No Disability Standpoint Here!: Law School Faculties and the Invisibility Problem

Abstract

Endeavors to increase diversity in higher education invite many questions, including concerns about consistent and categorical application of the motivating values. For example, do law schools, and especially elite law schools, do enough to promote inclusiveness in the legal profession if their efforts are limited to admitting students from underrepresented minorities and not equally striving for similar diversity among the faculty? Where the students are diverse but the teachers are not, inclusiveness does not seem to rise to the level of a genuinely embraced value. The imbalance between the homogeneity of law school faculty and the diversity of law school students signals that while members of minorities may be capable of learning the law, they are unlikely to become sufficiently proficient to teach it. And further, homogeneity in the ranks of the professoriate suggests that assimilation is necessary for those who aspire to be acknowledged as proficient.