A Case of Frustration

AT THE BEGINNING of this month, The Law School Record published an article with a bold black headline reading "Chicago Firm Exonerated of Discrimination Claim." It was the first of a two-part series on a discrimination charge filed by Gail E. Bowman, a third-year law student. The essence of Bowman's charge was that a recruiter for a prestigious Chicago law firm made several insulting and racist remarks to her last spring during an interview for a summer job.

That first article concentrated on the report of an outside investigator called in by the Law School administration to examine the case. A second article, appearing in the next issue of the Record, was to discuss the final recommendations of the Placement Committee, the Law School body that sets up general guidelines for law firms' recruiting procedures at Harvard. Amazingly, the investigator's findings and the Placement Committee's recommendations contradict each other almost completely. The committee reported that Bowman acted in good faith throughout--that is, her reaction to the recruiter was not overblown and, some members of the committee said, was perfectly justified.

But that first headline--"Chicago Firm Exonerated"--outraged a large segment of the Law School student body. The Bowman case had become a cause celebre there, the focus of a controversy unusual for the school. Throughout the winter and spring, angry students confronted the Law School administration and the Placement Committee, demanding it investigate Bowman's case and offer her some redress, either by banning the firm's recruiters from the campus or at least by severely chastising the firm. Finally, the administration was forced to go further than it ever has on such matters, calling in the outside investigator that the Placement Committee's bylaws provide for.

What actually happened in that interview does not easily lend itself to investigation. Bowman says the recruiter told her the firm once had "a gal like you" working for them--"she was just like you, only shorter"--and that the last black who worked for them now works for Clorox--"Isn't that funny, a black working for a bleach company?" John H. Morrison, the recruiter, categorically denies the offensive remarks. The matter, then, could only be decided in terms of Bowman's word against Morrison's.

The Law School Council (the student governing body), the Black Law Students Association and the Women's Law Association all backed Bowman to the hilt. The battle between the students who wanted the Law School to chastise the firm, and the administration, which seemed to want to hush the whole thing up, intensified. Throughout the struggle, students kept suggesting that the real reason the dean refused to take action was the Law School's financial cowardice. Morrison's firm, like many prestigious corporate law firms, apparently makes a large annual gift to the Law School, and students felt that the Law School might go easy on Morrison because it wanted the gifts to keep coming. In other words, the students felt the school was placing a higher value on its endowment than on fighting discrimination, and wanted to force the administration to take a stand.

WHEN THE PLACEMENT COMMITTEE decided--after what was apparently an extremely stormy four-hour meeting--to recommend the dean announce that Bowman acted in good faith, just about everyone was satisfied. All they wanted, one student said after the meeting, was a Record headline telling Law School alumni that the students had won their fight--a fight against an administration they felt had more faith in law firms run by alumni than in the law students themselves.

The fact that the Record blew their hopes seems to have left a number of students half-believing that the articles were the result of a conspiracy against them: that the administration ganged up with the reporter to destroy Bowman's credibility, and that of the anti-administration groups backing her. That appears unlikely. But the fact remains that the administration moved this summer to cut down the number of student members on the Placement Committee, reinforcing a feeling that the school would rather avoid student-initiated controversy that could damage its ability to rely on firms for donations. The school denies the move was anything but an effort to cut the membership for efficiency's sake--but to the students involved in the Bowman case, it is only another example of the school's willingness to avoid student input that could damage its future relationship with donors.

No one would deny that for many students at the Law School the Bowman incident was unimportant. Most students now say the only real problem with the Placement Committee is that their computer broke recently, screwing up the assignment of times for recruitment interviews. But for those few students who want to increase their input into the school, the issues the Bowman case brought into the open--questions of where the school puts its priorities and how it acts on them--are not dead.

It's hard to say whether the radicals will have any success in changing the way things are run at the Law School. Right now, they don't seem to be having much success, just as radicals there have had little success in the past. Maybe the answer is that radicals just don't belong at the Harvard Law School, truly a bastion of the status quo. But for now they sound like they want to go on fighting. Maybe in the end they'll be able to do something--to change the shape of their education so that it answers what they, and not the administration, perceive to be their needs.