What Michael O. might have said

Thinking today about my late, Michael Olivas, and his larger than life advocacy on behalf of law teachers of color, and especially Latinx faculty (that locution coming more recently, but whatever term is au courant, Brown law professors and others know what's what).  One especially aggressive piece of MO advocacy was his distribution of the so-called "dirty dozen" list -- in essence, a list of various law schools, including some of the more "elite" ones, and their baleful record of hiring Latinx faculty.  The impact of Michael's advocacy was meaningful.  When I started my teaching career at UC Berkeley in 1989, I was the second Latinx faculty member in the law school's history and the first Latino. The numbers increased with our hiring of Ian Haney Lopez and we hoped and expected that things would take off from there.  Measured by numbers, a crude but important way of determining the scope and magnitude of diversity, Latinx faculty members steadily made their way into law schools, across the range of hierarchy and geography.  So far as leadership was concerned, I came to Northwestern's deanship with colleagues such as Rachel Moran (UCLA), Eduardo Penalver (Cornell), Kevin Johnson (UC Davis), and several others who I came to know and appreciate as Latinx leaders in legal education.  I expected that the impact would only increase.

But I have, as I sit here in the early summer of 2024, with an uneasy feeling that things have stalled.  It is extraordinary and important that the ranks of African American law deans, the majority of women, has exploded in number.  Other diversity groups (including LGBTQ+ and Asian American/Pacific Islander) have seen meaningful strides.  So far Latinx law deans, and I believe the law professiorate more generally, it is my impression -- although I admit I don't have the exact numbers handy -- that progress with respect to Latinx law school faculty and, especially, leadership is not where it should be, and indeed is not where it was.

To be sure, diversity in law school hiring, including at the leadership ranks, is not a zero sum game.  We can and should expect diversity to expand within distinct sub-groups without facing the dilemma of one group displacing another.  And yet the progress that has been celebrated by so many of us, noting especially the great, and overdue, strides made by groups who have suffered the special brunt of racism and exclusion over the lifetime of the academy -- and I am especially thinking here of our African American women colleagues -- seems by one measure to be achieved without anything at all similar, even in a long stone's throw, for those Latinx professors whose history of exclusion, of discrimination, of intersectional subordination has been amply documented and is (ought to be?) the occasion for advocacy and progress.  Where is Michael Olivas's voice when we need it?  Where are the Latinx law deans?  (In my count, the number is, excluding the law schools from Puerto Rico, less than ten total).