A new promotional pamphlet produced by the Faculty of Law boasts that one-third of the incoming class are “students of colour.” At the Dean’s Town Hall on financial aid and accessibility on October 16th, Dean Moran presented students a slide showing the upward trend in the number of visible minorities at the law school, hovering at about 33% for the past few years. These statistics are used by the Faculty to show that we as a class are both diverse and accessible.
Many students expressed skepticism at the statistics presented, and what it purports to tell us about diversity at our law school. They were right to do so. Here we raise two main concerns of the data presented.
Firstly, the “33%” statistic collapses all racial and ethnic identities into one category: “students of colour.” It obscures a fact that is painfully clear to anyone who has sat in a class at the law school: there is a significant underrepresentation of students from certain racial or ethnic groups, such as blacks, Hispanics, Arabs and Persians (to name a few). A breakdown of the Faculty’s statistic would show that, rather than a diverse class (in a more sophisticated and deep understanding of what it means to be “diverse”), our class continues to be racially imbalanced, with students of East Asian (followed by South Asian) descent accounting for the majority of minorities present at the school. Other equity seeking groups remain vastly underrepresented.
This critique does not take away from the fact that the Faculty’s minority numbers have gone up over the decades. Indeed, the fact that there are more minorities than there used to be is a good thing. However, we challenge the lump-sum statistic because it fails to tell us about our diversity (and accessibility) as it does not indicate which groups are represented at the law school, and by correlation, which groups are not.
The 33% statistic is also misleading from the perspective of the experiences of students from underrepresented groups. In using the 1-in-3 stat as a recruitment tool (as it clearly does in its promotional pamphlet), the Faculty implies that there are going to be students at school who look like you and who share your background. Unfortunately, for students from some backgrounds, that is simply not the case.
Furthermore, the methodology behind the statistic raises concerns. The responses are self-reported – but the question asked to students is not framed in terms of identifying as a person of “colour” but rather, as identifying as part of certain ethnic minorities. This shift in terminology between the question and the answer is problematic – not only from a linguistic perspective, but in terms of the numeric validity of the statistic itself. Had the Faculty asked students to self-identify as persons of colour, their answer may have been different.
Secondly, the statistic is deficient because it fails to track the intersectionality of race/ethnic identity and class/socioeconomic status. This concern is not new, and was raised by students following the “listening sessions” last March, and expressed in a UV article by a group of minority students last spring. We repeat the concern here: by failing to explore the way in which race and class interact, we fail to take the concept of accessibility seriously. That is, by tracking the number of minorities and median household income in isolation, the Faculty has failed to address – or understand at all – the meaning of accessibility through its present data. If we admit students of diverse backgrounds, but only those from affluent homes, what does that say about our actual accessibility? Indeed, if low-income minorities are not being admitted to the Faculty of Law, then what does the 1-in-3 stat really mean in terms of accessibility?
The fact that the request for this intersectional data analysis has already been made to the Faculty nearly 7 months ago – during private listening lunches and public articles –makes the continued use of the reductionist 33% statistic ever more frustrating.
Given these two critiques, we request that the Faculty take the following actions:
1) Disaggregate the 33% statistic: the Faculty should discontinue its use of this statistic in its promotional and recruitment tools until it puts out new data which breaks down minorities by sub-groups. This new data will present a more comprehensive and accurate picture of the racial balance (or imbalance) and diversity of our class.
2) Conduct an intersectional analysis of race/ethnic identity and class/socioeconomic status: Given that the Faculty collects information on race/ethic identity (through OLSAS and the LSAT data), as well as household income (through Financial Aid applications), it should be able to conduct an intersectional analysis without difficulty. This will give insight into our accessibility to certain groups relative to others.
There is no doubt that there are large, deep, systemic issues facing certain minority groups and their representation within the legal profession. U of T Law is no exception. By presenting our racial composition in simplistic one-stat-sum-it-all numbers, we are obscuring the hard reality of our very real racial imbalance. Moreover, the risk we run with such numbers is that there will be a feeling that “we are doing okay – not perfect, but pretty good”. In fact, we are not. Our racial imbalance is a cold, uncomfortable truth, and the statistics currently used by the Faculty make light of this fact.
