Following up on their many complaints from last month, a group of Stanford Law School students has now issued a set of “proposals” they say will help alleviate the problem of persistent racism targeted at minorities.
Due to the “death by a thousand proverbial [microaggression] paper-cuts” and the “reeling” from such instances as encountering a (white supremacist) Identity Evropa poster, the generically named Coalition of Students of Color compiled a list “focused on five pillars” and presented it to university officials and students at a March 9 confab.
None of the proposals are that different from the demands of any other racial grievance clique. For instance, on faculty diversity the Coalition says that since the US Constitution wasn’t written with racial minorities in mind, “we need faculty who have confronted issues of racism and xenophobia.”
So, naturally, Stanford Law needs more Black, Latinx, Asian and Native faculty “to commit to broadening all of our educational experiences.”
Student recruitment and retention
Students of color provide a lens into the legal profession that cannot be taught. In order to meaningfully increase the student of color population, we ask that [Stanford Law School] hire a diversity officer whose duties include planning minority preview day and organizing recruiting trips to areas that are vastly underrepresented. We also ask that SLS create a fellowship program to support and cultivate diverse students interested in academia.
Campus climate
Race is implicated in almost every class the law school offers. Yet, students are woefully unprepared to think about or discuss issues regarding race. Stanford should graduate lawyers prepared to engage with the intellectual issues of the day. Programming on race and its intersection with the law must begin during orientation.
Similarly, faculty also struggle to address these issues. Torn between challenging problematic statements and hindering speech in the classroom, faculty members forget that when harmful comments go unchallenged by the most powerful voice in the room, students of color in these classrooms are deeply impacted. We propose training to empower our faculty to address such comments effectively so all students in the classroom feel welcome.
The Coalition also wants a “social/racial justice graduation requirement” and an endowed Critical Race Studies chair. It’s seeking regular reports from the Law School on diversity/inclusion matters, and wants SLS to “create a report examining whether students of color have equal opportunities in and after law school.”
If that Orwellian “programming … during orientation” proposition doesn’t result in a raised eyebrow, it probably should.
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