Recruiting Sexual Minorities and People With Disabilities to Be Dean

• Publication year: 2008
• Citation: Vol. 31 No. 04

UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 31, No. 4SUMMER 2008

Recruiting Sexual Minorities and People with Disabilities to be Dean

Joan W. Howarth(fn*)

I. Introduction

As our day-to-day work lives make abundantly clear, a law faculty is a many-headed creature: an assortment of people with a variety of interests, strengths, foibles, personalities, and identities. Within the legal academy, a dominant consensus acknowledges that a strong faculty embodies diversity along multiple axes, including, for example, race, gender, religion, age, political ideology, research and teaching methodologies, and subject matter expertise.

The dean, however, stands alone, and stands above. Thus, issues of expectation, representation, comfort with and fear of difference operate quite differently when deans are selected, and when they do their jobs. The dean exercises authority over the entire institution. The dean also represents the entire school, and by common metaphor, is said to be the face of the law school. This symposium's focus on diversity in deaning is important because notions about identity inevitably shape how a dean's authority, competence, vulnerability, power, trustworthiness, and strength are interpreted, understood, and experienced. Imposed identity issues play out differently when the choice is not just about a colleague, but instead about the person in charge.

This Essay discusses diversity in deaning as it pertains to two identity categories: members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities, and people with disabilities. Each identity is itself fluid and contested, containing such enormous variations as to render the category illusive and often obfuscating. People with visible disabilities face fundamentally different issues than people with hidden disabilities, for example. Pairing sexual orientation and disability risks false analogies, and worse.

Yet some common themes may pertain to people with disabilities and to members of the LGBT communities who are potential or sitting deans. Individuals who identify as members of either group may venture into a dean candidacy with only ambiguous, formal legal protections against discrimination, or no legal protection at all. The many variations in what might be considered a disability-some understood to be irrelevant, others permitted to be determinative-create their own uneven and unpredictable employment law landscape.(fn1) Formal protection against employment discrimination against LGBT candidates forms a geographic patchwork quilt, layered at different thicknesses with possible law school, university, local, or state nondiscrimination policies or laws, but also marred by many large holes, where no laws or policies protect against discrimination. However limited the power of formal prohibitions against discrimination, the absence of those prohibitions carries its own power, too.

Perhaps the most vexing questions that some people with hidden disabilities and some members of LGBT communities may face relate to visibility, passing, secrecy, privacy, and disclosure. Deliberate disclosure of personal information (otherwise known as "coming out") may be central for members of both groups. The irrelevance of being gay or being disabled is not securely established, so communication about these aspects of one's life may be challenging. Even in welcoming contexts, the LGBT or disabled applicant may face decisions about how to discuss that aspect of his or her identity, if at all.

At a more theoretical level, people with disabilities and sexual minorities share identities that may be provocative in similar ways. All members of groups not traditionally associated with power and authority may face challenges from being perceived as inappropriate to represent the entire institution. The particularity of outsider identities is somehow noticed, exceptionalized, and translated into inability or inappropriate-ness for representing the full breadth and strength of the institution; the equal particularity of traditional insiders may be ignored or mistaken for universality. For people identified as disabled or as members of the LGBT communities, concerns about imperfectly representing the entire institution may overlap in complex ways with discomfort with the corporeal realities presented by the disabled or LGBT person. These identities may draw attention to the physicality of the dean, the body of the dean, or the sexuality of the dean in unsettling ways, even if never acknowledged. These issues may feel new in the context of law school deaning, but they are not.

II. A MEMORABLE SPEECH AT THE 1990 AALS ANNUAL MEETING: "YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY BE BOTH DEAN OF A LAW SCHOOL AND OPENLY GAY."

As President of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), former Boalt Hall Dean Herma Hill Kay chose A Time for Sharing: Speaking Difference, Building Strength as the theme of the 1990 AALS Annual Meeting.(fn2) Dean Kay planned the plenary session, A Time for Sharing: Tokenism, Tolerance or True Diversity, to feature presentations by three distinguished leaders in legal education: Professor Regina Austin of the University of Pennsylvania; Professor Richard Delgado, then of the University of Wisconsin; and Craig Christensen, then-President of the Law School Admission Services and Executive Director of the Law School Admissions Council and former Dean of the Syracuse University School of Law. Dean Kay asked Dean Christensen to speak personally about his experiences as an openly gay dean. Dean Christensen delivered a brave, effective, and powerful speech entitled, "The Trivial Concerns of the Invisible Minority."(fn3) Dean Christensen told the plenary audience some of his stories about coming out as a gay man in the context of being a law school dean, a position he had taken several years before when married to a woman. Dean Christensen recounted, for example, that when he began to socialize with members of the gay community, a senior officer of the university, rumored to be gay, called him in to his office. The officer told him, "Surely you must understand that ultimately you will have to make a choice. You cannot possibly be both dean of a law school and openly gay."(fn4) As Dean Christensen told the senior administrator, and then recounted almost two decades ago to the AALS Plenary session, "if I had to give up one, it was going to be being dean of the law school!"(fn5)

In truth, Dean Christensen did not have to choose. As described in his AALS speech eighteen years ago, Dean Christensen's problems juggling his responsibilities as dean and his identity as an openly gay man were minimal, limited to "the occasional unfriendly graffiti, ... fewer social invitations, and ... an awkward moment or two with an alum."(fn6) On the other hand, once he had come out, Dean Christensen's chances for advancement at that time within that university disappeared. Dean Christensen told the AALS audience about the chair of Syracuse University's hiring committee having disclosed Christensen's "lifestyle" to the committee as supposedly relevant to the viability of his candidacy for a position as Vice Chancellor. Syracuse University had a formal applicable nondiscrimination policy at the time, but it seemed to have had little impact on the committee's actions. Dean Christensen subsequently formally grieved the committee's treatment of his sexual identity...