When Camille A. Nelson begins her appointment as dean of the American University Washington College of Law in July, diversity will be a departure point — not an end.
“I like to talk about diversity, inclusion and the third step no one is talking about, which is empowerment,” Nelson said in a recent phone interview from the Netherlands, where she is finishing a sabbatical.
For Nelson, that means not only “bringing more voices to the table and making the implicit explicit,” but also “making sure those people around the table are representative of the community we say we are, making sure we value and treat people in the ways we want to be treated.”
Such are just a few of the principled views of Nelson, a former Suffolk College law dean whose scholarly pursuits are rooted in critical race theory — a theory that holds that racism is endemic to American life and has contributed to contemporary forms of group advantage and disadvantage.
With American Bar Association statistics showing that women represent under a third of all law school deans and African-American women represent just 11 in total — or 19 percent of all female deans — observers say Nelson’s appointment as law dean with a background in critical race theory signifies American University’s commitment not only to demographic diversity but diversity of thought.
“We don’t have a lot of deans,” said former FAMU law school dean and current law professor LeRoy Pernell, who has written about issues that confront law school deans of color, speaking in reference to law deans with a background in critical race theory, or CRT.
“We have a few that have written in that area, but to have a school at this level [appoint a dean with a background in CRT] I think is a sign that America is willing to be much more progressive and much more diverse in their thought,” Purnell said.
