The ABA’s demand for ‘diversity’ is in truth a perversity
Quin Hillyer
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A recent warning shot from the American Bar Association to the Hofstra University School of Law serves as one more reason the ABA should just go away.
The world would be better off without the ABA, which long has pretended to be a professional-standards organization while actually acting more like a left-wing lobbyist and cartel. In this case, the ABA has dinged Hofstra, and essentially threatened Hofstra’s accreditation, for (allegedly) violating ABA’s Standard 206(b), which requires “a faculty and staff that are diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.”
The ABA’s race-and-gender bean-counting comes just as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a major case about whether to slap down even implicit ethnic quotas in college admissions. But the court made clear years ago that explicit quotas are forbidden. By the time next summer when a Hofstra representative must appear before an ABA star chamber, the ABA’s own requirement probably will be considered, by implication, unconstitutional.
When an accrediting association of lawyers is in tension with the supreme law of the land that lawyers are sworn to uphold, something is wrong with that association.
Hofstra’s percentage of faculty members (full- and part-time combined) who are “people of color,” 9.4%, is not too far below the national percentage for all lawyers, which is 14.1%. Its percentage of female faculty members, 37.5, is almost identical to the percentage of female lawyers nationwide, which is 38.3. More importantly, of full-time faculty at Hofstra, more than half are women.
It’s nonsensical to threaten punishment for Hofstra for featuring a faculty which is representative of the profession’s population. This is especially true when considering that faculty obviously skew older than students. Faculty “diversity” will be a lagging indicator as trends continue of student bodies steadily becoming more inclusive of women and non-whites.
Even those calculations above, however, miss the more important point — namely, that it shouldn’t be the ABA’s business to require “diversity” at all. Professional standards should have nothing to do with sex or color. Absent obvious discrimination against protected classes of faculty applicants, the ABA should pay no attention at all to such superficialities. Even then, such considerations probably should be of little concern to the ABA, because civil rights laws protect against such discrimination anyway, without the ABA sticking its collective nose into the situation.
As Johanna Markind of the Legal Insurrection blog writes, “with accreditors like this, it’s surprising that universities don’t approach all faculty searches these days with a ‘no whites need apply’ attitude.” Markind reminds readers that the ABA’s approach itself seems to contradict both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
By now, it’s almost trite, but no less appropriate, to cite the famous line from Chief Justice John Roberts that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” It is the ABA, not Hofstra, which clearly is discriminating on the basis of race.
In the long run, for this and many other reasons, the best way to stop the ideological ruination of the bar is to stop letting the American Bar Association have any authority. The ABA’s cartel should be denuded.