Redefining Authority: The Need for Diversity : Education: Seeking tenure for a black woman, Harvard law students demand change: they assert that authority doesn’t mean <i> white </i> and <i> male.</i>

Inside the gray corridors of Harvard Law School, where 18th-Century oil paintings of robed barristers cast cold stares from beneath big wigs, there is divergence on the issue of diversity. Outside the classrooms, hundreds of students have marched and rallied in recent weeks to demand the tenure appointment of a woman of color to the faculty. It is a struggle waiting to happen on many campuses--a struggle to change the face of legal authority.

The singular demand for “diversity” hardly reflects the numbers behind it: 173 years without a Latino, woman of color, American Indian, Asian, disabled or openly homosexual tenured professor. Of the 60 current tenured faculty, 53 are white men, three are African-American men and five are white women.

For Dean Robert C. Clark, untold faculty and many conservative students, it is a struggle to preserve the power of the Harvard name, as though it were the H-bomb of elitism to be dropped upon frightened listeners in professional conversation. The idea of, say, a black woman in charge of a class full of the “best and brightest” is anathema to people, mainly men, more accustomed to watching them cook and clean than assign and grade. Discrete and insular minorities were less threatening when they were quiet and unknown.

An outsider might wonder why so much is made of a single appointment in such a large institution. Is the fear that an inch may become a mile so realistic?

Perhaps it is. After all, diversity would call into question many of the assumptions about interpretation of the law. It might challenge professors not fond of confrontation to defend their expertise in classrooms, law reviews and faculty meetings. It might challenge the dishonesty of “it is”--for which law faculty are known--with the “I think”--by which many minority and feminist scholars assert their views. Perhaps “Truth” itself would disappear. As more integrated approaches rivaled tradition for intellectual primacy and discourse, the old school might lose hegemony. The H-bomb might explode, leaving equality to reign amid the ruins.

Yet for minorities and others outside the norm whose presence and competence was only recently recognized here, diversity might defuse the H-bomb that burns within us.

Any student can tackle questions or deliver doctrine on demand. But law is ultimately about living people, and to sit inside a law-school class and hear the stories of our parents reduced to irreducible principles of abstraction, the facts removed from the flesh in our casebooks, the race and class edited out of opinions is to taunt implosion. As mild-mannered missionaries of difference, we await “race week” in contracts, “women’s day” in constitutional law and “Indian moment” in property to offer the victim’s expertise. We are good, but we are tired of being visiting lecturers for the education of white students. Like all students, we come for the rigorous study of ourselves.

Yet the promise of true diversity is that groups who don’t know each other will come to terms through exposure and debate. This is rare in the bastion of privilege and rarer still among U.S. suburbs and boardrooms. But it is critical to an education for leadership. You cannot exalt diversity only in exotic vacations, the globalization of markets, new opportunities in Eastern Europe and popular intolerance of apartheid. You must live it at home.

The law is but one element in life--though it tries to be its regulator--and life is becoming more diverse all the time. The major cities for legal practice--New York, Chicago and Los Angeles--are home to more Latino school districts, lesbian-owned businesses, Asian service workers, homeless families and black developers than ever before. That presence parallels the numerical inclusion of minorities in training grounds such as Harvard.

As a result, this struggle for diversity involves the demand for substantial inclusion and a radical restructuring of legal perception, argument and analysis. It is a struggle for the power to legitimate. That perhaps is why conservative faculty here, as everywhere, raise questions about the competence of African-Americans to teach or, for that matter, to own businesses and lead school districts. It is not enough that the black female professor under scrutiny in the current debate is a well-published authority on insurance law, tenured at Penn Law School and sought by Michigan Law School. At Harvard, because she is also an unapologetic role model, she is the first step on a “slippery slope.”

A majority of students here at Harvard do not care to drop themselves upon the world like bomb threats. While black women have been most vocal, the 700 students who have consistently attended rallies and sit-ins this spring constitute a multiracial group of men and women intent on adequate preparation. The passage of a student referendum supporting a pro-bono requirement and the frequent winter protests over cutbacks in public-service programs signal a curiosity and a desire to expand the range of legal advocacy. The recent announcement by a beloved black professor, Derrick Bell, that he will not return until demands are met, threatens the existence of a role model for students hungry for open doors, feedback and human insight. Despite its acrimony, the diversity struggle has produced a rare experience at Harvard Law School: community.