A former adjunct professor of law at Georgetown recently had her day of infamy. Her name is Sandra Sellers. Being an “adjunct” professor of law generally means that your teaching job is part-time and that you have an actual law practice or other legal field employment outside the university. That seems to have been the case with Professor Sandra Sellers before her recent firing.
The apparent reason for the firing was Sellers’ conversation with another professor in a “Zoom” call that she mistakenly believed to be private. Here are the words that prompted her firing:
“You know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks, happens almost every semester. It happens almost every semester, and it’s like, oh, come on. You know, we get some really good ones but there also usually are some of them that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.”
Both law professors who remained on the Zoom screen after the completion of a virtual class were White. All of us need to be able to discuss matters of race. There was nothing racist in Sellers’ observation that year after year the academic basement of her class was disproportionately Black. She suffered “angst” because of that circumstance. It drove her “crazy.” If she had thought more precisely on her observation, she might have linked low academic performance to Georgetown’s affirmative action admission of minority students whose LSAT scores and/or undergrad academic records would not otherwise qualify them for admission. As it should have, it bothered Professor Sellers to see some Black law students lagging academically. There is nothing racist about such a concern.
It was Georgetown’s “Black Law Students Association” that declared the leaked video evidence of “blatant and shameless racism” and demanded “swift and definitive action.” But what about the White Law Students Association? . . . To my knowledge, there is none. If one existed, the Black Law Students Association would condemn it as racist while oblivious to the inconsistency.
“Agitate, Agitate, Agitate” is a well-worn motto attributed to the renowned Frederick Douglass. His complaint was slavery. His goal was abolition. Yet to “Agitate, Agitate, Agitate” more than a century and one-half post-abolition and to direct that agitation at Whites for expressing or considering an inconvenient truth invites pushback.
It was not Professor Sellers’ agonized concern over Black academic performance that was racist. The racist feature was the reaction of the BLSA and others demanding that Professor Sellers be punished and silenced for speaking the truth. Georgetown should not have fired Professor Sellers though such action was the easier path. The alternative excuse for the firing is that law professors should be smarter than to assume the privacy of Zoom screen conversation.
Leave a Reply