Alan Rozenshtein (Minnesota; Google Scholar), Mandatory DEI Trainings and Academic Freedom:
According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a conservative advocacy group, the University of Wisconsin Law School conducted a mandatory 1L "reorientation DEI session" last week for which students had to fill out a "race timeline worksheet" with "7 significant moments at least" of "significant life events around race" and read a worksheet listing 28 "common racist attitudes and behaviors," including views like "I'm colorblind" and "We have overcome." A student who attended the session confirmed to me that WILL's reporting was broadly accurate.
I reached out to the University of Wisconsin Law School and received the following statement:
Friday's session on diversity, equity, and inclusion for second semester 1L students was held in partial fulfillment of ABA Standard 303's requirement that law schools provide education to their students on "bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism."
The session was interactive, with ample opportunities for students to engage in dialogue with each other. A core goal was to help students develop their critical thinking skills with respect to these topics.
We do not expect students to automatically accept the views expressed in the document referred to, any more than they would the reasoning of a legal brief, judicial opinion, or their professors. Intellectual and academic freedom are core values of the Law School.
Accordingly, we welcome and encourage vigorous debate over important questions of law and policy, and this session provided a forum for such discourse.
My goal is not to adjudicate between the competing accounts of the session, and indeed different good-faith observers can characterize the same event differently. More questions would need to be answered to properly evaluate a DEI session, such as: were a range of readings provided that offered a different perspective on race and racism; to what extent was the format of the session that of a training or rather an open-ended discussion; and, if the latter, was the environment such that students were comfortable expressing views contrary to those expressed in the worksheet, by the person leading the session, and by other students?
It's a problem if the answer to these questions is no. Some concerns are legal: WILL argues that such trainings would violate civil rights law and create a hostile environment (see, for example, a recent court case upholding a lawsuit against Penn State for particularly extreme DEI trainings). Others are substantive: it's jarring, especially a week after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to read that the statement, "Character, not color, is what counts with me," is a "detour or wrong turn into white guilt, denial or defensiveness." And then there is the practical issue of whether such training might in fact backfire.
But I want to focus on a different point: that an educational institution committed to academic freedom and free inquiry should not use mandatory trainings to impose contested moral claims (again, without taking a position on the specifics of how the Wisconsin session was conducted). This principle is especially important for law schools, which are, after all, in the business of training future lawyers who will need to be able to consider all sides of an argument rather than dogmatically accept one view or another. …
None of the above is meant to argue that discussions about race and racism, including the presentation of arguments based on anti-racism or critical race theory or any other school of thought, are inappropriate in a law school class, or even as part of the mandatory 1L curriculum. But a discussion has to be just that: an open-ended exchange of views that recognizes that no one has the right to force anyone else to agree with them when it comes to some of the most controversial debates in modern life.
Jonathan Turley (George Washington), Wisconsin Law School Under Fire Over Mandatory Anti-Racism Training
