A letter from me to the editor of the Harvard Law Record, [published April 29]:

I write in response to Jon Lamberson's article "HLS to Lose Three Assistant Profs." Although it is always a shame when HLS loses intelligent, qualified, and popular professors, I fear the bent of the article misconstrues what I feel is HLS's most glaring problem in faculty diversity.

Lamberson laments that two of the departing professors are women, leaving only one woman at HLS on tenure track. He points out accusingly that the only two professors granted tenure this year were both (gasp!) men. The Record backs up Lamberson's position with an online poll at hlrecord.org: "Does HLS have enough women profs?"

This concern with gender diversity strikes me as what Justice Clarence Thomas termed "classroom aesthetics" in his dissent in the affirmative action case Grutter v. Bollinger last June. True diversity in a law school setting must involve much more than skin color and gender. HLS's professors are desperately homogenous when it comes to a much more relevant characteristic: political ideology.

Allow me to illustrate. Last February, Dean Kagan sponsored a forum to discuss the Mass SJC same-sex marriage case. Professors Tribe, Halley, Barron, and Parker were the participants. Their opinions ranged from Prof. Tribe calling the decision "a masterpiece" to Prof. Parker agreeing with the result but accusing the SJC of arrogance in the way they chose to implement their decision. Not one of the four panelists expressed the opinion--widespread in the general public and expressed by three of the seven SJC justices themselves--that the result was dead wrong. Concerned, I wrote an email to Dean Kagan, asking why there wasn't a professor on the panel to present the position against the SJC's decision. She replied, "Mary Ann Glendon of course would have expressed the strongest possible disagreement with the decision. I asked her to participate, but she was unavailable. Otherwise, you're quite right that Harvard -- like other elite law schools -- doesn't have many social conservatives. . . . Who knows why that is."

The message is loud and clear: Of the 179 people listed on HLS's faculty directory, only one can be classified as a social conservative. Rather than trying to figure out "why that is," HLS should be doing something to promote ideological diversity among its faculty.

A professor's political philosophy has a much more direct impact on the educational experience of students than his or her gender or race. How many times has a professor warned students at the beginning of a course that he or she will be presenting his or her own personal take on the way the law should be interpreted or formed? Despite their invitations for students with "opposing views" to speak up, the leftist rhetoric gets monotonous. When HLS's lone social conservative did publicly criticize the SJC's same-sex marriage ruling (in another setting), she was shouted down by a letter/petition signed by 167 students and published in The Record. When more liberal professors publicly state their views, we don't hear a peep of response from conservative students. It might be because The Record could never provide enough space for such rebuttals even if it were published daily, or it might be that speaking out with conservative views is close to anathema at HLS.

I believe that Dean Kagan is committed to increasing the diversity of the HLS faculty. I hope, however, that she takes seriously the problem of ideological diversity. Let's stop worrying about how we look aesthetically, and create the kind of diversity that truly contributes to a complete educational experience.

Matt Astle
2L