It’s not the first time this happened. And it’s not the first time this happened at a good law school. It happened in 1997 at the University of Texas when prawf Lino Graglia argued that black and Mexican law students weren’t competitive with white students. It caused outrage, but ended with a defense of his academic freedom to say so, with the ACLU behind him.
Then there was Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania, who began by raising the controversial if correct contention bourgeois values were beneficial, who then followed it up by claiming black students were rarely in the top half of the class. That cost her a job.
Now Georgetown law prof Sandra Sellers on a recorded Zoom call with David Batson said it.
Her angst notwithstanding, what was she thinking when she decided that this was a good idea?
In the clip, Ms. Sellers, a mediator with experience in intellectual property and high-tech disputes, discussed the evaluation of Black students with Mr. Batson after their virtual class had ended, according to the university.
“You know what? I hate to say this,” Ms. Sellers said on the video. “I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks — happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on.’ You know? You get some really good ones. But there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.”
When this went public, it resulted in calls for her dismissal, and the dean swiftly obliged.
After the video prompted condemnation from students and alumni, the dean of the law school, William M. Treanor, said he had referred the matter to the university’s Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity & Affirmative Action, which had begun an investigation. He called the contents of the video, which the university learned about this week, “abhorrent” and said it “included reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of Black students.”
“It includes conduct that has no place in our educational community,” Mr. Treanor wrote to the law school on Wednesday. “We must ensure that all students are treated fairly and evaluated on their merits.”
There can be little doubt that given the climate, Sellers’ statement was absolutely certain to end in outrage and her discharge, if not worse. Before anyone says it, it’s not the same as a professor calling for white genocide because this was about black students, and that’s the woke reasoning works. On a more rational note, discussing student achievement by race is inviting disaster, and it seems inconceivable that any academic would not grasp this.
Was this reprehensible, racist and an attack by Sellers on her black students, raising the specter that she treated them unfairly? Yale prawf Monica Bell raises some important questions, beyond the fact that she has never seen the problem of which Sellers speaks.
Plus, teaching is part of my job. If a student says something jumbled in response to something I’ve said or assigned, I’ve communicated in an unclear way. There is also pedagogical value in a jumbled comment. If one of my students is confused, so are others.
If your students aren’t “getting it,” is the problem the students or the teacher? Or is the only real answer, “it depends.” Bell dismissed “mismatch theory” as discredited, and indeed, it is not a well-regarded theory in academia as it conflicts with the preferred narrative. That doesn’t make it wrong.
The simple theory behind the mismatch effect is that a student (of whatever race) who has markedly weaker academic preparation for a class than most of his classmates is not only likely to do poorly in that class. He is also likely to learn less than he would have learned in a classroom full of his academic equals (because professors teach to the middle of the class), and he is likely to suffer from excessive doubts about his capacity and to lose interest in the subject matter of the class.
When law schools like Harvard and Yale snap up the best and brightest black students, they create a downstream problem for second tier schools like Georgetown, the theory goes. By poaching Georgetown Law-level students, Georgetown is left to reach lower to get enough black students into seats.
Beyond the most elite colleges, the cascade effect dramatically increases the academic disparity between those admittees who receive racial preferences and those who don’t. As Sander and Taylor explain it, the cascade effect derives from the fact that black college applicants as a whole are severely underrepresented at the top levels of the academic index rank and severely overrepresented at the bottom. What this means is that as the most elite colleges enroll blacks from the several highest cohorts, the next ranks of selective colleges need to go far lower on the academic index to recruit black students. By Sander and Taylor’s numbers, the gap in the median academic index between non-black and black students is nine percentile points for the most elite schools, but then quickly cascades to huge gaps of 27, 39, 44, and 47 percentile points for the next tiers of selective colleges.
Is this a real problem, one that calls for a real solution so that black students at elite schools are competitive and aren’t left to feel, if not be, inadequate to the task? Or is this just another form of racist rationalization, reflected by prawfs like Sellers, Wax and Graglia a generation before? Regardless of which side you’re on, there are two questions that might be worthy of answers to either ascertain whether there’s any merit to this contention, so it can be seriously addressed and black law students, if working at a deficit, can be helped to achieve. Or that this contention be conclusively debunked and die a brutal painful death.
There are great lawyers who are black. There are crappy ones too, just as with every other race. Whether any of this bears on the practice of law is an entirely separate issue. But if it shouldn’t be an issue at all, then silencing academics and impairing their freedom to express concerns neither fixes the problem nor reveals it as meritless. Still, that Sellers said what she said was stunning given the tenor of the times. A generation ago this was a matter of academic freedom, but what academic in the current campus environment doesn’t realize that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose?
Update: Eugene Volokh raises some interesting thoughts about this at VC.
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Yasmin Mogahed.
“Don’t lie to me. Don’t deceive me. Give me the truth. Even if it breaks me. A painful truth is better than a pleasant lie.”
John 8:32.
“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
I never considered going to law school. Feeling good was good enough for me.
I think she was lacking in that thing they call ‘situational awareness’.
I saw this whole thing being “outraged” in the news yesterday. What she really said is not all that controversial. Some of them are really good, and some are at the bottom. It’s true of all the other law students too, so maybe the issue, if there is a real one there, is simply that she made the observation as to black students in particular. But then, race as a factor in admissions is real. That fact is reflective of the further fact that even the kinder, gentler racists who favor race-based admissions believe they are necessary to help some black students compete. Because otherwise, how could they, right? Yet, the downside of dumping those students into the curve with other students (including other black students) who have been selected on competitive ability is that it sets up for failure the students who are present because they were selected for their color. It’s a predictable and real problem, but members of the academic community aren’t to speak of it, because it might suggest that there is an imperfection in the grand scheme of race-based admissions. So, shepherd those students through with marks at the tail of the class, try to prepare them to pass the bar, and turn them loose on live clients. Whatever ills they have to suffer and whatever ills their clients have to suffer brook no comment. They are simply part of the price that must be paid for paternalisically advancing racial justice.
The narrative is that there is an abundance of qualified minority students who weren’t previously admitted because of racism. If the pool isn’t as deep as claimed, or there is more work needed to prepare the pool for college or law school, then the narrative would be wrong. That would make the narrative angry, and you don’t want to make the narrative angry.
When the choice is between an angry narrative and a bat-shit-crazy-fire-your-ass-for-speaking-the-truth narrative, I think most of us would prefer the former. But of course, I could be wrong.
From what I can gather from Professor Bell’s comments, the statement from Georgetown University’s Law Center Black Faculty, and the Law Center dean, the only acceptable view of the matter is that racial differences in course performance don’t exist and also they are caused by racism.
In another time, that would be considered a conflict.
There have always been fields where the ability to hold two apparently conflicting ideas to be true simultaneously is viewed as an asset, provided they’re the right conflicting ideas. The equal truth of two seemingly incompatible things is viewed not as a sign of error, but as a source of mystery and beauty, a glimpse of the transcendent, and the acceptance thereof as a sign of mature enlightenment.
You may have guessed by now that I wasn’t talking about Law.
To be fair, Bell was clear that one was primary, the other secondary if the primary proved false. It was very much like pleading in the alternative.
The bizarre thing is that the same people going crazy about “racism” here are A-OK with all of the bricks of the argument, just not the finished product.
Everyone agrees that if you designate a group of students with much lower GPA / LSAT scores than everyone else in the school, you’d expect that group to do worse.
Everyone agrees that in every school, the “bottom admits” tend to do worse than average admits.
Everyone agrees that if a group of bottom-admit students was formed because they got an admissions boost athletics / connections / money / legacy / bribery / sleeping with the Dean, that the group would on average do worse.
And, oddly, everyone pretty much agrees that certain minority groups DO have much lower stats–come on, have they seen the Harvard stats?
They just won’t put them together.
Well, “wrong” doesn’t always mean “incorrect.” Sometimes it just means “not allowed to be spoken.”
This is quite literally the whole POINT of AA, which makes it even more bizarre.
AA–which I support, by the way–is designed to ensure we don’t cut entire segments of society off from higher ed, merely because society had already mistreated / under-served them for the prior 12-16 years.
So as currently used, AA is *designed* to admit people who wouldn’t otherwise get in–because if they could get in, they wouldn’t need AA.
And that’s the maddening thing. How can you do any of this in secret? If you’re going to run AA right, you need to be able to talk about the results, in order to address them and fix them.
It’s always dangerous to tell the emperor they arent wearing clothes. Not that the emperor would mind, its the court who has been telling them how great they look that will cut off your head.
“It’s always dangerous to tell the emperor they arent wearing clothes.”
The nuns who taught me grammar would be outraged at that. Whether it is woke or not, I could never have gotten away with it.
Hey! Are you denying my lived grammatical experience?
Also, I suck at grammar.
not really! I meant to note that we all face dogma, and do or do not resist it. over the years. grammatically and much more importantly otherwise.
my nuns: they would have hated our current newspeak. but you use it, while disagreeing with the folks who invented newspeak!
none of which I consider significant, and I hardly mean to suggest that anyone should assess your views in light of my sad grade school experience. grammar: your choice. my small thought is that there is dogma in each generation — sometimes with opposite dogma of much more significance than grammar rules simultaneously being argued as the only way to salvation. consider the McCarthy era; the Vietnam era; to scandalize Sister Jane Francis, the Crusades/
the confusion of acceptance and rejection of current views that might be classified as dogma is in a small way accidently present here.
for me: I much more fear the retribution of those nuns now in heaven, than that of the youngsters with more current views. so I call out “the emperor aren’t wearing clothes”!
Yesterday’s post: the perils of focusing exclusively on the systemic.
Today’s post: the perils of treating the systemic as obvious and implicit.
They were both so close to being woke. Framing is almost as important as identity to mobs.
As you said some posts ago, one must deal with the underlying reality of a situation. To paraphrase the good Dr. Feynman: “When facts don’t agree with your theory, your theory is wrong.”
So instead of recognizing an actual issue, GU goes all woke and fires someone rather than trying to fix something. A perfect example of screeching monkey’s throwing feces. Maybe a better example would be Doug the Dung Beetle perpetually rolling his ball of dung.
Identity politics and being woke means being aware of different identities and cultures while fostering inclusion, minimizing inequality and facilitating advancement. One has to be aware of racial identity and disparity in order to accomplish all of that. It behooved Sellers as a professor to attempt to understand the cause of the disparities and make attempts to mitigate them. It did not sound as though she has made any attempt toward that that end. Instead, Sellers mentioned the on-going racial disparities as though they are a fait accompli. The latter is the problem, not the mere mention.
On the one hand, that was Monica Bell’s secondary point, as noted in the post (her primary point was that this was simply false). On the other hand, as persuasive as you view your own iteration of the point to be, what does that have to do with the actual point raised by the black Georgetown law students who demanded Sellers’ firing? There’s this bizarre tendency of outsiders to make their best attempt to rationalize something in their peculiar way, and then pretend their rationalization was the one that actually happened, except it’s nonsense.
On the third hand, it’s bad enough that elite undergrad colleges now provide remedial English and math courses to entering students incapable of doing basic high school level work, no less succeed in college. But this is law school. At what point are students supposed to be capable of doing the work without being treated like village idiots or coddled like fragile infants? Are you familiar with the soft prejudice of low expectations? Do you really think that black students are just too incompetent to ever be expected to be competitive with white students so that the “on-going racial disparities” are an excuse for failure in perpetuity?
I know Bell said that while denying the underlying issue. Sellers described the problem as on-going. I would like to know whether other professors at Georgetown Law have a similar grading pattern before addressing the students’ demand. Am under the impression there is some “coddling” at law schools. I thought some (not all) have writing clinics and extra support to help students, who having graduated college SHOULD already know how to write. Would need to know in what sense the answers are “jumbled”. IDK what that really means. I guess I am back where I started. 🙂
You make a lot of assumptions about law school at a law blog. You should consider that before writing a comment. As for “jumbled,” I suspect she means incapable of presenting or following a rational argument. It’s a thing lawyers are expected to do and it’s kinda important.
This is the problem with the “diversity” rationale that emerged out of Bakke, the “critical mass” notions that followed it, and ideas about optimal mixes and so on: when and where do the weights and preferences and differential standards ever end, either temporally as time marches on or at whatever stage of our meritocratic filtering processes? How much do you adjust standards to allow for this “critical mass”? America has for almost its entire history been and likely always is going to be a diverse country, so “diversity” will always be present, and if it’s going to remain a “compelling state interest”, then the way to do that is always going to be some kind of quota, whether soft or hard: right now, a lot of the focus is on hard goals and targets.
At least the reparatory, ameliorative rationale we had pre-Bakke (and propounded by Thurgood Marshall) allowed for discussion of differential performances and for them to be acknowledged, as Erik H points out up above, because that’s the entire point, that we’re trying to fix a deficiency. The diversity rationale, meanwhile, necessitates that different people being around each other is a good in and of itself, but if people notice these differences and suggest that different groups are being held to different standards in order to achieve diversity, that’s deemed an attack on diversity and an attack on the groups admitted for diversity considerations. Justice O’Connor famously wrote that “racial preferences” would expire 50 years after 1968 (meaning only 7 years from now), but why would a diversity rationale for racial considerations in college admissions, hiring, or anything else ever expire?
When Bakke was decided, I was very much in agreement with its rationale, as I agreed that diversity was an inherent virtue and that it needed a nudge to reach critical mass. I still do, but there is an underlying assumption that with the right support, it can be reached. There is certainly an argument that we still don’t provide the right support, although I see pushes going for and against these things needed to ameliorate the problems suggesting that progressive ideology will never help us to achieve that worthy goal.
At the same time, since we haven’t achieve the goal as yet, it seems that many are abandoning the goal for fantasy excuses for failure that are self-fulfilling. If you believe that there is no reason black students can’t do every bit as well as white students, then their failure to do so is problem in need of fixing, not pretending is nonexistent or unmentionable if accurate. But it has to be fixed well before law school, and by the time they get to law school, the coddling has to end.
Your honor, because of these racial disparities, I’m not a very good lawyer even though I graduated first in my class from Yale Law School, so I move that the prosecution spot me four “not guilty” jurors to compensate for my intellectual inequities.
Brilliant, Stephanie!
Yeah, drop the academic levels until you achieve parity and everyone is happy… except the bright blacks who would have passed on white standards. They miss out when I make sure I never get a black lawyer, why would I take the risk when I know they run on lower levels.
Ms Sellers should be congratulated for her concern and recognition of a problem, and the School should have started a conversation on how to tackle it immediately.
These law schools are doing nothing for the public’s perception of lawyers intelligence as a whole. Do you really want sub-standard medical surgeons, aviation engineers, or a lot of blacks with great degrees driving taxis?
To be fair, getting a white lawyer doesn’t guarantee you’ve retained a genius either.
Nor does having a law degree guarantee you got a good taxi driver.
“I stashed the bill in my shirt.” Who said this, lawyer or taxi driver?
More likely the client that promises to pay you next week.
Are you paying cash or will that be a check?
True. Just ask Joe Rakof… never mind.