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Seeking more minorities on campus Florida’s law schools are committed to diversifying their student bodies While bar leaders across Florida agree the public would be better served if the makeup of the profession more closely mirrored the diversity of the state’s population, a simple fact remains: It’s not going to happen until more minorities go to law school.As one ABA report aptly put it, “Law firms, corporate legal departments, government, and the judiciary cannot recruit attorneys of color who don’t exist.”Florida’s 10 law schools recognize that truth and all have made racial and ethnic diversity part of their overall strategic plans. With One Florida, one of Gov. Jeb Bush’s first initiatives, Florida’s state schools are no longer permitted to take race into account in admissions standards.“But state law schools are permitted to make special efforts to recruit historically unrepresented students,” notes Florida State University College of Law Dean Don Weidner.What are those special efforts?The Florida Bar News surveyed the state’s 10 law schools, both state-funded and private, to see what is being done to increase diversity among law school students. We gathered the stats. We talked to the law school deans. We summed up their best efforts to recruit minorities.Everyone agreed that diversity is important and is improving, but efforts need to continue if Florida is to boast a legal profession that mirrors its diverse society. That is the stated goal that came out of The Florida Bar’s 2004 Symposium on Diversity in the Legal Profession: to have the profession as diverse as Florida’s population by 2014.For legal reasons, the Bar does not collect mandatory gender and ethnic information about members, although it does voluntarily request that data, and almost 60 percent of Bar members supply it. According to those statistics, 88 percent of the Bars membership is white; 7 percent is Hispanic; 3 percent is African American; and the rest are other races and ethnicities. Among young lawyers, the numbers are more diverse, with 77 percent white, 5 percent African American, 13 percent Hispanic, and the rest other races and ethnicities.Diversity is at the top of his priority list, said Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center Dean Joseph Harbaugh.“We are in a state and region of that state in which there is a very high percentage of minority citizens, and our Bar is a fundamentally white bar,” Harbaugh said.“For the justice system to be honored and respected and followed, those who are leading that justice system ought to reflect as much as we possibly can our population. We need to make extra effort to diversify. I think the law schools in Florida have done a very good job of diversifying the student body.”At St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, Dean Bob Butterworth points with pride to the 2006 edition of the American Bar Association’s Official Guide to ABA-approved Law Schools that ranks St. Thomas first in total Hispanic enrollment and fifth in Spanish heritage total enrollment among 189 ABA-accredited law schools.“My experience as a dean and as the former attorney general of Florida leads me to believe that a diverse classroom is imperative for educational excellence,” Butterworth said.“Students learn from one another, both in the classroom and outside,” Butterworth said. “Our students spend three years in the company of people unlike themselves and are better prepared for life and work in our society.”What impact has two new law schools in Florida — Florida A&M University in Orlando and Florida International University in Miami — had on increasing diversity?As NSU’s Harbaugh said: “One of the things we said when the law schools were proposed is this was not going to create more minority law students in Florida; it is going to redistribute them, which is what it has done.”Black students are shifting away from Nova, with 12.4 percent three years ago to just 5.4 percent today.When historically black FAMU celebrated its first law school graduation in May 2005, for the first time black students did not make up the majority of a FAMU graduating class.Of the 410 total students now at the new FAMU law school, 41.22 percent are African American/black, 38 percent are Caucasian, 14.63 percent are Hispanic, and 6.1 percent are listed as American Indian/Asian American/other.Here is a look at what the law schools in the state are doing to attract more minorities to campus: University of Miami “Every fall the Office of Student Recruiting attends law fairs at several historically black institutions,” said Tom Keller, assistant director of student recruiting at the University of Miami.“Howard, Morehouse, Florida A&M, Florida Memorial, and Xavier & Dillard in New Orleans are schools that we regularly visit.“In February we host an annual Multicultural Admissions Fair aimed at providing prospective law students from under-represented ethnicities information on being admitted to and succeeding in law school. In the winter and early spring we have held telethons and online chat rooms to provide admitted students who are minorities the opportunity to speak with current law students. We host a visit from the pre-law student organization at Florida A&M once a year. We also have an outreach program that brings local high school students to the law school for half a day to learn about law school and legal careers.”Besides those activities, Keller said UM participates along with other South Florida law schools in hosting the Miami Law Fair. More than 120 law schools from around the country are expected at this year’s law fair on October 5.The law school also has the James Weldon Johnson Summer/Robert H. Waters program visit for all beginning law students, minority and nonminority, to help them adapt to the rigors and demands of law school.Keller also noted that the UM School of Law is a member school of the Council on Legal Opportunity and that every year the Hispanic Business Review ranks the top law schools in the country for Hispanic students and in 2005 the University of Miami School of Law was ranked number one.In the past three years, UM’s minority enrollment for incoming classes has been 25 to 27 percent Florida Coastal At Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Dean Peter Goplerud said there are two parts to the school’s diversity recruitment efforts.“We’re going to have a lot more intensive recruitment at historically black colleges and universities throughout the Southeast. We have one staff member in our admissions office who, among other things, focuses heavily on minority recruitment. We also do a lot to utilize the minority student organizations with both pre-application recruitment efforts and post acceptance recruitment efforts.”Secondly, Florida Coastal typically admits around 1,300 to 1,400 students in order to get a class of 400 who actually attend, and the school works hard to emphasize its student-centered approach in attracting minority students.As that approach leads to more minority faculty and students, “It becomes a better story to tell,” Goplerud said.Florida Coastal’s minority enrollment is 16 percent. St. Thomas University Dean Butterworth said since its inception 20 years ago, St. Thomas’ law school has made it a mission to identify underrepresented populations and encourage them to come to the school.“Latin culture plays a significant role in the lives of many of our citizens,” Butterworth said. “This ethnic diversity has been deliberately taken into account in student admissions policies, curriculum design, and is reflected in the significant number of students, faculty, and staff who are functionally bilingual and bicultural.”He said the school regularly sends recruiters to historically black colleges and offers scholarships and other financial assistance to students based on need and ability. The law school also offers a summer conditional program for students who do not quite have the GPA of LSAT scores to get in. He said many minority students fall in that category because they historically do not do as well on standardized tests, for many because English is a second language. The conditional program gives them a chance to prove they are up to the task of law school, and the school has found that those who sucessfully complete the conditional program go on do to well in law school.But Butterworth also noted statistics show that over the past few years the number of African Americans entering law school in Florida is staying constant, while that number is shrinking in other states. That’s why there is a need to interest students in the law not just at the undergraduate level, but in high schools and middle schools as well. He said St. Thomas is involved in promoting the law as a career in the Miami schools, participating in organizing moot court and mock trial contests. St. Thomas also has developed a partnership with Palm Springs Middle School in Hialeah, where it works to interest students in a career in law.The Princeton Review also ranks St. Thomas number nine in the country in diversity of faculty, and the last four tenured track professors hired by the law school are minorities, including two black females, a Native American, and an Asian American.“An all-white faculty is not in the best interest of obtaining a diverse population of your student body,” Butterworth said. “So we are very committed to that.”He also said minority students at St. Thomas are just not numbers to the university, and when minority law school candidates visit campus they are introduced to faculty and staff members “who look like them” so they feel comfortable right off the bat.“We are proud of our extraordinary active and diverse community,” Butterworth said. “We are proud because we have successfully attracted a student body whose proportion of Hispanic students is greater than that of most other law schools, and whose regional roots span the geography of Latin America and the Caribbean.”St. Thomas’ minority enrollment this year is 41 percent. Nova Southeastern University Dean Harbaugh said Nova Southeastern in Ft. Lauderdale-Davie relies on its online Alternative Admission Model Program for Legal Education — or AAMPLE — to help attract minority students to campus. Formerly known as the Summer Conditional Program, AAMPLE offers determined individuals (whose outright admission to law school is questionable based on traditional applicant criteria) the opportunity to earn a place in the classroom.The school has applied for a patent for the performance-based admissions program that rewards students who demonstrate the desire, commitment, and level of achievement necessary to manage the rigors of law school.Harbaugh said well over half of all minorities taking the LSAT score below 145, the score below which most law schools won’t accept students. The national median is about 150.“We are a school that takes the average student, but that means we are missing a large number of minorities,” Harbaugh said. “We have this online AAMPLE program that is designed to attract students who score between 135 and 145. They take two online courses that are designed to test whether they can be successful in law school.”Why focus on that group? Harbaugh said the Law School Admission Council has said for years that 27 percent of applicants who score 140 on the LSAT, if admitted, do as well or better than 50 percent of those who score 160.“The problem is the Law School Admission Council can’t tell us which ones those are. We can, because our AAMPLE program is another form of testing for law school, but it is more finely tuned than the LSAT,” Harbaugh said.“If we use 135 to 145, there is an extremely high percentage of those folks who are minorities,” he said. “If we give them the opportunity to go through this program, and they are successful, we then admit them and they graduate from law school.”Harbaugh said the academic attrition rate of NSU’s AAMPLE students is less than 5 percent.NSU has offered a program like AAMPLE on campus for 20 years, but to reach more minorities, the school has taken the program online so it could reach a national audience. The school also makes contact, through a list provided by the LSAC, to all those who score 135 to 145 regardless of race and ethnicity.“If you are going to be a successful fisherman, you had better go to a fishing hole where there are fish,” Harbaugh said. “We know that in the 135 to 145 [range] there is a very high percentage of minorities.”Minority enrollment at NSU has been about 30 to 35 percent over the past few years. Florida International University Location. Location. Location. While that is the mantra of real estate brokers across the country, that adage also applies to Florida International University in its quest to attract a diversified student body.“I think we have to work less hard than most of the other schools,” Dean Leonard Strickman said of the Miami law school. “Our student body is about 55 percent minority. Partly, that is location, and partly it is cost in relation to the private schools in the area.”While FIU has no specific program aimed at attracting minority students, diversity is a priority.“But like all the public schools here, we are subject to One Florida,” Strickman said. “We have had some focus on African American recruitment because that has been a little bit more difficult for us than Hispanic recruitment. So our recruitment people have tended to visit a disproportionate number of historically black schools in order to try to recruit African American students. But other than that our recruitment is quite general. Of course, we want to recruit the best students from any race.”Strickman said in attracting minority students it also helps to have a diverse faculty and “our faculty is about half minority —about equal between black and Hispanic professors.”At FIU the student body is more than 40 percent Hispanic and about 12 percent black, Strickman said. Florida A&M University Being a historically black institution, FAMU College of Law in Orlando is a natural draw for minority students, particularly for African Americans. But interim law Dean James Douglass says the school is not going to rest on that alone.“One of the things we have decided to do this year is minority-focused recruitment — that is, trying to go where the minority students are,” Douglass said. “So we have focused our recruitment on going to those universities that have large African American and Hispanic enrolled students and make them aware of our mission as a law school here in Florida, and that is to increase the number of minority lawyers in the Bar.”Being located in a part of the state that has not before been served by a public law school also helps to attract minority students, allowing them to go to law school close to home, he said.“I think in a few years people are going to be proud of the diverse population of lawyers we are producing for the state of Florida,” he said.For the total enrollment of 410 students for 2005-06, 41.22 percent are African American/black; 38 percent are Caucasian; 14.63 percent are Hispanic; and 6.10 percent American Indian/Asian American/other.The diversity figures are more impressive for this year’s incoming class alone: Nearly 71 percent are members of minority groups, with 49 percent African American students and 14.6 percent Hispanics.FAMU also deals with the issue of diversity once students are on campus, through seminars about the importance of diversity and embracing other cultures.“When you bring a lot of different cultures together, you can’t just throw them in one big pot with no effort on how to make these relationships work,” Douglass said Florida State University Give bright minority undergrads from all over the country a chance to check out law school.Give them an opportunity to size up what kind of law they may want to practice.Bring them to Florida State University’s College of Law for an intense month in the summer filled with law classes, legal writing workshops, visits to firms, and Supreme Court oral arguments.Let them mingle with judges, justices, law professors, administrators, alumni, and current students.Before they leave Tallahassee, have them take a full-length LSAT exam, with follow-up workshops concentrating on areas where students need improvement.And maybe the best and brightest in the group will want to enroll in law school at FSU.That’s the idea behind the unique Summer for Undergraduates Program created in 1992 by FSU law Dean Weidner.“I’m convinced it is very important to reach out to students early in their academic career, to open up that pipeline,” Weidner said. “It sends a signal the law is a very inclusive profession that is welcoming to all people.“This program also gives us alternative credentialing. In addition to students’ undergraduate grades and LSAT scores, we can look to their performance in the program. We are very interested in tracking their success and encouraging them to apply to our law school.”Of 486 students who have gone through the program so far, more than 100 have applied to FSU’s law school and 30 have actually enrolled. The current minority student enrollment at FSU is 21 percent.The program, which accepted 88 undergrads this summer, is funded by grants from the Law School Admissions Council, and about $3 million in contributions, with a state match, from Jacksonville personal injury attorney Wayne Hogan and his wife Pat, a mental-health counselor. University of Florida Want to know what it’s like to be a minority law student at UF in Gainesville? Just ask one.According to Levin College of Law Dean Robert Jerry, student recruiting is one of the most effective tools for recruiting minority students.“We are very interested in recruiting a diverse and high-quality student body. We’ve created a student recruiting team. Once we admit the class, this team works very hard to answer the questions of the applicant pool, but also to present us fairly and accurately, and hopefully in a way that will encourage the people we admit to enroll here. This team has been very active and very effective in that regard. In many ways, our best recruiting technique is to put our current students with the applicants, and we try to maximize those contacts,” Jerry said.The addition of new staff at UF also has enabled the school to step up recruiting efforts.“With the additional staffing, it allows us to be more aggressive in our student recruiting than we have been able to be before,” Jerry said. “We have been increasing our external visibility by expanding and constantly refining what we do in recruitment. We do approximately 70 recruitment events or campus visits each year. Many of these are at campuses or institutions where we would expect to encounter a diverse set of applicants.”The college of law is transitioning to a single admission cycle, as opposed to admitting a class in both the fall and spring. Jerry says this will allow the school to invest more staff time in recruiting.Recruiting is an essential component in maintaining a diverse student body, but since One Florida, the percentage of minority students in the student body at UF has fluctuated, instead of steadily increasing as it had in the years before.“I think just looking at the numbers, there’s no question that One Florida has made it more difficult to enroll a diverse class. From 1993 until 2002, minority enrollment in our law school went steadily upward. It rose about 10 percentage points over that period. After One Florida, we dropped several percentage points; it has been volatile since then. I’m pleased that we were able to reverse that with this last class, although we were not able to recover all of the lost ground. We will be just over 24 percent minority students in the class we just enrolled for this fall. I think we’ve done well, but we haven’t done as well as before One Florida,” Jerry said. Barry University At Barry University School of Law in Orlando, it’s all about crossing the finish line. While the school has increased recruiting efforts and has created several programs whose aim is to attract minority students, the school also focuses on fostering an academic environment in which minority students can continue to excel all the way through the bar exam.“It’s not just admitting students. It’s admitting them and making sure they are successful in getting through the course of study, and then the bar exam,” Dean J. Richard Hurt said. “It doesn’t do any good to admit students if their chances of succeeding are very low.”In terms of initially attracting students, Barry has increased recruiting efforts at the historically black colleges in Florida and Georgia, and has increased the number of scholarship offers available with the goal of attracting more minority students.For the second year in a row, Barry has run the Early Start program. Early Start is different from a conditional admissions program because the students’ continuation in the school is not contingent upon making a certain grade. Students are admitted to start in early July and take one substantive or doctrinal course and a special legal methods course, that focuses on study skills and writing.“The beauty of the program is they get to take the first semester with a three-hour reduced course load,” said Hurt. “Early Start gives them a head start in terms of getting acclimated to the law school, getting to know their way around, and feeling comfortable here. That program is not a minority-only program, but it was certainly designed as one of the ways we felt like we could continue to ensure that we got good, qualified minority students.”Over half of the students participating in the program last year were of a minority background.“The increased success rate of the students with those credentials was phenomenal. The academic attrition rate, which should be higher among this group than the other students, was about the same or better than those who didn’t go through the program,” said Hurt.In addition to academic programs, Barry focuses on the importance of student groups and organizations, and encouraging minority groups that do not have an organization to form one.“We are trying to make sure that our student organizations that represent ethnic and minority groups get adequate support from the student bar association and the law school administration, so that they are a strong and visible presence on campus,” said Hurt.According to Hurt, an integral part of attracting and retaining minority students is to utilize a diverse staff.“A major part of being successful in recruiting minority students is there has to be a critical mass of faculty, staff, and administrators as role models for those students. So increasing minority presence in administration and faculty remains a priority of ours,” said Hurt.In addition to faculty, administration, and staff, every first-year student will take diversity training as part of orientation. Once a year, any new hire at the school will also take the training.This year, Barry doubled its minority law faculty. The entering class of 2004 was about 24 percent minority students. Of the entire law school population, 20.2 percent are minorities. Stetson University At Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, founded in 1900 and dubbed “Florida’s first law school,” admissions office employees make a point of visiting historically black colleges and universities to recruit minorities.“Minority status is one of many factors we consider in our ongoing effort to achieve a stimulating intellectual environment, because we believe the richness of academic discourse depends on the presence of diverse viewpoints and experiences,” said Stetson’s law Dean Darby Dickerson.“We believe this to be particularly true for law schools because the law plays such an integral part in our society.”Other recruiting efforts at Stetson include:• Using lists purchased from the Law School Admission Council’s Candidate Referral Service to send information about Stetson to a diverse group of candidates.• Offering a wide variety of scholarships, including diversity scholarships.• Involving currently enrolled minority students in recruiting efforts.• Participating in a grant program sponsored by LSAC to encourage minority middle and high school students to stay in school to pursue the dream of college and law school.Stetson’s most recent statistics available for 2004 show that the 371 new students in fall, spring, and summer represent the most diverse class in Stetson’s history. Of those 371 new students, 25 percent are minorities. Managing Editor Mark D. Killian, Senior Editors Gary Blankenship and Jan Pudlow, and Assistant Editor Melinda Melendez all contributed to this report. Seeking more minorities on campus September 15, 2005 Regular News read more