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?
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