Course demanded that students ‘acknowledge the reality of systemic racism’
The dean of Penn State Dickinson Law resigned on Friday after a former student testified before Congress about the school’s mandatory anti-racism class, which required all first-year students to “acknowledge the reality of systemic racism.”
The school announced that Danielle Conway, who also leads the Association of American Law Schools, was stepping down as dean “effective immediately.” The move came two days after David Blackman, a Texas military veteran, said at a congressional hearing that he had left the law school over his objections to the course, which Conway created in 2020. She will remain on the law school’s faculty.
In a short press release on Friday, Penn State declined to thank Conway for her service. University provost Fotis Sotiropoulos said the school “remains fully committed to continuing to provide our law students with an excellent legal education.”
For his part, Blackman is taking a victory lap, telling the Washington Free Beacon that Conway’s departure is “a necessary acknowledgment” of the damage she caused.
“The law school shifted away from traditional, objective legal training in favor of forced ideological orthodoxy,” Blackman said. “This erosion of professional neutrality hurts the legal academy, the bar, and every student forced to comply.”
He added that Penn State should “take the logical next step” and eliminate the required course.
Conway’s departure follows months of legal and public relations turmoil at the law school, whose strategic plan calls to expand “employment opportunities” for “underrepresented” candidates. The school was hit with a civil rights complaint in May after the Free Beacon reported on the plan. A separate Free Beacon report included audio from the required first-year course, Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws, in which speakers asserted that the justice system is “about keeping black people in their place” and called on students to “dismantle systems that racialize, subordinate, and oppress.”
Conway, the executive director of the law school’s Antiracist Development Institute, attended every session of the class.
When Blackman requested an exemption from the course, a committee convened by Conway denied the request. “Faced with the choice of completing my degree in a system that demanded my intellectual submission, or walking away to maintain my integrity, I chose the latter,” Blackman said in his congressional testimony. “I withdrew from Penn State Dickinson Law after one semester, forfeited my scholarship, and returned to Texas to pursue my master’s degree.”
The testimony was submitted to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as part of a hearing on the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards, which require law schools to provide education on “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” Blackman argued that law schools use these standards to justify “ideological programming.” And he warned that what’s taught in law school eventually filters into law.
“The students sitting in these classrooms today are the prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges of tomorrow,” Blackman said in his testimony. “If they are taught that the law is merely a tool for racial retribution, that the First Amendment is conditional, and that due process is an obstacle to ‘equity,’ the American justice system as we know it will not survive.”
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