A Must-Read for Chief Diversity Officers
I just found this very interesting piece on diversity at Inside Higher Ed. Among other things, the author — one Alan L. Contreras, administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization — talks about the impossible task that Chief Diversity Officers are assigned: searching for people who don’t yet exist!
CDOs should read Contreras’ piece, titled Affirmative Inaction. While the author’s intended audience includes the CDOs of universities and colleges, much of what he says is directly applicable to law firms and their CDOs, who have a like-minded focus on diversity. Here are a few excerpts:
Diversity has become a word that must be spoken; those who don’t speak it in the right slightly breathless tone while looking both sorrowful and committed are unemployable.
Universities need to stop treating diversity as an internal, mechanical process and start looking at the larger communities they serve for ways to improve academic opportunities for young people.
Get rid of your highly paid and symbolic chief diversity officers. We all know that they accomplish little. This is not their fault; their jobs are inherently impossible.
Contreras makes that most important point that is all but ignored by most law firms — by the time someone is old enough to attend a law school, his/her options are bounded and no amount of financing can then alter them.
Some firms have taken to getting involved with primary education. Notable among them is Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, which has been working with the North Star Academy, a public charter school in Newark, NJ, to help students prepare for their SATs. Also notable is Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll’s effort to help launch Constitution High School in Philadelphia. These firms are doing much more than looking for people who don’t yet exist — they’re not only helping to bring those people into existence, they’re generating the sort of positive news that other firms are left to envy.
Near the end of his piece, Contreras offers practical advice — Be bold! He was talking to the CDOs at universities and colleges, but CDOs at law firms should consider his advice.
We see the next generation of bounded children all around us. We know who they are because we know where they go to school and who their parents are. We know they’ll be bounded because we can see they’re malnourished (yet obese) — raised on a diet of sugar water and Cheetos by mothers who were raised on sugar water and Cheetos.
Here’s a bold idea, one that could generate much more positive news for a firm than any announcement about a new diversity scholarship program for law school students. Imagine a law firm doing something that you might expect the ACLU to do — pressing a suit demanding that the Fourteenth Amendment be applied to public education.
A lot of people wouldn’t like a logical outcome, but it would do a heck of a lot more good than hearing yet another law firm (hoping to secure Wal-Mart as a client) announce its determination to ignore the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
July 24th, 2006 at 13:01
What do you mean by applying the 14th Amendment to public education?
July 24th, 2006 at 13:36
Allow me to use this sort of stereotype. Student A attends Public School #1; Student B attends Public School #101; there’s a set of railroad tracks between PS #1 and PS #101.
Statistics required by the No Child Left Behind Act show that students at PS #1 aren’t doing nearly as well as those at PS #101. Other stats show that the drop-out rate at PS #1 is much higher than at PS #101, and that far fewer of the graduates of PS #1 apply to college.
A formal study shows what the locals know all too well. The salaries of teachers at PS #1 are substantially lower than those at PS #101. The police are routinely called to PS #1 and very rarely called to PS #101. PS#1 is a much more dangerous place than PS #101, both for students and for teachers. Last year, a student at PS #1 dropped a desk down a stairwell. It struck a teacher on the head, broke her neck, and left her paralyzed. Students thrown out of PS #101 can attend PS #1, but not vice versa.
I could go on and talk about the differences between PS #1 and PS #101, or about the differences between the parents of the students at the two schools, but I’ll assume you get the general idea. All the locals would much rather send their kids to a school that’s more like PS #101 than PS #1. It’s much safer, the education is of a much higher quality, etc.
Both Student A and Student B are required by law to attend their respective schools, but every measure shows that Student B attends a much better school than does Student A, and that — it could be (and has been) argued — is inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause.
As I see it, the firm that dares to take on this problem, one so close to the core of the social disparities that are measured by ethnicity (culture), stands to gain — and accomplish — much, much more than all those firms that are proud to issue press releases about their diversity awards. Their efforts will seem so inconsequential, by comparison.
July 24th, 2006 at 21:56
You might be forgetting a most important law with your suggestion — it’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences!
February 14th, 2007 at 08:23
I’ve just read your post with great interest and wanted to let you know that we’ve published a number of articles on diversity in education, CDO and CEO committment.
Here’s a link to our latest news articles:
http://diversityinc.com/public/1391.cfm
Kimberly Stewart
www.DiversityInc.com