Minority Law Students Offer Reforms at Faculty Meeting

Continuing their efforts to bring about minority hiring and academic reforms at the Law school, representatives of the minority student organization made a rare formal presentation of their positions at yesterday's faculty meeting.

Their appearance, which featured a 15-minute speech by Cecil McNab, co-chairperson of the Third World Coalition, came less than a week after the end of the group's widely publicized boycott of a winter-term civil rights class.

Both the faculty and coalition viewed McNab's presentation as a significant advance, because of the recent antagonism between the groups and because the coalition had never before been invited to a faculty meeting.

It is "not unprecedented" for students to speak at faculty meetings, Stephen Bernardi, secretary of the Faculty, said yesterday, but it is "not common." The last such presentation occurred "quite a while ago," he added.

Critique

In what he later called "a wholesale criticism of the entire educational process," McNab advocated a variety of reforms in the Law School's grading process, student admissions, curriculum development, faculty hiring, and student participation in policy decisions.

Following McNab's 10-15 minute speech, the faculty debated for more than a half hour whether to discuss the issues McNab had raised, finally deciding to take up the issues during the next several twice-monthly faculty meetings.

Muhammad Kenyatta, president of the Black Law Student Association, one of the groups in the Coalition, said afterwards, "this is a multi-faceted and ongoing struggle."

This struggle has in recent months included the boycott, offering an alternative civil rights class, and filing an employment discrimination suit with the Federal government over faculty hiring policies.

But yesterday's presentation marked the first face-to-face meeting of minority leaders and the faculty as a whole.

"We have invited the faculty to [coalition-sponsored] forums before," McNab said, calling low attendance at these meetings "a thermometer of their concern."

Professor Lance Liebman yesterday disagreed, pointing out that the most recent such forum was scheduled for the same day as a convention which drew many professors out of town.

"I've spent lots of days in my life meeting with students," he said, "and I think that many of may colleagues have done the same."

In a related action the faculty voted to include a class entitled Civil Rights Litigation in next year's tentative course schedule, to be taught by a visiting Hispanic professor, Gerald Lopez from UCLA, Liebman said.