Stanford Draws Praise for Diversity Efforts

Stanford fares better than other top law schools do in terms of faculty and student diversity, but it still has room for improvement, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education says.

The Journal found that, overall, little progress had been made over the past seven years in the recruitment of black students or the retention of black faculty members at top law schools.

Stanford's diverse law faculty earned high marks in the survey. Stanford has made a concious effort to recruit a diverse faculty, Dean Larry Kramer told the Stanford Daily. 7 of Stanford's full-time faculty members are minorities, with blacks representing over 9 per cent of full-time professors.

By contrast, Stanford's performance in recruiting minority students is on par with the national average. Blacks represent 7.8 per cent of students enrolled at Stanford and 7.4 per cent of students enrolled in the nation's 25 top law schools.

Dean Kramer reiterated Stanford's commitment to maintaining a lively and diverse academic community. "We believe that it is very important to have a faculty body that is diverse in all the ways important in American society — which means racial and ethnic diversity, but also gender and intellectual approaches as well," he said. "Our efforts to recruit have been focused on finding candidates and convincing them that Stanford is the right place for them to be."

Source: "Diversifying the Law School," by Niraj Sheth - the Stanford Daily, May 19, 2006