Law Schools

Diversity And Academic Conference Speakers: A Misunderstood Relation

The benefit of diversity is not just for the diverse speaker. Diverse groups confer benefits upon everyone.

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I’m going into my conference season.  I’m excited to go to the various panels I go to every year.  At some of these conferences, I’ll see the same people speak every year.  It will be exciting to see them say the same thing they said last year in a different way.   I go to one particular ABA conference that’s very exciting in that way.

I’m kidding.  I’m not excited at all.  If it weren’t for my hand-crafted speaker bingo cards, I’d be downright bored.

And this brings me to the importance of diversity in the realm of conferences.

I think that many annual conferences are failing at the notion of diversity, or at least just giving it lip service.

Let’s start with some basics about diversity.

There are some no-brainer diversity steps you should have on every panel.  First, if your panel is a bunch of white males with degrees from Harvard and they are high-fiving each other about most points and disagreeing on something insignificant, you’ve flunked basic diversity.

Second, if your panel is a bunch of people with Harvard degrees who all have had the same socio-economic status, the same privileges, the same experiences, then you’ve flunked basic diversity.

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Third, if you’re just “doing diversity” because someone says you should do diversity, you’ve flunked basic diversity.  There are important reasons for it, which we’ll get to in a minute.

Fourth, if your panel raises the same issues that you’ve raised in panels 20 years in a row to highlight the articles your speakers have written that have all said the same thing 20 years in a row, you’ve flunked basic diversity.

The purpose of diversity is this: People have different experiences, and those experiences bring about different knowledge bases.  Those combined experiences, when synthesized, produce a unique body of knowledge and understanding that cannot be brought about by having five clones speak on the same topic. As an example, it is one thing to have someone who has thoroughly researched illegal searches speak at a conference.  It’s entirely another to have someone speak who has experienced it.

There is a ton of literature about the value of diversity in groups.  Non-diverse groups tend to come up with wrong conclusions.  Diverse groups come to better results.   Diverse groups are more innovative.  They are more gifted at solving complex problems.  And the diverse members of the group bring information that others do not possess.  In short, the benefit of diversity is not just for the diverse speaker.  Diverse groups confer benefits upon everyone.

Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE to hear my besties talk about things.  They are brilliant, savvy, smart, and always blow my mind.  BUT, in crafting conferences, I have made a lot of new friends, who are ALSO brilliant, savvy, smart, and blow my mind.  And this is what you’re missing when you have the rerun show every conference.

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In some initial thoughts I wrote about diversity, I said:  “Diversity means something more than just stretching your tolerance of people who aren’t like you just once.  A commitment to diversity doesn’t mean hiring a token, a person who eventually suffers in isolation.  It means a commitment to the notion that the school is a better place because we all have different experiences, backgrounds, and ways of thinking.”

This is true of academic panels as well.  If your claim to diversity is that you have one person of color on an otherwise white panel, you’ve failed at diversity.   You’ve consolidated diversity into two categories, white and non-white, and that clearly demonstrates which you value.

The same is true for gender.  If your panel is completely devoid of women, you are implicitly suggesting something and it’s not good.  And given that women are 50 percent of the population, having a panel of six men with one woman again demonstrates mere lip service to diversity.  You’ve minimized the experiences of women to that of a single person.

And I’m going to throw in two more categories of people:  The first is people who are of different economic classes.  People who have grown up in poverty or have not otherwise lived in privilege tend to be discussed at great length in conferences.  I have yet to hear a professor discuss having been one of those people.  That can’t be true, right?

Finally, there has been much talk about political diversity.  It might be all fun for us to speak in our own echo chambers, but it is more important, as AALS President and University of Richmond Dean Wendy Perdue suggested, that we model proper discourse.  That doesn’t mean in a conference on gravity that you have to invite those who don’t believe gravity exists, but it does mean at a panel on administrative law there ought to be someone who has serious intellectual concerns about the scope of the administrative state.

If you don’t believe me about the benefits of diversity, believe Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia.  As she wrote, his dissents made her opinions for the Court better.  “We disagreed now and then, but when I wrote for the Court and received a Scalia dissent, the opinion ultimately released was notably better than my initial circulation.  Justice Scalia nailed all the weak spots — the ‘applesauce’ and ‘argle bargle’ — and gave me just what I needed to strengthen the majority opinion.”

That’s the point of diversity.  Everyone wins.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at [email protected].

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