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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Yale Law School, the Wall, and the Jews
Interesting op-ed in the Washington Post about the unprecedented dominance of Harvard and Yale Law Schools on the Supreme Court. This passage in particular got my attention:
Jerome Karabel's fascinating new book, "The Chosen" . . . details the efforts made by the Ivies -- in particular Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- to keep out Jews. The admissions department, with its demands for interviews and references, questions about your mother's maiden name (now we know why) and other attempts to filter out the undesirable Hebrews, was originally introduced to avoid the sort of school Yale was becoming in 1929 when its admissions chairman, Robert Corwin, likened the list of newly admitted students to "a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall." Yalies always could frame a quote.
This sort of gives new meaning to "The Wall" in the hall -- a wall that always publicized its fair share of debate about Israel/Palestine issues when I was there.
This got me thinking further. Despite aggressive (and sometimes fair) denunciations of Israel on that wall, YLS was a remarkably comfortable place for a Jew. In some ways, one could argue that with dramatic overrepresentation of Jews on YLS's faculty and within the student body, the culture of the place remains rather Jewish. When I was there, I was sensitized to the way this annoyed and alienated some of my fellow students; and I have to say that I saw where they were coming from. I wonder if others wish to comment about the Jewishness of the place (if I'm even right about that) and about how that makes others (Jewish or otherwise) feel.
UPDATE: Eric Muller replies at Is That Legal?
Posted by Ethan Leib on November 15, 2005 at 07:37 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink
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Comments
I'm a mite worried about the term "overrepresented." The baseline being what exactly?
Posted by: Dan Markel | Nov 15, 2005 8:35:48 PM
I assume he means "overrepresented" as in "relatively overrepresented"--i.e. relative to a cross-section of the community as a whole.
This exact issue came up in our jury study paper. We are careful to talk about relative representation and relative education (e.g. "relatively undereducated") for precisely this reason.
Posted by: Hillel Levin | Nov 15, 2005 9:05:31 PM
I'm sure you're right Hillel, but my concern is that there's a normative baseline implicit when language like that gets used, and that's what makes me leery.
Posted by: Dan Markel | Nov 15, 2005 9:13:50 PM
Dan: do you object to the use of the word "underrepresented" as well?
Posted by: Kate Litvak | Nov 15, 2005 10:03:48 PM
The normative baseline is something like: assuming equality of opportunity, the distribution of goods like professorships at fancy law schools and admission to fancy law school should approach the 'representation' of the population. When we say a group is overrepresented or underrepresented on faculties or student bodies, we are saying precisely that the group's representation diverges from its representation in the world. Of course this is normative, but I wouldn't have thought controversially so. Unless you believe in "merit" and the intrinsic superiority of certain groups to achieve admissions and faculty appointments at fancy places. But you can't believe that. Or is Charles Murray alive and well here at PrawfsBlawg?
Posted by: Ethan Leib | Nov 15, 2005 10:11:41 PM
You've got to be kidding me. Mere skepticism toward a normative assumption that sub-populations should represent themselves proportionately in different sectors of the economy or culture renders you vulnerable to the stain of comparison to Charles Murray's Bell Curve arguments? Please. I'm not saying we have equality of opportunity yet. Far from it. But disproportionality is consistent with equality of opportunity too, even at "fancy law schools."
Posted by: Dan Markel | Nov 15, 2005 10:39:16 PM
disproportionality is consistent with equality of opportunity too
How? Assuming no innate group merit (which is the Murray comparison) and assuming a sufficiently large population to avoid flukey results, it would seem that disproportionality is precisely not consistent with equality of opportunity.
Which of course, is not to say that there's some kind of Sinster Conspiracy on behalf of any of the classes who are overrepresented. Rather, it's to say that the underrepresented classes are running behind the bar because of a lack of reasonable opportunities.
Posted by: Paul Gowder | Nov 16, 2005 9:48:07 AM
Wait a minute -- some of these comments seem to reduce this to only two possibilities: (1) "innate" biological differences, or (2) unequal opportunities, even if not the "conspiracy" type.
This 1-2 seems to cut out the very strong role of cultural group traditions, values, etc. I suppose one could argue that this is yet another sub-part of "opportunity," in that Person X grew up in an Italian family/culture that promoted tailoring as opposed to a Swiss family that taught watchmaking. But I, and many readers, think of "equality of opportunity" as representing some barrier or tiled playing field in "the system" (whether intended or subconscious or whatever) as opposed to such cultural determinants.
Posted by: just me | Nov 16, 2005 10:19:57 AM
J.M.: that's indeed a sub-part of opportunity. If the culture that surrounds, say, a young poor black male, suggests to him that he's more likely to succeed in a gang or the NBA than by going to school and undertaking a professional career, that individual is going to have less opportunity to stumble upon the path that is most likely to result in upward class mobility.
Cultural group traditions, after all, don't exist in isolation. There's nothing about blackness, or black culture, that promotes basketball playing over studying. Rather, the dominant American culture promotes basketball playing over studying to young poor black males. Via role modeling, etc. etc. This is a terrible injustice, and not one that we can blithely fob off to "cultural group traditions" that are somehow inherent to (relatively) advantaged cultural groups.
Posted by: Paul Gowder | Nov 16, 2005 10:43:23 AM
Culture and equality: I suspect that if we managed to remove the obstacles to achievement that concern "just me" we would soon discover which cultural traditions are rooted in past injustice and which have other foundations. If it turns out Catholic physicians are relatively underrepresented in abortion clinics, or Quakers in the military, I'm not sure they are the victims of injustice.
YLS culture: Discussions of Israel and Palestine were very heated when I first arrived at YLS but cooled off thereafter. It's possible that the graduating students were more polarized over the issue than later classes, or that the focus had by that point shifted to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Diversity: My four 1L professors were ethnically Indian, Chinese-Filipino, Italian/Catholic/Jewish, and African-American, so I had a strong dose of diversity to start out with. After that all but one of my eighteen professors were white, I believe nine were Jewish, and only four (plus 1 from first semester) were female. Of my seven closest advisors six are white, six are male, I believe four are Jewish and one is ethnically Jewish and religiously Catholic. I'm very concerned about the lack of racial and gender diversity at YLS, and I'm very eager to see at least one Muslim scholar join the faculty. Both of those moves would affect the proportion of Jewish professors, but that's a mathematical side-effect, not a policy objective.
Posted by: Adil Haque | Nov 16, 2005 11:19:32 AM
Let me just note that everyone has taken self-segregation out of the mix of causality as well. Maybe a disproportionately high percentage of applicants to Yale are jewish? Don't get me wrong: this just pushes the question back a step (or more), and it would be necessary to think about the root causes. But people are not only acted upon in this world; they are actors too.
Posted by: Hillel Levin | Nov 16, 2005 11:25:45 AM
Hillel: well, sure, of course that's true -- but we really have to ask, would self-selection be unevenly distributed among populations in the absence of external social factors?
Here's to the situated subject!
Posted by: Paul Gowder | Nov 16, 2005 3:05:46 PM
Of course, Paul. That's why I said that it just pushes the question back. But no one mentioned self-selection yet, so I did.
Posted by: Hillel Levin | Nov 16, 2005 4:00:02 PM
Hillel: I feel this is the point where we should move into an argument about Kelo :-)
Posted by: Paul Gowder | Nov 16, 2005 4:26:50 PM
Paul:
Who could argue with Kelo? Democracy rules! ;-)
Posted by: Hillel Levin | Nov 16, 2005 4:46:27 PM
Mr. Gowder et al. -
PG, I agree that we shouldn't just "blithely fob off" cultural factors as nothing to worry about. Many such cultural conditions are the legacy of discrimination, or, even if they do not result from any discrimination at all, are still things that we should want to remedy, e.g., a culture with little education.
But, just as we don't want to ignore culture or classify it as part of "self-selection," I think it's EQUALLY true that it should NOT be folded under "opportunity," but should be a third category in-between, or be a category that overlaps the two starting points, or some such thing. I agree that the blended view is tricky, but it seems to me the alternative is the pure Procrustean approach, which suggests that ALL deviations from "proportional representation" are a "problem" to be remedied. That is, we should be upset that most Chinese restaurants are run by the Chinese, and try to move toward a "proper" distribution in every nook and cranny of life.
This raises dozens of problems, not least of which is that it threatens the quality of my Kung Pao Chicken. And I simply cannot sign on to any theoretical construct that threatens that real-world consequence! :-)
Posted by: just me | Nov 16, 2005 4:50:54 PM
Dan wrote: "But disproportionality is consistent with equality of opportunity too, even at 'fancy law schools.'"
Does this statement apply to whites, or just to minority groups?
Posted by: Mike | Nov 16, 2005 7:14:09 PM
Ethan --
I'd like to know more about your perception that the number of Jews at YLS "annoyed and alienated" non-Jewish students, and whether you think (as you appear to) that this annoyance was justified. I teach at a law school (not Yale) where the percentage of Jews on the faculty exceeds that in the general population. A colleague, a couple of years back, expressed unhappiness that the appointments committee was bringing out too many Jews to interview. I don't see where he's "coming from"; or, more accurately, it seems to me that where he's coming from is uncomplicatedly anti-semitic.
J.
Posted by: J | Nov 17, 2005 2:54:42 PM
Say you were black, J. Then further assume that you had a set of professors at law school who disproportionately looked the same, talked the same, and drew upon their cultural heritage to illustrate various doctrines in the law. Assume that the vast majority of students understood this cultural heritage and it resonated well with them. Indeed, this gave the school almost clubby feel. Try to further imagine that the professors in the majority tended to favor the students they could relate to best -- those in their club. Try to imagine really hard that you were different from this majority group. Wouldn't you feel justified in being slightly annoyed by your exclusion? Admittedly, that imaginative reconstruction could be valid even if the majority culture was not itself an overrepresented one. But the point is really the same.
That justified feeling of irritation doesn't necessarily lead to a justification for Jew quotas -- and I'm fairly sure I didn't argue that we should take affirmative action against Jewish applicants to law school or for faculty positions. That's a much more complicated proposition.
Still, I don't think it is unreasonable, say, to aspire to more faculty diversity at the nation's best law schools. If your colleague was saying: we have just as qualified non-Jews applying for the job and there seems to be a built-in preference for Jews (likely because so many on the faculty are already Jews themselves and can relate to one another) and I don't understand why we are giving all the Jews the callbacks, I think you are being over-sensitive. If someone said during the process instead: we're flying too many whites back for callbacks when there are perfectly viable black candidates--who are themselves underrepresented on our faculty, would you call them racists? I assume not. So why is your colleague is an anti-Semite?
Posted by: Ethan Leib | Nov 17, 2005 3:16:06 PM
Here are a few hypotheses that added up may be a partial explanation for why some jews would seek to go to Yale. Many jewish mothers live in new york city, and compete for status. Having a child attend a high status law school or med school brings status points. However,the points count for more if the child remains a closeknit member of the family, coming hoem for laundry and latkes and seders. Yale is closer than Harvard or Michigan or Duke. Yale, Princeton, Columbia, these are good. Thus Yale would get more jewish applicants than BYU.
Also there's what I call the "my cousin vinnie" factor. Beign a lawyer involves a set of skills which become finely honed among ethnic New Yorkers - argumentation, debate, literacy. These traits might be less present among eskimos, farmers, Amish. So jews end up at Yale in statisticly significant numbers because it's where they want to be, and they can get in.
Posted by: arbitraryaardvark | Nov 19, 2005 11:09:04 PM
(I'm returning to this thread after several days; I expect that everyone else has stopped reading it, but I want to answer Ethan's questions on the off-chance that he still is. Of course, Ethan, folks who feel excluded from the majority culture have good reason to feel annoyed. But [1] I'd be quite surprised if Jews have ever been a majority of the student body at Yale; and [2] more to the point, that phenomonon has nothing to do with over-representation. The only work that over-representation does here is to add to the initial annoyance of being excluded from the majority culture, for a person who is independently resentful or suspicious of the over-represented group, a separate frisson of "and what right do they have to act like a majority?"
Years ago, an African-American colleague suggested to me that blacks at my law school had reason to be resentful of Jews, because Jews were over-represented. I asked him if he would feel the same way about bicycle riders, if it turned out that they were over-represented as well. His answer was no. One possible explanation for the distinction is that Jews were exercising cultural hegemony and my colleague knew that bicycle riders wouldn't have. But the fact is that Jews weren't exercising cultural hegemony; after all, though over-represented, they were still distinctly a minority at our law school. Whites, absolutely, were exercising cultural hegemony, and blacks were excluded from that, but I don't think the Jewishness of some of those whites played much of a role. My law school's in the Midwest. Even with a bunch of Jews on the faculty, the contribution of Jews to the dominant culture is pretty small. But he reacted differently to over-representation of Jews and bicycle riders because his attitudes about the two groups were different going in.
As for the colleague I mentioned in my previous post: His concern was that the committee was calling back too many Jews at the expense (he felt) of equally qualified (white, nonminority) Christians. What did and does strike me as anti-semitic was his feeling that having too many Jews on the faculty was a problem -- something that needed to be remedied. And this is crucially different from your initial hypothetical because I can't see my colleague as somehow reacting to his exclusion from a hegemonic majority. He's a Christian. The majority of our faculty and our students are Christian. That he feels threatened by having too many Jews as colleagues -- as I expect he would not if a disproportionate number of his colleagues were bicycle riders -- is what I find scary.
It may be (for all I know) that Jews really did form a hegemonic majority at Yale, and, if so, I can imagine that folks excluded from that dominant culture would feel resentful. But I'd expect mixed motivations at best, because some folks feel resentful of Jews whether they're they're part of a dominant culture or not. After all, 1929, when Corwin made his "Wailing Wall" comment, was four years after the percentage of Jews at Yale had risen to . . . 13%.
J.
Posted by: J. | Nov 22, 2005 3:04:49 PM
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