Walking the Walk: Successfully Recruiting a Diverse Faculty
(from the April 1996 AALS Newsletter)

In the March issue of the AALS Newsletter, the Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Professors presented the first article (in a series of three) on recruiting and retaining ethnically diverse faculties. In this essay, the Committee discusses recruiting challenges and techniques and solicits ideas and advice from members of the academy. In the next article, the Committee will address retention strategies.

As before, in focusing on racial integration of law school faculties, the Committee is limited by its charge, but it recognizes that urgency of the need to diversify faculties in other ways as well. It hopes that the lessons that we learn from successful recruitment of candidates of color can be transferred to other recruiting needs.

The Problem

This article assumes that its readers are convinced of the need to fully racially integrate law school faculties, perhaps for reasons outlined in the Committee's previous publication. Unfortunately, good intentions and even substantial efforts aren't always sufficient. Many schools frequently compete for a relatively small pool of minority candidates with credentials judged to be the strongest under traditional criteria..

A few schools have learned to maximize their abilities to snare such candidates, through such measures as interviewing early and extending prompt offers, thus taking advantage of candidates' desires to avoid a prolonged and exhausting interview season. Such techniques, however, only help to define the destination of a candidate who clearly would have entered the profession in any event. Rather than maximize integration of the academy generally, they simply identify winners and losers among schools in a zero-sum game.

We can make more substantial progress in integrating our faculties by helping to increase the pool of candidates of color whom we aggressively recruit. We can do this in at least two ways: First, we must ensure that our conceptions of merit are not so narrow that we fail to aggressively recruit announced candidates who have great talent and potential despite incomplete traditional indicia of such talent. Rather than competing for the same handful of candidates who are obviously stellar by traditional criteria, we can all take a harder look at potential stars whose paths have been less traditional and thus require more thoughtful assessment. Second, we can help to expand the pool of interested candidates by inspiring younger students of color to aspire to an education and career in the law and by persuading our best lawyers and new graduates of color to consider devoting their talents to teaching.

This Committee's article in the March issue addressed the pitfalls of excessively traditional and narrow conceptions of merit, and little need be added here except to revisit a point addressed by intervening case law. In the March issue, the Committee recommended that universities invoke academic freedom as a shield against state legislatures that sought to preclude them from establishing racial diversity as a critical facet of their educational missions, whether relating to student admissions or faculty hiring. Since the printing of that essay, two of three members of a panel of the Fifth Circuit have rejected as outdated the interpretation of Bakke that supports such an approach. While that decision of the Fifth Circuit stands, law schools in the three states within the Circuit naturally must proceed with appropriate care and restraint. As stated by Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel to the American Council on Education, however, "We do not have a final determination on this issue, and Bakke is still good law in 47 states." Moreover, even the Fifth Circuit decision does not preclude universities from seeking to achieve diversity on the basis of factors other than race that nonetheless may be correlated to race, such as socio-economic background or community activities that would help the candidate bring fresh perspectives to the academy.

To enlarge the pool of prospective candidates, we can lend our support to a number of efforts to increase the flow at various points in the "pipeline." For the most immediate results, we must persuade our best new graduates, judicial law clerks, and experienced attorneys of color to consider careers in teaching and to either register with the AALS or at least apply to a particular school that has solicited the candidate's expression of interest.

By definition, such an endeavor requires us to shift our focus from the existing AALS Register and to use networks within the minority and broader legal communities to identify additional teaching prospects. To work well, this requires more than simply advertising broadly and soliciting help from minority bar and faculty organizations. It usually requires substantial commitment by several members of a law faculty who start their detective work as early as May before the recruiting season by making countless phone calls and following up on innumerable leads. Once the bane of integration when used exclusively in the form of white male "good-old-boy networks," a broader use of minority as well as more traditional networks can ensure that we discover the hidden gems in the minority as well as the majority communities.

When we find good prospects for teaching candidates, we of course face the burden of persuading them to consider teaching as a career, and we should not smugly assume that we hold all the cards. The ranks of law firm partnerships are also badly in need of integration, and a successful young attorney of color can be forgiven for being drawn to the rewards of partnership and to the prospect of leaving her mark on the law and the community as an influential member of the practicing bar. Nonetheless, we can offer our best attorneys of color the opportunity to have a much greater influence on the law and the legal profession through their scholarship and their effect on a generation of students in the classroom, both as inspiring role models and as instructors who bring knowledge and perspective to their courses. Moreover, the droves of practicing attorneys who currently seek refuge in the academy speak to the price that goes with the rewards of an aggressive practice.

To adequately expand this pool of candidates, we must look ahead to our recruiting needs several years down the road. We should groom our most promising students of color for possible teaching careers, by soliciting their interest, advising them of useful academic preparatory steps, helping them network within the academy, and maintaining contact with them after they graduate. No one is suggesting that we should not also extend such advice to majority students. With relatively few faculty of color, however, students of color may be less likely to envision themselves in academic careers, less likely to seek mentors among the faculty, and less likely to be sought out as academic prospects by faculty.

We needn't stop there. Many minority law student and bar organizations sponsor or participate in outreach programs to primary, secondary, and undergraduate educational institutions. Their common goal is provide students with successful minority role models and to persuade students to set their academic and professional goals as high as possible. Though others may quibble about whether the brightest and most diligent of those students, and particularly those of color, would better serve the community by seeking careers in science, business, or the arts rather than in law or legal education, we can be forgiven if we plant the seeds of an interest in the latter. We in the academy ought to support such programs where they exist and help to organize them where they do not.

Finally, we must remember that the most promising of minority law graduates have options, not just between schools in an academic career, but between an academic career and other careers in business, government, or private practice. When we recruit faculty candidates, we often mistakenly assume in our "buyer's market" that all candidates have the burden of proving themselves to us and that we have nothing to prove to them. Aside from seeking and allocating the funding necessary to compete effectively for the best attorneys of color, we should be ready to prove that we will offer an atmosphere in which they can thrive and realize their fullest potentials. In some cases, this may call for strategies such as recruiting two or more candidates of color simultaneously to demonstrate to each the school's commitment to create a climate in which a new teacher of color will not feel isolated or marginalized.

The best strategies for fully integrating the academy may differ from school to school as the circumstances dictate. Yet, we can all learn from each other's successes and failures.

If you have anecdotes, advice, or opinions about successful techniques for enhancing the racial diversity of our teaching profession (rather than simply for luring a candidate from one school to another), please share them with the committee by sending them to the AALS.