Some law students at Stanford are meting out “diversity report cards” to top law firms, ranking them by how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have hired.
Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a research group that supports colorblind policies, is of course right in calling this grading exercise harmful. “Diversity is all too frequently a code word,” he said, “for preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex, or lower standards, or being opposed to assimilation.”
Also pernicious, I submit, is the big firms’ response. None questioned, much less objected, to the flawed basic premise of the report cards. (The New York Times)