Vanderbilt Law School Background Image

2020 Anti-Racism Steering Committee Report

Diverse VLS Community

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.

Faculty recruiting and retention 

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:

  • In the next several hiring seasons, strongly prioritize hiring of tenured or tenure-track scholars whose lived experience would meaningfully enrich our faculty’s diversity.
  • In the next several hiring seasons, strongly prioritize hiring at least one tenured or tenure-track scholar whose scholarship and teaching focus centrally on an intersection between race and the law, including Critical Race Theory.
  • Continue to prioritize multiple other forms of faculty diversity (e.g., gender, LGBTQ) in faculty recruitment and hiring, including an awareness and understanding of intersectionality.
  • Seek creative opportunities to better identify and attract diverse scholars outside of, as well as within, the ordinary processes (e.g., AALS) for hiring both entry-level and lateral faculty. Such efforts could include creating, supporting, or participating in pipeline programs for diverse legal scholars.
  • Increase inclusion of diverse perspectives, including those of BIPOC students and faculty, in faculty recruitment and hiring processes.
  • Invest in mechanisms to ensure that all diverse faculty are given the mentorship, resources, and other forms of support needed to thrive at the Law School.
  • Consider expanded use of visitors, short courses, adjuncts, and post-doctoral scholars to expand the diversity of both faculty and scholarship, particularly in the short term.

Staff recruiting and retention 

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:

  • Develop and publish a diversity statement that speaks to diversity within the student, faculty, and staff populations, building on the statement that currently speaks only to students (available here). 
  • Prioritize recruitment efforts that will address the acute underrepresentation of BIPOC staff in the Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, Admissions, and Career Services offices.
  • Seek creative opportunities to better identify and attract diverse staff outside of, as well as within, ordinary hiring processes. Place particular priority on creative efforts to enhance diversity in student-interaction and high-authority roles, including administrative roles.

Student recruiting and retention

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:

  • Undertake a comprehensive evaluation of Admissions strategies, practices, and outcomes in order to identify both areas of strength and opportunities for growth in building and sustaining a diverse student body.
  • Enhance the direct involvement of VLS student affinity groups in the identification and recruitment of diverse prospective students.
  • Strengthen connections between VLS and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including those in Nashville and elsewhere in Tennessee, in order to cultivate new generations of Black lawyers and legal scholars who may choose to pursue their studies at VLS.
  • Explore the option of creating, supporting, or participating in a pre-law pipeline program to encourage college students from historically underrepresented backgrounds to pursue a law degree; provide them with the tools to gain law school admission, including at VLS; and equip them with the tools to start their legal studies with a solid foundation for success. The entire VLS community could have a role to play in such a pipeline program.
  • Actively seek donor opportunities to meaningfully expand scholarships for students from underrepresented groups and formulate strategies to use such scholarships to enhance the diversity of each incoming class.
  • Actively seek donor opportunities to endow at least one new scholarship named for a victim of racial injustice, to be awarded to prospective students who have demonstrated commitment to combatting racial injustice and advancing civil rights.
  • Meaningfully expand concrete mechanisms to prepare incoming BIPOC students, many of whom face additional challenges given the historic imposition of socioeconomic disadvantage on persons of color, for law school success. Special consideration should be given to establishing a Summer Bridge program for underrepresented incoming JD students.
  • Meaningfully expand concrete mechanisms to retain BIPOC students, many of whom face additional challenges given the historic imposition of socioeconomic disadvantage on persons of color. Special consideration should be given to expanding academic support programs; expanding diversity within programs like the Vanderbilt Legal Academy Scholars Program; creating a food pantry and a professional dress closet program (akin to the Commodore Closet, available to certain undergraduates); and establishing hardship funds for students facing economic difficulty, including in access to technology and other learning tools.
prev    next