Vulgar attitudinalism

[sghosh2 at buffalo.edu]

The argument that diversity becomes more compelling the higher up one 
goes on the educational scale just seems flat out backwards.   
Diversity as characterized here would seem to me to be compelling at 
any level of education.  It seems bizarre, however, to say that since 
many students who end up going to law schools very likely went to 
elementary, high schools, and colleges that may not have been very 
diverse to begin with, professional schools can cure that big gap in 
their education.  

I agree the kind of diversity is an important question.  An equally 
important issue is whether administrators can really cure the problem, 
but that is more of a practical question than a constitutional one.  
>From that perspective, perhaps one solution is to defer to 
administrative measures to promote diversity absent some showing of 
animus or the types of pyschological and social harms in Brown.  

But that assumes, we understand what we want with diversity in the 
first place.   

Quoting RJLipkin at aol.com:

> Shouldn't we be asking what  kind of "diversity" is involved in K-12
> cases 
> and in law school  cases?  K-8 kids may need diversity as part of
> citizenship, 
> but it  isn't obvious that they need diversity in order to master
> elementary 
> educational  skills. Presumably, law students don't need citizenship
> 
> training--or do  they?--but the diversity in Grutter, seems to be
> designed to expose law  
> students to different points of view so that they will be prepared to
> deal 
> with  people of different ethnic backgrounds better. In other words,
> they will 
> be  prepared to redeploy the law (and methods of practice) in light
> of the  
> mosaic of different peoples in the United States.  Kids in K  9-12
> might need 
> both "citizenship-diversity" and "vocational-diversity, for  want of
> better 
> terms, but the distinction appears to be at least minimally  useful.
> 
>  
>         The Court in  Grutter seems to be saying, pace Justice
> Scalia,  that  
> educational (vocational) diversity makes lawyers better lawyers very
> roughly  
> in the same way that taking property makes them better lawyers, that 
> is, for 
> vocational reasons. Whether it makes them better citizens doesn't
> strike  me 
> as the kind of diversity involved.
>  
> Bobby
> 
> Robert Justin Lipkin
> Professor of Law
> Widener  University School of Law
> Delaware
>