Elena Kagan isn't real big on diversity. 28 of 29 faculty members she hired at Harvard were white!

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Sun May-09-10 03:49 PM
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Elena Kagan isn't real big on diversity. 28 of 29 faculty members she hired at Harvard were white!

-I just read these articles for the first time today. This is new information for me and one more reason why President Obama should not nominate her to the Supreme Court. I find it hard to believe that anyone who is not a bigot, or who is an advocate of diversity, would only hire one non-white person to the Harvard Law School faculty. This is the 21st century, not 1960! I think any DU'er in her position would have found many qualified people of color and women to hire for that faculty. BBI-

Colored Demos:
A blog on law, politics, democracy, culture, race
Some Questions About Elena Kagan
By Professor Guy-Uriel Charles of Duke Law School
April, 22, 2010

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.

Third, what is the justification for putting someone on the Supreme Court without a demonstrated commitment to opening barriers for women and people of color? Kagan's performance as Dean at Harvard raises doubts about her commitment to equality for traditionally disadvantaged groups. I am eager to be convinced that she is committed to full equality for marginalized groups, but I'd like to see the evidence. Moreover, what other questions would we have about Kagan if we knew more about her and her views?

Read the full article at:

http://coloreddemos.blogspot.com/2010/04/some-questions-about-elena-kagan.html

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Friday, May 7, 2010
Law Professors Attack Kagan and White House on Racial Diversity

Four law professors have attacked Elena Kagan's record on diversity. While she was the Dean of Harvard Law School, only 3% of the professors the school hired were persons of color or women. This is a pretty abysmal record.

The four law professors are Guy-Uriel Charles, Duke Law School; Anupam Chander, University of California-Davis Davis School of Law; Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Indiana University's School of Law; and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, University of Iowa College of Law. After sending a letter expressing their concerns regarding Kagan to the White House, the Obama administration responded indirectly by circulating a set of talking points that seek to defend Kagan's record. The talking points are fairly weak, as the professors explain in an article posted on Salon.com.

The White House does not dispute the low number of women and persons of color hired to tenure-track positions at Harvard during Kagan's deanship. Instead, the White House says the school hired persons of color and women as visitors and that the school could have extended offers that candidates declined. Visitorships, however, do not reflect a commitment to faculty diversity. Instead, they are typically temporary positions used to fill curricular needs while full-time faculty members are on-leave for various reasons. Also, the White House does not provide data regarding the number of persons of color and women to whom Harvard Law School extended offers (rather than hired) while Kagan was dean, and it seems odd that a large number of women and people of color would turn down offers to teach at Harvard.

http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2010/05/law-professors-attack-kagan-and-white.html

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The White House's Kagan talking points are wrong. We questioned Harvard Law's diversity record under Elena Kagan. The White House pushed back. But they got it wrong
By Guy-Uriel Charles, Anupam Chander, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig
May 7, 2010

Unfortunately, the White House’s defense of the solicitor general’s hiring record while she was Dean at Harvard is surprisingly weak.

To begin, and most notably, the White House does not dispute our basic facts. When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, four-out-of-every five hires to its faculty were white men. She did not hire a single African American, Latino, or Native American tenured or tenure track academic law professor. She hired 25 men, all of whom were white, and seven women, six of whom were white and one Asian American. Just 3 percent of her hires were non-white -- a statistic that should raise eyebrows in the 21st Century.

These are the facts that the White House does not try to defend because these facts are indefensible. For those who think that more women and minorities qualified to serve on the Harvard Law faculty were simply nonexistent, one need only look at Harvard’s primary rival--Yale Law School. There Dean Harold Koh led the law school during almost the same period (Dean Koh, from 2004 to 2009, and Dean Kagan, from 2003 to 2009). Dean Koh hired far fewer faculty members--just ten--but he still managed to hire nearly as many women (5 of 10 at 50 percent), and just as many minorities (1 of 10 at 10 percent) as Dean Kagan.

The White House’s primary response -- like the magician performing a trick--is to point our attention elsewhere. The White House says the hiring numbers are misleading because they do not reflect the number of offers that Dean Kagan made to women and scholars of color. But this seems a bit hard to believe. Do women and people of color find a tenured or tenure-track professorship at Harvard Law School less attractive than white men? Do they really prefer to teach at less prestigious schools? Or if they only prefer not to teach at Harvard because of perceived hostilities to women and people of color, why is it that Kagan could somehow overcome these perceptions when it came to conservatives, but not women and people of color? After all, part of the praise for Kagan is that she made Harvard Law School welcoming again for conservatives—in this case, conservative white men.

In order to assess whether Dean Kagan effectively reached out to women and scholars of color, we need the number of tenure and tenure-track offers she made to women and scholars of color. But the White House does not provide us the number of tenure and tenure-track offers that Dean Kagan made to women and scholars of color. In fact, they provide everything but those numbers. An honest defense would provide those numbers in the first instance. (The White House memo implicitly cites the privacy of the individuals who received offers as a basis for refusing to release names -- but we wonder how many law professors would be embarrassed by the public revelation that they turned down a Harvard Law School offer.)

In a sleight of hand, the White House instead provides the statistics for the number of visiting offers made under Dean Kagan. A visiting offer, however, is hardly tantamount to an offer to join the tenured faculty. Many visits are not offered with an eye towards permanent appointment. In other words, "visiting professor offers" without actual offers for permanent hire do nothing to increase meaningful faculty diversity. Many visits are made simply because the institution needs a temporary person to teach a class; law schools call these "podium" visits. Moreover, many visitors are foreign law professors who are temporarily rounding out the school’s curricular offerings. These foreign law professors could conceivably be cast as "minorities" in the American scheme, but such casting would be extremely misleading as many of these professors do not share the history and experiences of people of color in the United States and may not even identify as racial minorities, especially if they are part of the controlling majority or even minority in their own country.

Read the full article at:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/2010/05/07/law_professors_kagan_white_house/