I believe that critique powerful, as we don't want to go in blind, but I want to highlight another, very troubling bit about Elena Kagan documented by Duke law professor (and Michigan Law grad/Michigan Journal of Race & Law founder and 2010 symposium speaker!) Guy-Uriel Charles (and quoted in yesterday's article by GG)
Money quote:
Granting that we know very little about Kagan, what do we make of the facts that we do know? Here are some data that gives me pause about Kagan. When Elena Kagan was Dean of the Harvard Law School, she hired 29 tenured or tenure-track faculty members. But she did not hire a single black, Latino, or American Indian faculty member. Not one, not even a token. Of the 29 people she hired, all of them with one exception were white. Under Kagan's watch Harvard hired 28 white faculty members and one Asian American.
One of Kagan's purported qualifications for the Supreme Court is that she is a consensus builder. The chief evidence for that contention is that she broke the hiring logjam at Harvard and made it possible for Harvard to hire conservatives. It might sound absurd to some, but I will accept the point that one of Kagan's chief selling points is that she assured that Harvard did not discriminate ideologically. I am personally gratified that Harvard Law School is not closed to conservative faculty members. I support ideological diversity and would not want to see qualified individuals discriminated against on the basis of ideology.
But what about people of color? How could she have brokered a deal that permitted the hiring of conservatives but resulted in the hiring of only white faculty? Moreover, of the 29 new hires, only six were women. So, she hired 23 white men, 5 white women, and one Asian American woman. Please do not tell me that there were not enough qualified women and people of color. That's a racist and sexist statement. It cannot be the case that there was not a single qualified black, Latino or Native-American legal academic that would qualify for tenure at Harvard Law School during Elena Kagan's tenure. To believe otherwise is to harbor troubling racist views.
Given equality in hiring for disadvantaged groups in something liberals hold near and dear to our hearts and usually depend on the courts to enforce, how can we accept this in a nominee?
3 comments:
Can you explain the process for hiring at law schools? Did Kagan have complete say, or what is the process?
Also, out of curiosity, what was the race breakdown of the hires of other top law schools during the same period?
I'm sure it's different at every law school, with certain similarities. At Michigan, where I am, as I understand it, everything is done by a committee of current professors that rotates each year. I'm unsure what her direct role would be. However, I'm positive she must sign off on every hire/tenure offer, and if she were paying any attention to the hiring process with an eye to equality, she should have ensured that this kind of situation couldn't have happened.
As far as other law school hiring during the same period, I don't know, and I'm not sure how I would get that data. However, I'm not sure a comparison is needed. Theoretically, by comparing, you'd be looking to see if other schools thought there were good minority candidates out there. However, I'd argue that even in a best case scenario for this argument - all schools were all-white, that more means that all the schools were not hiring equally than that there were no good minority candidates out there.
And in addition to signing off on every hire/tenure offer, the dean of a school can set a hiring/promoting agenda. He or she can prioritize whatever he or she wants to. If a dean wants to recruit female faculty or people of color, the dean can usually make sure that gets done.
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