What's racist? It doesn't take a genius to figure out how this woman got on the tenure track.

shit. if peple got fired for typos and grammer mistakes i'd been gone months ago.

Another mountebank rides into town and fools the locals. What's so surprising about that?

Everyone is a racist who thinks that just because the paper was written by someone with an eleventh grade education the author can't teach writing at a law school.

Besides, it was a Wiki, not a research paper by a law professor . . . no, wait . . . .

If this was by a professor I'd love to get a sample from a FAMU student or two . . . .

In the words of Tracy Jordan: this is the subtle racism of lowered expectations.

Running a picture of her is gratuitous.

Your so RACIST. How dare you attack a black person like that!! And especially a woman!!! She adds color to the faculty. In this day and age - diversity is much more important than learning proper grammar and writing good. Especially in the law profession. Can't you peeple see that?

Running a picture of her is what happens on something that calls itself a legal tabloid, you fucking idot.

awesome. i remember my legal writing teacher was some bullshit practitioner at some shit little firm. her writing and reasoning skills were mediocre at best, but she was so proud of being able to teach us elementary school level grammatical principles. what a joke.

Laquisha-
Adding color to the faculty? But she can teach law? Its one thing to try to make sure that good law teachers that are minorities aren't passed over; its another thing to take someone that is entirely unqualified and put them at the top of the pile because they are black. Diversity never earned a day's pay.

This offends me personally, as a graduate of Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University College of Law.

4:38-
I think laquisha's post was sarcastic.
Of course, maybe you're post was to.

Bobby Rae: I think Laquisha was being sarcastic. If not, she's an idiot. But I think she was being sarcastic.

You've probably seen some blogging lately about the New York Times rule. Some (like Jeff Lipshaw) say it means: don't do anything that you wouldn't want to see covered in tomorrow's NYT. Others (like Jeff Harrison) interpret it as: don't say anything in writing that might get you in trouble; according to the rule, all controversial statements should be said orally so you can always deny what was said.

Well, with reference to that discussion and Ethan's post yesterday about the possibility of using corrected versions of papers on SSRN or bepress, readers in our profession might feel a twinge of sympathy for Professor Victoria Dawson of FAMU in Orlando, wondering if she has her own "NYT rule" problem. Here's why.

A few years ago, Professor Dawson posted on bepress a draft of a paper -- still in need of a proof-read -- as it was being circulated to law reviews for publication. The paper later appeared in the Missouri Environmental Law and Policy Review. Nothing too unusual there, right?

Well, some FAMU students are "now using [the draft paper] to help build a case that Dawson is not qualified to teach and was hired primarily on the strength of her personal ties."

Having reviewed the paper, the St Pete's Times authoritatively states it

is peppered with spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. Even the title is off: "Environmental Dispute Resolution: Developing Mechanisims (sic) for Effective Transnational Enforcement of International Environmental Standards."

Wow. And so because someone posted a shitty first draft on bepress, she is facing questions about her competence to teach. I understand that legal writing may be part of her responsibilities and I understand that FAMU's law school has had various serious problems, but I'm quite worried now that articles of the sort run in the St. Pete's Times will undermine the goal of getting "tomorrow's research today." If this is the flimsy evidence of incompetence used to shame someone publicly, we can thank the St Pete Times -- for now even more scholars, especially junior ones, will be worried about what their local paper will publish when there are incomplete or somewhat mangled drafts up on SSRN and bepress.

Of course, the answer might just be, put up clean copies on ssrn. That's not going to help allay fears. So many people in the prawf business are afraid of putting up work that hasn't gone through a dozen law students' eyes that we shouldn't be surprised when SSRN becomes a repository for only completed and published papers. So, what is to be done?? Well, if you have any thoughts, feel free to contact the reporter, Ron Matus, who can be reached at (727) 893-8873 or matus@sptimes.com. And of course, share your thoughts here too. (H/t: the inimitable HB.)

Posted by Dan Markel on June 6, 2007 at 10:58 AM in Dan Markel, Life of Law Schools | Permalink

http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2007/06/a_cautionary_ta.html

This says nothing about Prof. Dawson's competence, as the paper she posted was a draft that had yet to be proofread, according to Dan Markel.

At worst, she was somewhat careless in posting such a rough draft on SSRN, but I'd have to see something she considered "finished" before making judgment about her ability to teach legal writing (as if the job is that hard in the first place).

Further, Dawson's original "shitty first draft" was not reprinted in it's entirety by the... what was that paper called... oh, yeah, the St. Petersburg Times.

I guess we'll just have to take the word of the author that Dawson's entire paper was as bad as people are willing to assume it was. No reason to doubt her, right?

Lat secretly loves black women...

The story by the reporter was incredilby irresponsbile. The purpose of SSRN is to circulate drafts. Dawson circulated a draft. Her draft was clearly very rough but that's the point. Faculty members are able to receive comments at an early stage of their writing well before publications. The hope is that the piece that is ultimately published will be much better because of the peer review.

What nobody seems to notice is the fact that her paper was ultimately published! Many many articles are rejected by law reviews all across the country. She cleaned up her paper and got it published.

She should be applauded rather than ridiculed. This wouldn't be newsworthy if she was a balding white man. Everyone would have given her benefit of the doubt and it was sloppy first draft.

This article hurts minorities, law students, and law professors. There is no doubt that this will have a chilling effect. There needs to a forum where academics can circulate rough drafts of papers with fear of being humiliation.

She should have at least spelled the title correctly.

sorry i hit post instead of preview!

The story by the reporter was outrageously irresponsbile. The purpose of SSRN is to circulate drafts of works in progress. In progress and drafts should be the key words!!!! Dawson circulated a draft. Her draft was clearly very rough but that's the point. Faculty members are able to receive comments at an early stage of their writing well before circulating the article for publication. The hope is that the article that is ultimately published will be much better because of the peer review.

What nobody seems to notice is the fact that her paper was ultimately published! Many many articles are rejected by law reviews all across the country. She cleaned up her paper and got it published.

She should be applauded rather than ridiculed. This wouldn't be newsworthy if she was a balding white man. Everyone would have given her the benefit of the doubt and chalked it up being as a sloppy first draft.

This article hurts minorities, law students, and law professors. There is no doubt that this will have a chilling effect. There needs to a forum where academics can circulate rough drafts of papers without fearing humiliation.

i feel bad for dawson. it was a rough draft with, naturally, lots of mistakes. check the final paper on west law - it's 37 pages, which translates to about 60 double-spaced pages in doc format. there will inevitably be a bunch of sentences that don't makes sense when someone writes a paper of this length and doesn't proofread it. this is what editors (or research assistants) are for. Trust me, lots of top professors would have a zillion typos and non-sensical, ungrammatical sentences if they did not have their research assistants edit (or write) their papers. cut the lady a break. the final draft reads as well as any other random law review article on environmental law.

This story is a puff piece at best. It was in a standard newspaper, right? No one cares about law school stories in regular newspapers (except when the sun times broke the professor-with-the abusive-mistress story).

The irony of a writing prof with bad grammar caught some reporter's eye. Anyone who reads it should realize its just law school students doing what they do best: creating problems where none exist.

I shudder to think what the response of this board would have been had the man in the following article been black or latino.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime_file/2007/06/06/2007-06-06_liar_lawyer_he_dupes_city_firm.html

Why is it that when one minority does something off-color, it is attributed to the entire race, and the "effects of affirmative action," but when a white dude with the sense of entitlement ubiquitous in that demographic does the same, it's not an effect of "white privilege" or the "good old boys racist club," but individual action. So many of you claim to be educated, but are shockingly inept at any type of social logic. The comment boards on this website are sadly looking more and more like autoadmit every day.

so what if the paper got published - most low-tier law reviews, and definitely these shitty marginal journals like the Missouri Journal of Environmental Bullshit, are struggling for submissions to publish and accept tons of shit articles. the students then spend hours correcting the incomprehensible, redundant garbage the author submitted to the best of their abilities. in the end, the article still sucks and no one reads it because if it was worth a damn, it wouldn't be in Fuckwit Law School's Third Rate Journal.

besides, she should be evaluated based on her draft, because who knows who else was involved in producing the finished product.

WHITE PRIVILEGE SHAPES THE U.S.

Robert Jensen
School of Journalism
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712
work: (512) 471-1990
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu

copyright Robert Jensen 1998
first appeared in the Baltimore Sun, July 19, 1998

[This essay builds on the discussion of white privilege from Peggy McIntosh's essay "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies."]

by Robert Jensen

Here's what white privilege sounds like:

I am sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support.

The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that in the United States being white has advantages. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.

So, if we live in a world of white privilege--unearned white privilege--how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I ask.

He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter."

That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: the privilege to acknowledge you have unearned privilege but ignore what it means.

That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home to me the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us everyday: In a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant non-white population, American Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never changes--I walk through the world with white privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those things look like me--they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves, and in a racist world that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white.

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but is a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of them.

I am not a genius--as I like to say, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six years, and I've published a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like to think that I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my paycheck, I don't feel guilty.

But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from, among other things, white privilege. That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by force from non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a well-funded, virtually all-white public school system in which I learned that white people like me made this country great. There I also was taught a variety of skills, including how to take standardized tests written by and for white people.

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position at the predominantly white University of Texas, which had a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one non-white tenured professor.

There certainly is individual variation in experience. Some white people have had it easier than me, probably because they came from wealthy families that gave them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher than me because they came from poorer families. White women face discrimination I will never know. But, in the end, white people all have drawn on white privilege somewhere in their lives.

Like anyone, I have overcome certain hardships in my life. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself and my work, I do not have to believe that "merit," as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege, which continues to protect me every day of my life from certain hardships.

At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me to those myths. Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special.

I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked in my benefit. I believe that until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate--that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose--then we will live with that fear. Yes, we should all dream big and pursue our dreams and not let anyone or anything stop us. But we all are the product both of what we will ourselves to be and what the society in which we live lets us be.

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether or not I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.

Frankly, I don't think I will live to see that day; I am realistic about the scope of the task. However, I continue to have hope, to believe in the creative power of human beings to engage the world honestly and act morally. A first step for white people, I think, is to not be afraid to admit that we have benefited from white privilege. It doesn't mean we are frauds who have no claim to our success. It means we face a choice about what we do with our success.

Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism in the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

5:32:

So just turn in your first whack at your next brief. See how it goes.

These students are at FAMU. I don't think they have much room to complain about the caliber of their instructors.

5:40
I'm not saying they should be complaining about this particular instructor (at least she's published), but why should where they go to school determine whether they can demand a good education?

4:40 - best post of this asinine chain.

FAMU is as FAMU does.

Gallion OUT!

Jensen is a hack.

I was ready to laugh like hell at this professor... but jeez. The site to which she posted the draft is a forum specifically designed for "rough cut" drafts, and we pillory her for posting... a "rough cut" first draft? C'mon.

I clerked for a judge who was brilliant and a talented writer. But on first drafts, even he made mistakes. When you're in the zone, so to speak, and cranking ideas as fast as your fingers will type, sometimes grammatical errors spill onto the page.

PS: Those who mistake "your" and "you're" should cast no stones.

4:42 - "I think laquisha's post was sarcastic.
Of course, maybe you're post was to."

Funniest post.

I think you should have dropped the apostrophe, but maybe that would have been too much...

Soft Bigotry

New York Sun Editorial
May 22, 2007

President Bush was elected on a promise to end the "soft bigotry of low expectations," but his Justice Department seems determined to enforce it. That, anyway, is what we take away from the decision of the Justice Department yesterday to file a federal lawsuit accusing the city of New York of discrimination in its hiring process for firefighters. On one of the allegedly discriminatory tests, 85.6% of blacks who took it passed, and 92.8% of Hispanics who took it passed.

Our problem is not with making the Fire Department hiring process free of racial bias, or with making the city's firefighters more broadly diverse and representative of the city. But most New Yorkers in need of assistance from a firefighter will care less what race the firefighter is and more whether he has the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to conduct an emergency rescue or put out a fire. It is these skills that the test was designed to measure, including questions like, "Immediately after using the power removal box to turn off the electrical power, a firefighter should: A. wait four minutes before calling the trainmaster B. begin evacuating passengers through the tunnel C. call the trainmaster and explain why the power was turned off D. touch the third rail to see if the electrical power has been turned off."

If blacks and Hispanics do more poorly on this test than whites, it doesn't logically follow that the test should be scrapped, any more than a lower black or Hispanic pass rate on the bar exam should mean that test for would-be lawyers should be scrapped, or a lower black or Hispanic graduation rate in the nation's colleges should mean that higher education should be abolished. That is succumbing to low expectations, essentially throwing up one's hands and suggesting that blacks and Hispanics can never become as proficient at such tests as whites.

Why not provide better preparation for the tests, rather than getting rid of them altogether? The federal government argues that the tests are not related to the job of a firefighter, but those jobs are increasingly complex and can involve knowing about chemicals, electricity, arson law, and expensive computerized equipment. The government has produced no evidence the test was designed with the intent of keeping minorities out of the Fire Department, or that the questions are in any way biased against minorities in their content.

It's not as if, for instance, they all feature white victims in burning houses being victimized by black arsonists. The problem, rather, is "disparate impact." But while getting rid of the test might help get more black and Hispanic firefighters, eliminating it might itself mean that the department has fewer Asian-American firefighters, which it already has even fewer of than blacks and Hispanics. Asian-Americans tend to do better on standardized tests, and eliminating the test might have a disparate impact on them.

When President Bush spoke of the soft bigotry of low expectations in respect of primary and secondary education, his remedy wasn't to eliminate standardized tests in which minorities performed worse, but to require even more tests to measure performance while also adding money for tutoring and mandating school choice to introduce competition. What is called for in respect of the Fire Department is a similar approach, focused on meeting standards and raising them rather than discarding them.

I can spot an italicized period at fifty paces. Spelling and grammar mistakes are not tolerated.

Welcome to life in a law firm.

5:32: I go to MU Law. Way to be a dick. We weren't going to roll out the new name until 2009. I hope you're happy.

If your to stupid too not no the differnce butwein wen too use your or you're, your to dam dumb too be layer.

Are you people ("you people, what do you mean by you people?!!") seriously defending her because it was a rough draft? Would YOU ever post a rough draft that looked like this paper in a place it could be seen by your peers?

You're ignoring the fact that rough draft in academia means that the author isn't 100% sure about her reasoning, her conclusions, etc., and is looking for input from her peers that might make the paper a stronger piece. You don't expect your fellow professors to instruct you on the proper use of coordinating conjunctions.

This lady clearly doesn't understand basic grammar. If she did, even her roughest draft would not look like this. Spelling is another issue; everyone hits the wrong key from time to time.

Is it disturbing that a professor writes like this? Yes. Is it a shock? No. You'd be surprised at the number of college graduates who can't string two coherent sentences together. And it's reasonable to suspect that this woman's work was not the primary reason she was hired as a professor, given the focus on diversity in law schools (and law firms).

Is that racist? I don't think so. Nobody has suggested that she's a bad writer because she's black. It's not racism to point out the obvious possibility, though, that she is a law professor because she's black. That's just acknowledging a cultural fact.

I'm afraid that this sort of coverage may have a chilling effect on any further contributions to academia by Ms. Dawson. Please keep in mind the future and well-being of the Missouri Journal For Children Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, as well as like publications.

@ 8:15: It goes both ways; most male white law professors are law professors because they are white males. There are tons of mediocre ones at just about every law school. Welcome to reality.