Educating for Privilege

As a law school dean, I was much taken with a statement from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's landmark opinion in the University of Michigan case: "Law schools represent the training ground for a large number of our nation's leaders...it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open" to every segment of society.

In a powerful way, that sentiment breaks new ground. It recognizes that more is at stake in our affirmative-action battles than the quality of the classroom experience. The graduates of the country's strong law schools enjoy a hugely disproportionate access to opportunity and authority in the private and public sectors of our economy. Selective professional schools constitute distinctive pipelines to our principal corridors of power. The processes designed to distribute these remarkable resources, Justice O'Connor reminded, must be open to all.

The Michigan case, of course, explored the accessibility of selective higher education when it comes to race. The Justices concluded, thankfully, that universities need not be agnostic about the effective integration of their halls. But what if we cast O'Connor's inquiry more broadly? What if we asked about the diversity of selective student bodies on the basis of class? I think we'd find that the great institutions of American higher education, and their law schools, are constructed on a foundation of economic advantage that is bad--and getting worse. We aren't doing much about it. And we're behaving in ways to widen the breach.

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