Editor’s note: No discussion of a commitment to diversity in higher
education would be complete without talking to Derrick Bell.
Unfortunately, as Black Issues was preparing the following article,
Professor Bell fell ill and was unavailable for an interview. Black
Issues is happy to report that at press time he was reported as doing
better.
Professor Derrick A. Bell Jr. is known throughout academic circles
under many names: The Race Man, The Steward, The Scold, The Pessimist,
and The Realist, among others. He is often recognized as a pioneer of
critical race theory and, perhaps most definitively, as the man who
walked away from Harvard University.
When Bell went to Harvard University Law School in 1969 after years
as a civil rights lawyer, his understanding was that his would be the
first of several appointments of faculty of color. When he received
tenure in 1971, he was still alone. And despite the appointment of some
visiting professors, he remained alone on the faculty for many years.
During that time he helped develop the notion of critical race theory,
a collection of ideas that center on the way law has been used to
enforce racism in the Western world.
In Confronting Authority, published in 1994, Bell describes his
frustration with Harvard University: “Twenty years after hiring me as
the school’s first full-time [B]lack law professor, Harvard’s diversity
record at the Law School was poor and in the rest of the University
appalling. Harvard’s claim that it made goodfaith efforts to diversify
its almost entirely [W]hite and male faculty was belied by the fact
that not even one Latino, Asian, or Native American professor had
joined the law faculty. Although over the years a half-dozen [B]lack
men gained faculty appointments, Harvard had stood aside while women of
color taught and earned tenured positions at other prestigious law
schools, including Georgetown, New York University, and the University
of Pennsylvania.”
As much as the university held fast that it was actively seeking out
potential minority hires, students as well as Bell got a different
impression.
“They would talk to us about making changes,” explains Sheryll
Cashin, now a law professor at Georgetown University who was a student
of Bell’s during the late 1980s at Harvard. “But nothing would happen.”
“Derrick was the most important mentor in legal education for years
because he was the only Black man, for one thing,” says Columbia
University law professor Patricia Williams, who was a student of
Bell’s. “He took everyone seriously – especially Black women, which was
rare.”
