Opinion ID: 777482
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Achieving the Benefits of a Diverse Educational Environment

Text: 285 Even if I were not convinced that the Law School's pursuit of a critical mass of minority students is a constitutionally invalid means to achieve diversity, I would still find the empirical link between such critical mass and the values of diversity lacking. 31 The Law School never provided any evidence that the existence of the critical mass would in fact contribute to classroom dialogue or would lessen feelings of isolation or alienation. The only evidence at all bearing on this is from the Gurin Report. 286 The Gurin report is questionable science, was created expressly for litigation, and its conclusions do not even support the Law School's case. The benefits of a diverse student body that the study purports to prove, essentially better learning 32 and increased democratic participation, 33 are themselves vague to a degree that we would never accept to satisfy strict scrutiny in any other context. The concurring opinion 34 contends that this opinion ignores the Gurin report in discussing diversity's capacity to deliver its claimed benefits. Concurring Op. at 759 (Clay). The concurring opinion, however, does not even mention, much less analyze, the strength of Gurin's proof. The study suffers from profound empirical and methodological defects that lead me to doubt its probative value. And certainly neither the trial court as finder of fact nor the majority opinion take the report's conclusions as fact. 287 First, the report falls well short of making the Law School's case, even if we simply accept it without scrutinizing its conclusions. The report takes no position on how much diversity is required to yield the claimed benefits, and thus does not even purport to substantiate the Law School's claim that a critical mass of minorities is required to achieve the educational benefits of diversity. 35 288 Second, the report's aspirations to empiricism are undermined by the subjectivity of its data. After all, the report bases its claimed educational benefits on only the subjective self-reports of students. 289 Third and most importantly, the statistical regressions relied on by the report never examine the statistical link between having a more diverse student body and the benefits that it claims. Instead, the regressions investigate only the correlation between the claimed benefits and two proxy variables for diversity: classroom diversity and informal interactional diversity. See Gurin Report, JA at 2434, 2437, 2441, 2446. Classroom diversity is defined as the responding student having taken an ethnic studies class, and informal interactional diversity as a student having had social interaction with or about minorities in college. Ibid. Both of these variables, however, are independent of having a more racially or ethnically diverse student body, and appear to make the case for more ethnic studies classes or informational seminars about ethnic issues, instead of greater numbers of minority students. In fact, one wonders why Gurin did not directly correlate her benefits to the much less complex, but infinitely more relevant, variable of participation in a more diverse student body: I fear that Gurin used the proxies because a study of mere student body diversity either did not or would not produce the results that she sought. 36 In any event, we lack any even purportedly empirical evidence demonstrating a correlation between increasing the number of under-represented minorities enrolled and the vague benefits of diversity claimed by the Law School. 37 290 The Gurin Report aside, the link between the Law School's diversity and its claimed benefits is conceptually flawed. The relationship between a critical mass and the values of diversity would depend on contingencies nearly impossible to predict. The Law School's definition seems to depend wholly on the psychological makeup of the people involved, whether labeled as majority or minority. Certainly history is replete with examples of members of minority groups, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King to Thomas Sowell, who have said their piece and stood for what they believed in without regard to whether others thought them to be a representative. Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as having said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. The same is true of representativeness. Apparently, by this measure, if and as members of the under-represented group become psychologically stronger, and thus more able or willing to speak as individuals, the Law School needs less and less of them. 291 On the other hand, if the measurement is based on the attitudes of the non-minority students, there again is little concreteness to the measure. This would seem to mean that if those outside the minority groups were all paragons of tolerance, then there would be no need for any preference, because all students would uphold the precepts of the Constitution and major religions to treat each person as an individual. Conversely, if the majority student body stubbornly persisted (following the Law School's lead) in attributing the experiences and opinions of their classmates to their racial identity, the critical mass would need to expand and expand, presumably until most or all of the recalcitrant majority students had been driven from campus. In short, any sort of rationale-based definition of critical mass seems hopeless. 292 Critical mass also has difficulties if it is defined in a way divorced from some notion of the proper representation of the particular group. Since the Law School gives no principles, sociological or otherwise, by which the non-representativeness of individual group members can be judged, we would have to assume that a critical mass would be of approximately the same size for any designated group. Thus, Afghans, Orthodox Jews, Appalachian Celts, or fundamentalist Christians might also feel that their remarks were being taken as representative, rather than individually, unless they, too, had a critical mass. Then, the makeup of the entering class could be wholly determined by those groups that the Law School chose to classify as appropriate for worrying about their under-represented status. Indeed, the Law School does not appear to believe that the critical mass for Native Americans, for example, is nearly as large as it is for blacks and Hispanics. Thus, some measure of rough proportionality inevitably creeps in as the measure of what is the critical mass. Although the Law School's deponents tried very hard to avoid any specificity in their responses (A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow), it was clear both in the trial record and at oral argument that a number that was only half or less of a group's representation in some national measure of population would not be considered a critical mass. 293 Also problematic is how the Law School has selected the minorities entitled to a preference in terms of fostering a diverse educational environment. The Law School's statement that its actions are justified because members of under-represented minorities are particularly likely to have experiences and perspectives of special importance raises the question of whether it can determine that other groups, such as Americans of Japanese or Welsh ancestry, are particularly unlikely to have such experiences and perspectives. In practical effect, that is what the Law School has decided, and without any specific basis. Either the experiences and perspectives are themselves valuable, in which case they could be judged on that basis without reference to skin color or parentage, or the Law School is assuming a heterogeneity among widely diversified groups.