Just a few months ago (December 2020) I declared that the “essence of progressivism is refusal to deal with reality.” I had some pretty good examples in that post, but none of them can top the current convulsions that are upending Georgetown Law School. At Georgetown recently, a teacher made the mistake of uttering a small dose of reality while speaking to a colleague. This occurred after a recorded class had concluded and everyone else had signed out, but while the recording of the class was still running. Needless to say, the recording of the teacher’s remarks promptly hit Twitter. Thereupon, all hell broke loose.

The subject of the reality that must not be spoken is of course the current all-consuming obsession of academia, namely race. The question I pose is, are Georgetown, and for that matter all of academia, taking this obsession so far as to fully undermine their principal mission?

Probably, you are familiar with how this started. The after-class discussion took place in early March between Georgetown teachers Sandra Sellers and David Batson. Here is video of the key portion of the discussion. The offending words came from Sellers, referring to the performance of students in her class:

“I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, oh come on. It’s some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom, it drives me crazy.” 

Before getting to the reaction to that remark, let me discuss how the reality of affirmative action plays out for a law school like Georgetown.

The Law School Admission Test is taken by nearly all aspiring law students who want to attend a high-ranked school. The LSAT is specifically designed to predict success in law school. Like all such tests, it is far from perfect, and any individual student may far over-perform or under-perform his or her LSAT results. But averaged over the full range of the test takers, the LSAT is reasonably accurate. I have found it difficult to locate LSAT results by race, but in this article last fall in the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald came up with a racial breakdown of LSAT results for the year 2004, which she sources to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:

Of black test takers, 1 percent—or 108 blacks nationwide—scored at least 165 in 2004, 165 being the average for the top ten law schools. Over 10 percent of white test takers—or 6,689 whites nationwide—scored at least 165.

Now consider what this means to you if you are Georgetown Law. As you will see, this falls under the category of “math can be cruel.” According to the US News rankings, Georgetown ranks number 15 among law schools. That’s pretty good. But there are plenty above you. The top five are said to be Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia and the University of Chicago. And all of those want to achieve 10% or more of blacks among their incoming students. Ten percent of the incoming class at just those top five schools is about 170 students, which is already way more than the 100 or so blacks who will score at 165 or above on the LSAT in a year. Sitting there at Georgetown, you can be sure that every one of those top five schools will be making an offer of admission in any given year to every single one of those 100 or so black students with those 165+ LSAT scores. And you can also be sure that all of those black students will accept one of those offers — or maybe an offer from a school ranked number 6 through 14 — before they will accept an offer from a number 15 like you.

What this means is that as practical matter Georgetown can’t attract a single black student with an LSAT score above 165. OK, maybe they’ll get one every few years. Meanwhile, there are plenty of white and Asian students with LSATs above 165 to completely fill their class. Here’s the inevitable result: in many if not most years, the highest LSAT score of a black student in Gerogetown’s incoming class will be lower than the lowest LSAT score of any incoming white or Asian student. Given the relative numbers of black, white and Asian students among top LSAT scorers, and given that all the schools are practicing the same affirmative action, that’s just how the math works out.

John Lott, writing this subject at Town Hall on March 17, provides the following information from the University of Chicago:

At the University of Chicago Law School [where Lott previously worked], I heard faculty say that over several decades there was only one time when the highest black LSAT score was above the lowest white score.

In short, the affirmative action process, as it plays out, inevitably puts the black students at schools like Georgetown into a separate intellectual category and sets them up for failure. The issue is particularly acute at just-short-of-top-tier places like Georgetown. You can well understand why black students there might come to feel isolated. And thus this has become a phenomenon that everybody knows is true, and that has to be true, and is obvious, and yet it cannot ever be mentioned. As Lott puts it:

Some simple, obvious facts are too politically incorrect for academics to state publicly.

In the two weeks after the Sellers/Batson video surfaced, Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor put out some four statements to the university community, each one successively taking reality-denial to a whole new level. A couple of excerpts:

From the initial March 10 statement: [T]wo members of our faculty engaged in a conversation that included reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of Black students. . . . I have watched a video of this conversation and find the content to be abhorrent.

From a March 21 update: The comments about Black students, made in a conversation between two adjunct faculty charged with preparing students for leadership and service in the legal profession, had a profound and adverse impact on Black students. But the harm inflicted did not stop there. Our entire community is grappling with the painful and difficult effects and the significance of the video.

Both the Georgetown Black Law Students Association, and the black members of the Georgetown Law faculty, promptly weighed in with their own statements on the situation. Needless to say, both called for swift punishment of the offending speaker, for her “racist thoughts [and] racist actions” (BLSA) and for “white supremacist thought” (faculty). More ominously, both the BLSA and black faculty called for reform of grading practices that allegedly disadvantage black students. From the BLSA statement:

We demand that Georgetown Law take action in the form of . . . critically assessing and improving its current subjective grading system. . . .

From the black faculty statement:

Broad statements as to the intellectual ability of students based on their race reflect more poorly on the speaker than those spoken of. Such beliefs spur behavior that is unlikely to create a fair playing field for all students in the classroom. If you expect Black students to behave poorly, your classroom performance as a professor and your grading can operate to confirm that bias. Your Black students then suffer irreparable harm as they experience the consequences of poor grades driven by racial bias. 

The dean and administration at Georgetown cower in abject fear at these accusations. But they had to know that they were admitting classes of students where all, or almost all, of the black students had LSAT scores lower than any of the whites or Asians. Of course most of those black students, if not all, would end up at the bottom of the class in grades. How could it be otherwise?

Which raises this question: what is Georgetown trying to accomplish with its program of affirmative action for blacks? I assume that the aim must have been noble to begin with: Georgetown offers academic rigor and sets high standards, and teaches its students to succeed as lawyers at the most accomplished level; by admitting more blacks, we provide them the opportunity to subject themselves to the same high standards and to learn how to also succeed as lawyers at the most accomplished level. Well, now it seems that those standards — the very standards that we thought were the magic sauce that would enable these students to succeed — are going to be deemed “subjective” and “racist.” We will get rid of the standards.

OK, but now, what is the value that Georgetown offers to these black students, or indeed to any of its students? Without the academic rigor and the high standards, there is nothing left but the brand name. And how long will the name alone retain value after the standards that gave it value have been abandoned? This is the fundamental question that is playing out all across woke academia today. Probably, I will not live long enough to see the final dénouement.

For more detail on the “cultural revolution” at Georgetown Law, you might enjoy this long April 9 piece at Quillette from faculty member Lama Abu Odeh. She describes herself as “Muslim, Palestinian, woman . . .,” but apparently she is one of the few not going along with the current wave of groupthink. In one of the more revealing points in the piece, she notes that she was advised by a colleague that “I was wasting precious victimhood resources by refusing to sign” a statement of support for the black faculty.