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(I am pleased to share with you this very interesting report and analysis by Prof. Alan Rosenstein (Minnesota). -EV)
by Wisconsin Law and Liberty Institute (WILL), a conservative advocacy group, has implemented a required 1L at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “Reorientation DEI Session” Last week, students had to fill out „.race timeline worksheetListing “at least seven significant moments” of “significant life events related to race,” worksheet It lists 28 „common racist attitudes and behaviors,“ including statements like „I'm colorblind“ and „We've overcome it.“ Students who attended the sessions confirmed to me that the WILL reports were mostly accurate.
I contacted the University of Wisconsin School of Law and received the following statement:
Friday's session on diversity, equity, and inclusion for second-semester 1L students means the law school will provide students with education on „bias, intercultural competency, and racism.“ It was held in partial fulfillment of the requirements of ABA Standard 303.
The sessions were interactive, with plenty of opportunities for students to interact with each other. A central goal was to help students develop critical thinking skills regarding these topics.
We do not expect students to automatically accept the views expressed in referenced documents any more than they would accept legal preparations, judicial opinions, or professorial reasoning. Intellectual freedom and academic freedom are core values of the Law School.
We therefore welcome and encourage active debate on important issues of law and policy, and this session provided a forum for such discussion.
My purpose is not to pass judgment between competing explanations of the session. In fact, different honest observers can characterize the same event differently. To properly evaluate a DEI session, you need to answer many more questions, including: Were you offered a variety of reading materials that offered different perspectives on race and racism? To what extent was the format of the session training or rather open-ended discussion? If the latter, did the session leader or other students provide an environment in which students felt comfortable expressing opinions that were contrary to those expressed on the worksheet?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have a problem. Some of the concerns are legitimate: WILL claims that such training would violate civil rights laws and create a hostile environment (e.g. lawsuit (especially against Penn State for extreme DEI training). Others are substantial. Especially a week after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the statement „It's not the color of my skin that matters, but my character.“ It is unpleasant to read that it is a „transformation“. Defensive power. ” And then there is the practical question of whether such training actually takes place. backfire.
However, I would like to focus on another point. Institutions committed to academic freedom and free inquiry should not use mandatory training to impose contested moral claims (this is also how the Wisconsin sessions played out). (without taking a specific position on whether or not the incident occurred). This principle is especially important for law schools, which aim to train future lawyers who, after all, must be able to consider all sides of an argument, rather than dogmatically accepting one view or the other.
The question is not whether one agrees with the view in question. Academic freedom does not only limit the indoctrination of “anti-racism” ideology reflected in handouts; It similarly rules out adopting anti-racist critiques as institutional orthodoxy. Nor is the issue limited to debates about race (which are at the heart of the current culture wars). It would be equally inappropriate for conservative-leaning universities to force students to take compulsory classes on the virtues of capitalism and the vices of socialism, or for liberal universities to take the opposite position.
Indeed, mandatory training often touches on issues that have a normative dimension or are controversial for that matter. For example, during a law school's required orientation session, you are expected to discuss the school's policies regarding free speech, harassment, sexual misconduct, and more. Each of these policies reflects substantive choices that not everyone agrees with. For example, some members of the law school community may think that free speech policies go too far or go too far, and they may think the same is true of other policies.
However, DEI training differs from existing policy training in two important ways.
First, training on policy content assumes that the policy actually exists. If a law school (or university) has already taken a substantive position on an institutional issue, it stands to reason that it should communicate the content of that policy to members of the community. And if community members don't like that policy, they should oppose that policy, not oppose training that informs them.
However, it is possible that law schools may adopt as official policy the argument that expressing „fatigue and despair“ against racial discrimination is itself racial discrimination, and adopt one of the arguments in the handout. (It is also not clear what it means to adopt such claims, which are treated as a matter of „policy.“)
Second, even if a policy exists, training should be limited to making students understand the policy, not forcing them to agree to it.
None of the above means that discussions of race and racism, including the presentation of arguments based on anti-racism, critical race theory, and other schools of thought, should be part of law school courses or classes. I am not claiming that this is inappropriate for the department. Required 1L curriculum. but, That's what the discussion should be about: A free exchange of ideas that recognizes that no one has the right to force anyone else to agree on the most controversial debates in modern life.
How to address race and racism in law school curricula is an important and difficult issue. Law schools (and, as the law school pointed out, the ABA requires education on „bias, intercultural competency, and racism“) should consider both perspectives, no matter how they approach the issue. We should start from scratch. It is effective and consistent with their commitment to academic freedom.