This concept captures the shared desire to have a student, faculty, and staff community that is fully diverse, inclusive, and respectful of our differences, with particular attention to racial diversity. We believe the following to be important steps for fostering a diverse VLS community.
Cultivating, recruiting, supporting, and retaining a diverse faculty is fundamental to the Law School’s mission. Racial diversity—that is, a meaningful presence of Black faculty and other faculty of color—is a particularly crucial aspect of faculty diversity. A broadly diverse faculty with strength in racial diversity is better positioned to generate dynamic scholarship; mentor future generations of attorneys, leaders, and scholars; and deliver a high-quality legal education. Further, the diversity that characterizes a great law school includes strength in scholarship and teaching that critically examine the many ways in which race and law interact. Creating and maintaining both forms of diversity is an ongoing process. Just as one never stands in the same river twice, our faculty and the scholarship and teaching it generates constantly change as individuals and generational cohorts join, leave, and take on new roles over the course of their careers. Commitment to diversity therefore requires consistent and concrete action over time, with no expiration date.
We recommend that VLS take immediate steps to develop and implement an action plan to: significantly diversify the faculty within the next several years; bring on additional faculty whose scholarship and teaching focus on race; and establish permanent mechanisms to ensure that both faculty and scholarly diversity receive the consistent attention and resourcing they merit. In developing and implementing this action plan, we encourage VLS to take a broad view of diversity, including persons whose life experiences and scholarly interests touch on various forms of subordination, but to keep race and racism firmly in focus.
The following items should be considered in developing this action plan:
The imperative to create a fully diverse VLS community applies to non-academic staff, including administrators, as well. Student interactions with staff are both frequent and important. Students are better prepared for leadership, citizenship, and professional competitiveness when they are exposed to diverse perspectives. Shortcomings in staff diversity—particularly the underrepresentation of BIPOC staff, and the clustering of such staff in lower-authority roles—create barriers to connection and success for BIPOC students. These students are less likely to seek, value, and benefit from services provided primarily by staff who do not reflect their lived experience. Such shortcomings are compounded by diversity gaps among the faculty, as these students may lack mentors and role models in both domains. Low diversity in high-visibility and high-authority staff roles also impact BIPOC staff, in part because it sends a negative message about opportunities for growth.
We recommend that VLS take immediate steps to develop and implement an action plan to enhance recruitment, hiring, and retention of diverse non-academic staff, including administrators. In developing and implementing this action plan, we encourage VLS to take a broad view of diversity, including persons whose life experiences and scholarly interests touch on various forms of subordination, but to keep race and racism firmly in focus.
The following items should be considered in developing this action plan:
Cultivating, recruiting, supporting, and retaining a diverse student body, in both the JD and LLM tracks and with particular strength in racial diversity, also is fundamental to the Law School’s mission. A diverse student body allows all students to benefit from a diversity of perspectives, understanding and negotiation of which is critical to personal growth, intellectual rigor, and leadership in a diverse profession and world. It also creates the conditions in which Black students, other students of color, and other students whose experience includes identity-based subordination can feel free to pursue their own personal, intellectual, and leadership paths. Graduating diverse classes of students also serves the legal profession as a whole, in which patterns of underrepresentation and inequality stubbornly persist.
We recommend that VLS take immediate steps to develop and implement an action plan to more effectively cultivate, recruit, support, and retain a diverse student body. In developing and implementing this action plan, we encourage VLS to take a broad view of diversity, including students whose life experiences and scholarly interests touch on various forms of subordination, but to keep race and racism firmly in focus.
The following items should be considered in developing this action plan: