Georgetown Law professor terminated after ‘reprehensible’ comments about Black students

In a statement Wednesday evening, Treanor said he had learned this week about a conversation between two faculty members “that included reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of Black students.” He called the content of the video “abhorrent.”

In a petition, the Black Law Students Association also called on the law school to conduct an audit of Sellers’s grading and student evaluations. It also wants the school to assess and improve its “subjective” grading system and commit to hiring more Black professors.

“These racist statements reveal not only Sellers’ beliefs about Black students in her classes, but also how her racist thoughts have translated to racist actions,” the group of Black law students said. “Professor Sellers’ bias has impacted the grades of Black students in her classes historically, in her own words.”

The group has urged Batson to publicly apologize for failing to condemn Sellers’s statements.

Although years removed from law school, Tiffany Wright said she was disgusted by the news from her alma mater. Wright, a former Supreme Court law clerk, graduated from Georgetown Law in 2013.

“I can’t say I was surprised by it,” she said, adding that in academia and in practice, “there is sort of this perception that maybe the Black folks, like, we just don’t belong.”

Wright, now a practicing attorney and co-director of the human and civil rights clinic at Howard University’s law school, said she has been dealing with the kind of microaggressions espoused by Sellers since she was a student. She’s used to people doubting her abilities and seeing Black people held to different standards than their White peers. “It also has an effect over time on our mental health,” she said. “You start to absorb and believe those lies.”

The recent incident comes months after Black law students said Carrie Menkel-Meadow, professor emerita at Georgetown Law and professor at the University of California at Irvine School of Law, used the n-word in a class she was teaching at the California school.

In September, the Black Law Students Association said: “Professor Menkel-Meadow’s offensive words and rationalizations are dangerous and unacceptable. She claims to understand the pain that offensive epithets cause, yet will not apologize for the harm her own usage of the n-word has caused for her own students.”

In an email Thursday, Menkel-Meadow denied using the word but said it was in an article she assigned to students about regulating hate speech.

Menkel-Meadow said that the article had been used for several years and that no one had objected to it or the assignment.

I'm sure this will be a civilized and reasonable discussion without any trolling.

r2 what I find interesting is that the other professor (also an adjunct) is now under investigation as well, for failing to challenge the professor's comments.

And fuck the trolls. Punch, delete, move on. I have most of them already block from yesterday's George Floyd threads.

Meanwhile, China has won.

If you talk about race 24/7 as in whites bad and POC color good you’re golden. But criticizing black students like this has been a No No for years.

R5, any evidence for your opinion?

I'll go ahead and sign, and add, as someone who works in higher ed, stories like this are chilling. (Esp. because of what is happening to the other professor.)

As Jeffrey Toobin will attest, Zoom can be perilous.

The comments on the WashPo article largely support the professor, by the way.

Was she meaning that she wants to understand why an inordinate number of black students were not as doing well?

[quote] “I hate to say this. I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks,” Sellers said in the video. “Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on.’ You get some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.”

Stating a fact she observed is "abhorrent"?

R9 YES! This is just one example of how silly we Americans are.

That was probably her intent. But she got her payback by getting fired. And just listening to her seems to be a reason to be fired.

r11 what was her intent? To be fired?

As somebody who also works in education, as a university professor, I will say that this is not chilling and it was the right thing to do. If you bring in your bias with you into the classroom, how can you be a good educator thinking that a good number of your students are biologically and/or sociologically inferior and that it's a waste of your time trying to impart any knowledge or have a meaningful discussion with them? How can you objectively assess them and, frankly, if I was one of her Black students, I'd be very suspicious as to how my grade was derived. We are talking about law which is heavily subject to the case interpretation, not math or physics, where the grades are derived purely on the prescribed correctness of problem solutions.

Most assessment in law schools is blind, r13.

I see that I already have R9/R11 on "ignore" for stating that Biden is suffering from dementia.

Everyone is canceled for racism! America is fucking unhinged.

R16, I know, right? What a terrible injustice to cancel people for just being racist!

Make an anti-Black comment: Reprehensible! Fired! Be Gone! Ostracized!

Make an anti-Jewish comment: Lose a couple of bucks. A couple of days off work. An invite to the victim's home for a meal.

R13 🙄 She's commenting on an observation that most of the bottom dwellers in her class tend to be black. An OBSERVATION of past results...NOT an expectation of future results which would be biased.

You as a professor, can't see the difference?

Don't you think that the outcome of the class is largely influenced by her attitudes in how she teaches them? No, she's not an "impartial observer" as much as you'd like to justify her racist behavior. I think you'll find your spiritual brethren (or, bottom feeders, if you prefer) on Breitbart or Daily Caller.

Taking law school exams - and thus doing well in law school - is partially a “knack.”

For many, many years the legal profession has been (overwhelmingly) composed of white men. The social structure surrounding those practitioners helps convey certain behaviors to their social group, including [italic] some [/italic] elements of that knack.

Those not exposed to it are somewhat less adept. They are not less smart, just not as equipped to perform well on that particular testing metric. The more elite the law school, the more pronounced the effect of this slight difference.

Testing techniques generally are not specifically taught. They are absorbed as part of the undergraduate curriculum training and largely passed onto students unnoticed.

Think of certain rules of grammar or accents common in minority school environments that differ from those in majority white schools. If minority students were graded on how “White they sounded” fewer would score at the top of the class; not because they weren’t adept at languages, but because the “appropriate” intonations and accents hadn’t been unthinkingly conveyed throughout their academic careers. Legal test taking behaviors are similarly, subtly, differently conveyed.

Minority students who attend integrated, K through 12, majority culture schools, are more likely to subliminally pick up the techniques, making them more likely to “test as expected,” as was referenced by one of the two Georgetown professors.

But doing well on law school tests is not necessarily what makes one a successful lawyer. As is the joke among Ivy League Law Schools: “A” students become law professors, while “C” students become millionaires.

Lowering academic standards will never yield ANY negative outcomes, nosiree. 🎶

Soon we’ll be dying to go to Mexico for our healthcare. I’d just love to have a doctor who got their degree because the school didn’t want to “look racist.”

Shouldn't you be out there on a ledge with your MAGA hat, braying about building a wall, R22?

Calling me a Trumper. How lazy. 🙄

Nah, I’m just going to go to Asia to be with my 2Raw2Real homies who value meritocratic standards.

[quote]I'll go ahead and sign, and add, as someone who works in higher ed

No you don't. None of our "PC is killing higher education" trolls actually work at universities or colleges, they just pretend to.

[quote]As Jeffrey Toobin will attest, Zoom can be perilous.

Dude was jerking his nubbin in front of co-workers, come on.

[quote]The comments on the WashPo article largely support the professor, by the way.

"Trolls in newspaper comments agree with me."

Public r1, New England, untenured, r25.

Now kindly fuck right off

Well ... clear I can't type R 1 on DL

[quote]She's commenting on an observation that most of the bottom dwellers in her class tend to be black.

She isn't. She says "a lot" at first, then later on qualifies it as "some" "almost every semester."

She doesn't mention the race of the others finishing at the bottom of the class, and I would bet anything if "most of the bottom dwellers" (nice dogwhistle, by the way) were all one singular race, the administration already would have known about it, because there's something wrong if that happens. If all the students at the bottom of the class were men, or Latino, or lesbians, people outside of the class would have noticed.

She shouldn’t have apologized.

Go back to whining about being bipolar and forgetting which sockpuppet account you're using, r27, and stop making up qualifications you don't have just so you can engage in racist trolling. This is Datalounge, your trolling doesn't do anything but irritate a couple of people briefly. It's a waste of everyone's time.

They DO know that, R28.

Hence why so many Universities are ditching admissions standards and going for “holistic” application criteria.

When the stats don’t align with your desired outcomes, change the metrics.

I've never heard of poorly performing students referred to as bottom dwellers, this is a strange train of thought/ phrase.

How did this discussion about poor performance becomes race based?

PS. You just need to pass the course and the bar exam, bottom dweller or not.

[quote] How can you objectively assess them and, frankly, if I was one of her Black students, I'd be very suspicious as to how my grade was derived.

You should be more concerned that she is inflating the grades of black students rather than giving them accurate if lower marks. It seems like she is in an academic bubble and seeing that everything she’s been fed in diversity seminars isn’t adding up in the real world.

R33, right, I’m sure she inflated the grades for the “bottom dwellers”, didn’t she?

It is very very very very very very very very important to correctly address reversed racism.

Teaching black kids.

[quote] “I hate to say this. I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks,” Sellers said in the video. “Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on.’ You get some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.”

It sounds to me like she is unhappy about the facts.

Why did this come up at all?

"they" are " just plain on the bottom", strange thought process.

Can't talk about real life any more.

Sigh. I am bipolar but I have never used a DL "sock puppet" acct, r30

I'm a university professor and we have the same situation Sellers bemoans. It doesn't mean that she, or we, are biased in the classroom, in fact it means we try to improve year after year to resolve this "situation". Describing a situation is not expressing a bias. What happens in my school is the students flunk out after 2 - 3 years. Its a terrible experience for everyone and most importantly for the student who goes through that. There is no easy solution because as Sellers says, there are sufficient exceptions - students from this group who do well or are at the top.

I am in Europe and the group I am talking about is not African American.

Few of my colleagues think its wrong to admit that group despite the fact that for 15 years they are observed to be higher in flunk out rate and lower in performance.

The situation is always about a combination of minority ethnicity COMBINED with lower income upbringing.

Its perfectly possible Sellers is expressing the same thing that many teachers experience year after year. How can she help fix it,

That she apologizes after getting canned is necessary because she doesn't want the woke police to destroy her life. It's not really an admission that she did irreparable harm during her years of teaching.

Oh, r30, and in terms of "trolls in newspapers agreeing with me":

I would encourage you to actually read the comments on the story. Here are the top three in terms of upvotes. The fourth echoes my own thoughts (and has a number of upvotes as well.) I very much doubt the entire lot of subscribed WashPo commenters are trolls:

[quote]The academic audit of the professor's grading will reveal much. If professor Sellers' grading of black students is consistently lower than the same students received in other Georgetown classes, then there seems to be a problem with Professor Sellers. If, on the other hand, the ranking of these same students is lower across all their classes in comparison to their peers, then Georgetown has a problem with their recruitment and teaching support of black students. If this is the case Georgetown killed the messenger and has not addressed an important issue.

[quote]“I hate to say this. I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks,” Sellers said in the video. “Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on.’ You get some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.” The professor notes that many/most of her lower students are black. This is not racist, this is a statement of fact. The professor is upset about this, so the professor is probably not a racist. The Law School's action reinforces the understanding that to address racial differences is to be labeled a racist, so just ignore their performance and pass them. This is the racism of soft expectations.

[quote]I don’t get why that was a racist act worthy of immediate termination. She just stated a fact and expressed concern. Guess I’m not woke enough.

[quote]WAPO readership being mostly liberal, it’s interesting how many of the commentators here are sympathetic to the teacher and find fault with the school and the students. Anonymity allows a lot of us to share feelings that we would be frightened to express in our own workplaces and social circles. This woman is not a racist. She is, however, guilty of being foolhardy. Teachers nowadays must walk on eggshells at work and save observations like these for only husbands and wives behind closed doors or for general consumption behind pseudonyms.

The only disagreement I have with the last is "This woman is not a racist." I don't think the 40-second clip tells us one way or another.

One more thing, and then I'm going to stop using my official signature.

I am untenured, so I have to be even more careful about expressing any heterodox thoughts on these matters. But I have TENURED colleagues who disagree with some of the party lines and they are also terrified to say anything. We're all just one careless word away from ostracization.

The professor stated a fact and that she did not like that fact.

Firing her was idiotic. It doesn’t change the fact that many are unprepared for higher education and need more experience and challenge before going there

Well, R44, it's grad school so those students already had 4 years of Bachelor and some had the opportunity to work after, before Law School.

Maybe they still weren’t prepared, R45. Sometimes students are “pushed along” when they should have failed. If they failed, it makes the university look bad. It makes them look better they graduate them.

*when they graduate/pass them.

I don't think professors should provide grades. Grades should be handled by an unbiased department of the school.

The grader should not see the students name on the paper. The student number should be used instead.

Her unconscious bias plays a role. It absolutely does and you could set up What Would You Do? hidden camera experiences showing when a black person asks a question they're rebuffed and she thinks they're stupid, and when someone else asks it, oh they're acceptable. They're intelligent for asking.

You are describing a different situation, then, R46 R47. Bachelor is higher education. I thought you were saying at R44 that some students should work and get life experience before starting higher education.

The second scenario you describe is real of course. But points to institutional failure and institutional cynicism if a grad school is going to continue the bullshit of the undergrad school.

In fact, if Georgetown's AA students graduate at the same rate as other ethnicities and get jobs, then to me it wouldn't be a huge concern if the same students had lower GPAs while at Georgetown.

R48

She still looked with bias.

No so blind after all.

Instead of blaming the professor, maybe they can actually look at why some black students are having trouble—need for more personalized instruction, tutoring, study groups.

Instead they’re sweeping the actual problem under the rug

R51, can you explain? If the tests are graded blindly, without names, she is expressing that she is disappointed that the tests she grades poorly turn out to be those of black students. How exactly did she look with bias?

R51, just because she noted a trend does not make her automatically biased

[Quote] In fact, if Georgetown's AA students graduate at the same rate as other ethnicities and get jobs, then to me it wouldn't be a huge concern if the same students had lower GPAs while at Georgetown.

It’s a twisted statistic because graduation occurs for those even at the bottom of the class

[Quote] I don't think professors should provide grades. Grades should be handled by an unbiased department of the school. The grader should not see the students name on the paper. The student number should be used instead.

This is EXACTLY what happens at that school. So bias does not play a role at all.

African American students often have trouble in college and beyond because they start at terrible grade schools. They al tend to feel more isolated in higher Ed because there are fewer of them and aren’t given many supports. This too can lead to lower grades.

It has nothing to do how smart anyone is; it has to do with how much preparation their community and schools have given them.

R56, how can some unbiased person grade exams from another teacher's class? Almost every law school exam I took was essay. Grading an essay is inherently subjective, of course. But most law schools do grade essays anonymously.

If a minority successfully completes a graduate school at the same rate as other groups, and gets jobs and succeed, then the education is a success. I don't think it matters (a lot) if they earned more Cs than As than other groups. See above about Harvard Law. The graduates of Harvard Law with As become professors and the those with Cs become millionaires. A gross generalization.

Missing from this discussion is failure rates and drop out rates. I am the one who said I teach in European university and we have a situation with a minority group who FLUNK out at higher rate. If they were passing at the same rate and graduating, that they earned Cs would be less an issue bothering teachers.

This is definitely a shoot the messenger situation. However, as other mentioned, a teacher should be very careful verbalizing any such observation.

Scalia, who said there should be fewer black students at elite institutions, used to fail his black students repeatedly while giving conservative students higher grades.

I believe a review of grades should be required for this professor.

The bias comes in everything they do. You are affirmative action, therefore you should not really be here.

You're black so you're probably going to be dumber than the other students because blacks are dumb. Oh look here at the test scores! See? I'm right. It's a cognitive bias.

Surely there's not some other historical element there at play. There can't possibly be anything else exactly blacks are dumb or lazy and that's why they're at the bottom.

Tired of this shit.

Also in my school we have a situation with students "on the spectrum" who can be extremely challenging to teachers and peers in a classroom. And god forbid anyone talk about it and yet the school does ZILCH to support teachers in dealing with this, neither pedagogical seminars to learn techniques nor guidelines for applying of standard rules of conduct in the official Code.

Insult to injury this is the first year I am getting medical certificates about students with "sensory" handicaps (overly sensitive to noise and any social contact with peers) who need bizarre and complicated (and perhaps inapplicable) accommodations in a classroom.

Asking the administration for input or guidelines - receives no response or nothing concrete. Just boilerplate.

Also now all printed material must be in san serif because serif is triggering.

Yeah, it's like if you went to university where some ethnic group used to beat the fuck out of white people, and few white people are around, and no white people taught the courses.

How safe would you feel?

R62 you are not a teacher. There is no proof this teacher considered those students "dumb" or "dumb because black."

Soon, they will claim a brain drain....”If Our Racists can’t hire and retain racists than there will be nobody left to teach our racists lawyers of tomorrow!”

What R21 spewed was far more racist than anything the Law professor said.

[quote]Instead they’re sweeping the actual problem under the rug

And that "problem" has been "swept under the rug" starting in grade school. Where the "problem" is passed along year after year, grade after grade, with nary a whisper due to fears for job, income and career. It's no coincidence that up to 30% of high school graduates are functional illiterates. And that turning a blind eye continues on into college and university.

The professor is the unfortunate victim of and scapegoat for America's inherently racist, hypocritical education system.

This is ridiculous. She made an observation. All the whiners here claiming she had a bias and graded differently have no proof. That’s called speculation. You all would fail legal classes too.

Morons

"If you bring in your bias with you into the classroom, how can you be a good educator thinking that a good number of your students are biologically and/or sociologically inferior and that it's a waste of your time trying to impart any knowledge or have a meaningful discussion with them? "

She didn't say any of the things you mentioned.

Thank you, Zoom!

When people fearmonger about surveillance culture just remember that it has positive benefits. We will call you out for your behavior.

R71 is one scary MOFO

[quote]When people fearmonger about surveillance culture just remember that it has positive benefits.

There is absolutely nothing "positive" about the loss of livelihood and career. Neither is there anything "positive" about living in constant fear of misinterpreted remarks.

It's America 2021. Not East Germany 1963.

R73 anyone on here under the age of 60 probably has no idea what the E Germany reference even means and that is not a good thing.

When I was in law school, we used a number not our names on the tests so the professor didn’t know whose test he or she was grading. Not sure if this is still the case.

It sounds like the professor was expressing frustration and bewilderment at the number of her black students who are at the bottom of the class. It didn’t like she was, “yeah! Hahaha, they’re so dumb.”

I have see a theory that there are students admitted to schools based on ethnicity as opposed to LSAT score and grades and these students are not able to keep up. This naturally makes them struggle and not perform well which leads to self esteem issues. Makes sense. Maybe admittance to schools should be based on ability and not ethnicity for the benefit of all.

Then again, I’ve heard it said that a failing student at an Ivy League school has a better chance of getting a job than the top ranked student at a lower tier school.

I will say from my own experience that not being able to keep up in math in seventh grade was devastating and discouraging. I was somehow sorted into accelerated math based on a multiple choice test I guessed at. I should have requested to be placed in remedial math, where I belonged. It was an awful experience and I dreaded those classes. I didn’t understand and I couldn’t keep up.

R73, her words pre-sorted an entire ethnicity and who gives a fuck about her livelihood or career? Plenty of people loose that due to right-sizing. This is a case where an educator fired herself.

OK, “Loose that” was stupid and I’m a bad person.

r76 et al best beware the ideological purity police, who will, sooner or later, come for him

[quote]her words pre-sorted an entire ethnicity

Speculation/assumption based on your personal prejudices.

[quote]and who gives a fuck about her livelihood or career?

The people who depend on her, staring with herself.

[quote]Plenty of people loose that due to right-sizing. This is a case where an educator fired herself.

The professor is a victim of racism, as well as the failure of proportion, perspective, and reason in both the American education system and culture. See your posts R76 for examples.

Her comments really were no different than DeBlasio saying it sucks how Blacks and Latinos do poorly in the special high school entrance exam (and thus don’t get in) but he’s praised for it and this woman is eviscerated. Both were making observations.

r80 Facts do not matter these days but what you do with them. DeBlasio used those facts to actively lower the bar by trying to eliminate the exam. Well, this poor woman couldn't swiftly come up with anything, I guess.

The top comment on Slate's coverage of this story is one of the best:

[quote]Georgetown's actions in firing the professor deserve a lot of scrutiny, and this article has not probed at all the repercussions of this.

[quote]The professor stated an observation about her class and its racial disparities in outcomes. It was an observation about her class, not a sweeping statement about innate racial intelligence. She expressed concern and frustration about this observation. Her tone seems to imply not a hostile verdict about the ability of Black students but a frustration that they have not performed better in her class.

[quote]A good, independent, and progressive university would use complaints about the professor's remarks as a chance to explore what is actually happening in the law school classes: are there really measurable discrepancies between the performance of Black and non-Black students? Is there a lot of bad teaching going on? Are some professors compromised by implicit bias that affects their grading? Did the students in this professor's class perform at the "bottom" of their other classes as well? Is this situation unique to this professor?

[quote]What could have been a fruitful exploration and dialogue about race in the classroom was cancelled in order to appease a reactionary judgement that will now probably end this professor's career. The students lose out, the professor loses out, and the school as a whole loses out and chooses not perform a more thoughtful dissection of what is happening in its classrooms. Isn't there any room for real dialogue and investigation in universities anymore, or can any remark that is misinterpreted and distorted end your career?

[quote]The premise of the argument to fire the professor for making an observation about her class is that any differences among racial groups in performance must be the result of unfair or biased grading. That very well might be the cause here, but how do we know unless we look into it? I don't believe there are any innate differences in intelligence--analytical, emotional, or artistic-- among racial or ethnic groups and I find the desire to find them offensive. But that is not what happened here. What happened was a remark about a pattern of performance in one professor's classes that she finds frustrating, and which might well be her own fault. But she has a right to make the observation, and to read a sweeping racist sensibility behind her comments is reckless and illogical.

So, is it racist to say that Asians are usually at the top?

What are the chances Tiffany Trump was at the head of these two professors' classes?

From my experience - I was putting in computer labs around 2000. Our software was targeted at elementary students. Some Voc Ed high schools used it and we also got a good bit of business from HBCs. Can we not just work on the problem rather than debate it? I also serviced Georgia. When free college became a thing there (Hope scholarships), many of the systems got entangled in giving good grades to sub-par students. I don't blame the schools for doing it, but they set their kids up to fail.

The thing is that while economic status plays a big role, the neighborhoods themselves are even more integral. How can you compare one kid who got a full nights sleep, had a hearty breakfast and shows up bathed to one who had to listen to mom getting beat up last night? You can't. You should do everything you can for that child that suffers. but it should not be at the expense of the ones who have a chance. .

R85 You are absolutely right. That's why equity initiatives in education are so important.

People talk about the problem being that dim students are given as much opportunity as gifted students, but the reality is that there are a lot of gifted people whose life situations inevitably compete with their academic performance. Poor nutrition, unstable home lives, having to work to support their families, not being able to afford tech and other resources, etc. can obscure students' natural talents. Meanwhile, Tiffany Trump goes to Georgetown Law and the other idiot kids buy their ways into Penn, Meghan McCain buys her way into Columbia and all the idiots are given designer degrees that legitimize arguments for wealthy people to make them wealthier.

My local HBC (Edward Waters,look it up) has a 13% graduation rate . Millions of federal dollars go into supporting that dump every year . The local news did a profile a few years back on some of the professors ,and my god,listening to them talk was horrible . I remember thinking "how in the world are they teachers if they cant pronounce words correctly?" . Along that same line,I knew a guy who graduated from Morehouse with a degree in English . He was dating a friend of mine and would write him letters often. To read one you'd have thought it was from a 5th grader. In the 6-7 years he and my friend dated,he applied over and over again to schools in my city to be an english teacher. Never got a 3rd interview,and it was no surprise to my friend nor me.

That being said,he was a lovely person who worked 2 jobs ,but an english teacher he was never going to be. Maybe he should have applied at Edward Waters. These things Im saying arent racist,they are just facts. The law professor wasnt being racist,she was stating facts. Giving people passing grades for pc reasons is only hurting them in the long run. It sets them up for unrealistic expectations and guarantees a life of disappointment in themselves and the world.

I'll just preface this by saying that I am very very familiar with Georgetown and Georgetown Law. My familiarity goes to both the academic aspect as well as the administrative and financial machinations.

For the last 40 years or more Georgetown has been a completely rather greedy political animal. It abandoned its principles long ago. It is more concerned with how it looks and how its actions translate into benefits for the school be it in terms of its endowment, its ability to navigate and manipulate the city government, gaining favorable zoning decisions, gaining favorable publicity through various means and other areas beneficial to a university getting money, prestige and influence for itself and those associated with it.

Sadly this has translated into admissions, hirings, policies, investments, public statements and actions. Those applicants who can help the university, especially politically either directly or indriectly, are given preference whether they meet the academic or other qualifications or standards or not. Same with hirees whether they are particularly good at teaching or not. Even if proven to be poor teachers, their retention will depend mostly on their connections or political status.

I'm afraid I grew disgusted with GU a very long time ago and that disgust has just grown more and more through the years. I grimace every time someone touts it as a great university or law school.

There is no way GU would have had the principles to stand by a professor who made those observations in this time and political environment. They would have lost a lot and had to deal with a city which may have agreed with it but would also not have had the political courage to stand by it. That also might have demanded an accounting of how and why some students are being admitted when perhaps they were exceptions to the qualifications imposed on students. Some exceptions are a positive but if and when they skew the statistics for admission standards then they affect the university's and law school's standing and desirability in the academic and professional world.

A school that embraced and defended the likes of Stephen Glass but could not accept an honest observation by a professor cannot be trusted to educate or guide future leaders.

Asians have a culture of test taking. Chinese were using imperial tests for thousands of years.

People were burning witches alive, fighting over who was Catholic and who wasn't. During the Roman Empire, the British were peasant hooligans, Germans maurading ruffians and the Italians were the 'civilized.'

Things change. I don't think it's really fair to take a people who had a way of life that didn't need the cumbersome aspects of litigation and legally taking someone to the cleaners, exclude them from participating in those fields, and then scratch your head when they don't have the same advantages of the test prepping elite.

Forced assimilation people have more issues. This is why Africans who come over willfully, with intact families not broken by slavery outperform and succeed.

Everything this woman is complaining about has a root cause caused by her race. Why do HBCU exist to begin with?

R89 Honest question: Why aren’t today’s American black families (and poor white families) intact?

Poverty and lack of hope (God).

R90, the war on drugs grabbed 25%

Welfare programs incentivizing single households, especially unwed mothers.

R91 I don’t know if I can believe that. I’ve had very poor friends who immigrated from S Korea with little English proficiency but their families were intact and more importantly, an intact family was considered extremely important for their success.

Law school grad here. The end of semester exams are graded anonymously, at least at my school.

[quote] [R16], I know, right? What a terrible injustice to cancel people for just being racist! —David Duke

Oh shut up, you worthless cracka!

[quote] This is why Africans who come over willfully, with intact families not broken by slavery outperform and succeed.

How does this make any sense? An immigrant family is by definition broken away from their extended family and culture. Slavery ended a long time ago so families broken by slavery also ended a long time ago.

We have many, many intact African American families in the U.S. Even those not intact have an extended family. Almost all cultures and countries have some history of cruelty toward a segment of their population. When does that history cease to be an excuse for what may be considered aberrant behavior today?

This highlights a very sensitive and nuanced issue: academic performance of our Black students sometimes lags that of white students in many colleges because of systemic disadvantages starting from birth (first of all, many young Black men are incarcerated, so it’s hard to raise Black children with fewer Black men in their communities, plus racist medical care—Black women are more likely to die in childbirth, etc.), to our inequity in funding schools in the U.S. via property taxes, to the fact that many Black folks are lower SES because of a legacy of racism and exclusion in jobs). The system is rigged against our Black students from birth, generally speaking.

So when we get to the college age, lower SES and minority students lag behind their more privileged, white peers in noticeable ways (writing, literacy, math, etc.). Our higher education system doesn’t know what to do with that. Some people have been encouraged to inflate grades via curves when teaching college classes at places with certain demographics. I am very social justice oriented, but I don’t think that is the answer to try to make up for years of unfair education and lack of resources.

It has to start by addressing how we treat Black Americans at every level so that they have a real chance to succeed from birth. Change how we fund public schools. Stop incarcerating our Black men for minor drug possession charges. Stop killing our Black citizens for no reason and causing them to live in fear. Find ways to make housing more equitable in our communities. This is the real answer.

As far as the teacher, it’a possible that she’s biased, it’s also possible that she’s genuinely concerned about her Black students and why they’re struggling, but they should have explored this rather than jumping to conclusions.

The fact that she knows the race of students suggests that she is knowingly giving black students worse grades.

Then she said out loud what she wishes she hadn't.

It was recorded.

She was fired.

Who will weep for her?

Not me.

Georgetown is ranked between 11 and 15 in law schools. We keep in mind what R98 wrote. This is why if there is NO curve, its not a huge issue if one ethnicity has lower GPAs than another, but all are graduating at the same %. Because they will all get jobs and have a chance to prove all their skills that other than "success at tests". But if one ethnicity is failing in a primo grad school, there's a problem. Worse if they are dropping or flunking out.

We don't have any of this info about Georgetown and they certainly won't be informing us.

"the blacks". This bitch can't even hide her disdain.

Exactly. "the blacks" treats a group as something distinct and monolithic. Usually, they try to conceal their privilege.

[quote]The fact that she knows the race of students suggests that she is knowingly giving black students worse grades.

No it doesn't, r99.

Yes, it does, r103. It's prima facie discrimination.

Up to her to rebut it.

She didn't rebut it.

She confirmed it.

Meanwhile the Asian students and their parents are just laughing at the whole affair.

Interesting how the people so very concerned with minorities supposed poor performance in colleges never seem to comment on work of the nepotism admissions of rich and famous parents. Google Columbia grad Megan Mccains " journalism" for the daily beast. It reads like something a fourteen year old would write. Nor do these oh so concerned individuals express unease with all the sociopathic right wing assholes their fine institutions seem to spit out, who then attain great power.

And east coast ivy league types are not immune from bigotry and classism. Frankly they can be some of the absolute worst in that regard. Many seem to sneer at large segments of the population as somehow inherently beneath them.

R100 - yes, if the grades are fairly administered/applied and the students graduate, that’s seen as success, but what is more equitable is if we get the chance to see a range of scores/bell curve from all ethnic groups rather than a pattern of lower performance for certain groups when compared to peers from other ethnic groups. That tends to indicate that something is awry in the system.

R101 hmm....the teacher said “the Blacks”?? Yikes—that is concerning.

R104 No, she probably doesn’t know who got what grade until the tests are graded. That is how my law school did it.

Ignoring actual difficulties (if they do in fact exist) and dumbing down school exams like Di Blasio wants ultimately hurts black professionals. How would you like to be a black doctor who has worked hard to get though schooling and residency only to have potential patients wonder if you made it or on your own or were admitted due to a quota system? That would be extremely frustrating.

R106 Oh, there were no end to the stories to that effect during the GW Bush presidency. The issue of “legacy” students is raised all the time.

That’s why I’m saying, just let the grades and SAT or LSAT decide. If most of the school body is Asian, fine.

Years ago, a family member attended the Cooper Union and noted that more the half of the students were South Korean. What’s the big deal?

Student body not school body, lol

R106, I hate legacy privilege.

If I was president, one way I would address it would be to limit the number of students hired into government positions from those entrenched schools that perpetuate legacy (Ivy, Stanford). They would only be hired in numbers that matched the proportion of their graduates to the larger university graduate population.

And I would not hire any of them for cabinet-level positions.

R106 I read an article a few years ago which proposed that the new “elite” won’t be the rich white Ivy League types you describe but simply the smartest students who marry one another and congregate in the same cities. Brains, not who your family is, will be the new indicator of success, regardless of race or gender. It’s very interesting.

R111, support staff makes sure your school is the candidate pool. The ATS filters out anyone different.

[quote] hmm....the teacher said “the Blacks”?? Yikes—that is concerning.

Read the actual quote. She didn’t say that.

So good to read that some folks are taking into consideration our history in this country before making ridiculously offensive statements about intellectual abilities of African-Americans.

I swear, it's like a bunch of Archie Bunkers in here with pride flags.

What she said was objectively idiotic. She said some black students are good and some are bad. Well, guess what? That’s true of all students. Yet it’s the black ones that make her cringe?

She deserves to be out of that job.

Imagine if history was hey would you like to come to America to work? We'll pay you?

You want to learn to read and write? Sure, welcome in. As far as you would like to go, go ahead.

Oh, you don't need to make your own university. You're God's children same as we are. Welcome everyone.

Oh you made a thriving neighborhood of business owners? We rejoice in this because what's good for you is good for us. Let's make sure you have a fire department so it's not burnt down.

Anyone's welcome to move into our neighborhoods and have a true multicultural society. There's no need to fracture out and have really poor run down neighborhoods.

Almost 120 replies in 8 hours on a Datalounge thread about racism against Blacks? That sounds about right!

Look, this is an instance where anyone who has not attended law school should stand down from this discussion. Law school is truly dreadful for a number of reasons. One is that law exams are generally administered in essay form and require students to identify legal issues, the relevant law and provide an analysis of how the law applies to a hypothetical fact pattern. The tests are reviewed and scored by the professor and/or her assistants using completely subjective criteria. The grades are usually on a bell curve so that some students will always be on the bottom regardless of the proficiency of their analysis. So whether the class does exceptionally well, or poorly, there will always be a top of the bell curve and a bottom of the bell curve.

This is a completely alien testing methodology for students who are accustomed to standardized tests where there is a definitive right or wrong answer such that the entire class can perform in the A or B range and no one performs unsatisfactorily. Law school is not like that. Professors are given wide latitude in how students are graded. If a law professor says Black students are consistently at the bottom of her class that could be her ADMISSION that she purposefully puts Black students at the bottom of her completely subjective bell curve. The exams are supposed to be graded blindly without knowledge of the student but that is a complete farce. I know from personal experience that scorers can easily learn the identity of the student whose exam they are grading. It all hinges on an honor system where there may be no honor. The swiftness of her dismissal is evidence that her colleagues and superiors were suspicious of her racist machinations.

Now, obviously if she administered a multiple choice test my analysis is wrong, I will shut my mouth and I will return to the thread celebrating Liza Minnelli's 75th birthday. But when I first read this story elsewhere I felt that her termination was not only justified but necessary. This was intended to be a racebait thread but it isn't. There are not two sides here.

[quote] So, is it racist to say that Asians are usually at the top?

Not true in law school. Whites are usually at the top in law school, in the legal profession and among law school faculty. What does that tell you about law school and bias?

[quote] Can't talk about real life any more.

You can if you can acknowledge that your so-called "real life" is a subjective impression of the world around you based on the messaging, politics and biases of the majority culture.

R119 I don’t know if that’s true. I’d say Asian Americans are better at the American law system than newly arrived Asians. I believe it’s cultural. It’s not really hard to believe that a person born in Japan with Japanese values wouod find the aggressive American law school experience difficult. A student of Japanese parents raised in the USA would likely find it much more palatable.

As a strictly anecdotal example, there were few Asians or Asian Americans in my law school class. That was 20 years ago and I suspect there are more now.

When I graduated I worked for a Japanese attorney. It was very difficult working with her because our work depended upon getting immigration petitions signed but the client, a hospital administrator. She would buy him coffee and his favorite pastry and sit in his reception room waiting for him to keep the appointment they had made and sign the paperwork. When he didn’t, she would leave after a couple of hours. She was too polite to insist he keep the appointment with her and sign. Then she’d come back to the office, documents unsigned, and act like the worst passive aggressive cunt ito us. We dreaded those days.

A person (Japanese, Chinese) raised in the USA would, I think, be much more comfortable with asserting herself with the receptionist and insisting the administrator honor the appt than a woman raised in Japan with cultural values which didn’t include (especially for a woman) asserting oneself.

We as a nation better be on top of things because competence must never come second to diversity.

Other countries, not all of them friendly with whom we have to compete are not concerned with hurt feelings.

Checking a required color box first when cultivating the big brains can leave us in the dust.

“ but the reality is that there are a lot of gifted people whose life situations inevitably compete with their academic performance. Poor nutrition, unstable home lives, having to work to support their families, not being able to afford tech and other resources, etc. can obscure students' natural talents”

R86 these factors do not solely apply to black people. In East Asia where there’s a history of meritocracy as means of climbing out of generational poverty, people from poor backgrounds do better their station in life if not for themselves then for their children. Then you have the Vietnamese boat people who came here as refugees not speaking any English, living 5-10 people to a house and working menial jobs. They and their kids were able to succeed for the most part.

The key is expectation. East Asia has an ingrained expectations culture. You’re expected to rise above challenges and not complain. This work hard and not complain mentality does have its drawbacks; Asians tend to be viewed as both invisible, meek, and calculating at the same time. On the flip side we have low expectations, blame everyone/ everything else mentality. I know which of these two produces better outcomes.

Well There are some statistics they lead in ......

"Black men and women had the highest HIV diagnosis rates by race, with rates per 100,000 population of 79 and 22, respectively, followed by Latinx men and women (“HIV Epidemiology Annual Report” xi)"

[quote]Georgetown University's Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action.

There's your problem right there.

R121, I fully accept your personal observations and experience as a person of Asian heritage. I cannot claim to know or understand the cultural distinctions within the community. In the legal academic environment there is a systemic bias (this is where we lose the white folks) in favor of white students and in particular (God help us) Jewish students. If you think of the demographic composition on the law journals and moot court it was overwhelmingly white and Jewish. Throughout my career I have worked alongside highly competent and high-achieving Asian and Asian American attorneys and they have shared my impressions and frustrations over the absence of recognition, sponsorship and advancement in majority culture professional environments.

HBCUs exist because black people were not allow to attend white college, Klan Granny r89. HBCUs continue to exist because of the pervasiveness of attitudes like with this professor.

I'm at a small liberal arts college in the south, which is about 20% black. I have black students all over the spectrum in terms of performance, but the worst performing students in the class tend to be black. That is because my state has an appalling record at funding schools in black-majority counties. In some of these schools, it is impossible to put together the classes necessary to even attend college, no matter how intelligent the student is.

This country has a very long way to go before we are "equal."

R127 To play Devil’s advocate, how you explain Korean students who arrive in the USA without full proficiency in English who nonetheless adapt quickly and excel? At what point do recognize there are cultural values at play here?

Those Korean students likely developed the academic framework in Korean schools to be able to excel, regardless of the language.

It's really not that hard.

Isn’t saying ‘Blacks’ or ‘Jews’ or ‘Asians’ a totally outdated / republican way of speaking? It sounds so dehumanizing compared to ‘Black people’ / ‘Jewish people’ / ‘Asian people’.

She’s at her job and she’s speaking about people she works with like that? And so casually. Shameful.

r129 Apart from those Asians born in Asia, it's been often brought up that Asians who excel include so many of those in the not-so-great neighbourhoods with working class / immigrant parents who haven't also been able to give their children proper attention (due to several jobs / working to death) and/or nutrition. They all have the same chance as others with the similar socioeconomic status.

Why is every post in Datalounge about racial bullshit? Unless it’s about black cock vs brown cock vs white cock, WHO THE FUCK CARES?!

[quote]there is a systemic bias (this is where we lose the white folks) in favor of white students and in particular (God help us) Jewish students.

R126 Bigoted turd complaining about "systemic bias". Yep, that's DL.

I gather nobody has seriously challenged the veracity of the teacher's statement. It'd just the teacher broke the censorship taboo of speaking the truth in front of witnesses.

The school's motto is "Law is but the means, justice is the end." Truth doesn't seem to have been important enough to mention,

I teach graduate courses part-time. I’ve never noticed a difference in my students’ performance based on race or country of origin, because generally people who make it into my program are coming from the same baseline performance in undergrad. I grade from a position of educating rather than strictly evaluating. (In other words, I’m a softee/“easy grader” adjunct to who just likes helping students really grasp the material.)

Recently, two students cheated by sharing answers to final exams. In the first course I had with them, I pointed out the identical answers to them privately through email and they denied it. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and dropped the issue. In the second course I had with them, I generally administer two versions of the final exam, and I decided to stagger theirs. They still had identical answers where there was no possibility of chance because it didn’t make sense for one of the exams. Once again, I did not report them out of fear of how it would look for a white instructor to accuse two Black students of cheating in the current climate. Coming down to he said/they said, I’m not sure it would end well for me.

If I were talking to a colleague and being recorded, I could have been caught saying something that, framed a certain way — and if I didn’t choose my words carefully enough — would seem similar to this professor: frustration that there was cheating, concern that the cheaters happened be among my Black students, and disappointment in myself that I was going to let cheating slide because this is not a hill I’m willing to die on for a part-time position that I otherwise enjoy.

I teach in a graduate school of public policy that is about 40% African-American now. I give everyone A's because colleagues have been fired for giving students the grades they earned based on tests and papers. It's absolutely ridiculous and I admit to it the first day. The interesting thing is that hasn't changed student output. The great students still produce great work and the other ones do what they can do. Might as well be up front about the charade that is now higher education.

No one cares about inflation ego of this teacher. Why should he say as such? Good byes

The issue is not race; it’s class.

Wealthy blacks do very well in school as do immigrant blacks that come from the educated classes.

The problem is it’s tough to determine class so people comment on the easier, race

[Quote] What she said was objectively idiotic. She said some black students are good and some are bad. Well, guess what? That’s true of all students. Yet it’s the black ones that make her cringe?

Um, that’s not what she said

[Quote] "Black men and women had the highest HIV diagnosis rates by race, with rates per 100,000 population of 79 and 22, respectively, followed by Latinx men and women (“HIV Epidemiology Annual Report” xi)"

Whites have better access to HIV prevention tools like information, PrEP, and a continuing steady primary caregiver provider.

[Quote] How would you like to be a black doctor who has worked hard to get though schooling and residency only to have potential patients wonder if you made it or on your own or were admitted due to a quota system? That would be extremely frustrating.

This happens all the time anyway. People assume blacks got in because of affirmative action but don’t wonder if whites got in because daddy donated money

[quote]People assume blacks got in because of affirmative action but don’t wonder if whites got in because daddy donated money

Because the general public is impacted far more by affirmative action than wealth.

What a strange, unsupported claim r142. Could you elaborate?

It actually seems to be the opposite. For example, the general public pays more for cable, internet, and health care to protect wealthy interests. Not many people apply to colleges on a daily basis. Nor is everyone affected, as plenty of well qualified white students go to great schools.

R142 The general public encounters affirmative action in both education and employment. Instances of "daddy donating" so that junior is accepted are miniscule to non-existent in comparison.

And speaking of unsupported claims, "the general public pays more for cable, internet, and health care to protect wealthy interests" has nothing to do with the original assertion in R141.

[Quote] Because the general public is impacted far more by affirmative action than wealth.

In an oligarchy like the US, wealth determines power

[Quote] The general public encounters affirmative action in both education and employment. Instances of "daddy donating" so that junior is accepted are miniscule to non-existent in comparison.

The number benefitting from affirmative action is tiny. Whites not only get the benefit of getting because of daddy’s money but because of legacy.

The general public sees far more white people than blacks people in their lives.

[quote]Yeah, it's like if you went to university where some ethnic group used to beat the fuck out of white people, and few white people are around, and no white people taught the courses. How safe would you feel?

A similar situation to this exists in some of the top selective schools in Australia, where a huge preponderance of the students (and all the top ones) are from Chinese- or Vietnamese-Australian families.

It's created panic among the middle-class white parents who want THEIR kids to be at those schools because they are the top schools, but who can't compete with the just-arrived-from-Asia work ethic. They're all having their kids tutored from elementary school onwards in the hope of competing. Our future leaders are all going to be miserable people, whatever their racial background, because none of them are being allowed any time to play or relax.

Now, a bright black kid doesn't have that kind of push from his or her background, because the parents are (usually) neither wealthy nor part of the dominant culture. The other point to make, about the "flunking out during the course" syndrome, is that that is also common to white kids from less advantaged backgrounds who make it to university on sheer brains and application. The problem is that their families often don't understand what they're trying to achieve, and/or are afraid if they achieve it the family will be left behind. This is a very discouraging background noise, and if they don't manage to quickly find a "tribe" at university, it only needs a proposal from the boy next door or something similar to lure them back to their comfort zone.

Sorry, I may have misinterpreted "beat the fuck out of white people". The Asian-Australian students are only beating them at exams!

Washington Post comments are notoriously right-wing and trollish, because the Post doesn't edit out comments as long as they don't have overtly racist words contained therein. So, it's a favorite site for Magats and Qcumbers to post their slimy comments.

The second professor has left as well:

[quote] The second professor has left as well:

Woke news from 1934. Fifteen bank employees and customers are imprisoned after it is confirmed they heard John Dillinger say he was robbing their bank.