by capitalizing on system justification, a palliative evolutionary mechanism that forces all members of society, from privileged high socioeconomic groups to the disenfranchised, to buttress the societal status quo pervasively and unconsciously.
These responsive desires to keep the status quo invoked by the rankings are the same ones responsible for the perpetuation of the caste system in India, and every other division of human societies into dominant and disenfranchised groups. This system justification is not subject to introspection because it operates through powerful unconscious mechanisms. As a result, consciously antiracist people do not experience dissonance when making institutional decisions based on the rankings, even though those decisions perpetuate deeply rooted structural racism.
The only schools enrolling black students at the same level as their representation in the general population are the schools U.S. News ranks so poorly that they are not even assigned a numerical ranking, listed only as Tier 2 schools. This is because the metrics used to evaluate success are themselves racist metrics which devalue blackness and overvalue whiteness and wealth. Undoing this cycle of perpetuating and reinforcing racism requires the reexamination of fundamental assumptions on which our society is based. Assumptions like America being a meritocratic society and that we live in a just world perpetuate systemic racism. Mechanisms that mitigate the impact of systemic racism in legal education and beyond exist, but while corporations are now widely adopting these mechanisms and decreasing racial inequity, legal education is unlikely to follow suit because real antiracism in legal education will reduce institutional profitability.
Citation:
Bahadur, Rory D., Law School Rankings and The Impossibility of Anti-Racism (August 25, 2021). Forthcoming 53 St. Mary's L.J. _ (2022), Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=
No comments:
Post a Comment