OP-ED: PAUL L. TRACTENBERG | 04/18/18 and Friends of Rutgers News Weekly 04/20/18
At the half-century mark, Rutgers’ MSP has transformed the face of legal education at the school where it began and across the country
This past Saturday, April 14, Rutgers Law School celebrated the 50th anniversary of its Minority Student Program, an enormously successful effort to diversify not only the law school, but also the entire legal profession in New Jersey. At a full-day symposium and an evening banquet attended by 700, many of them from among the program’s 3,000 alumni, current MSP students, and supportive faculty and administrators, there was a mix of serious talk and celebration about a pathbreaking program. The MSP may have been the first such program at a law school in the nation. It was adopted and implemented three years before the “Harvard Plan” at that law school, and it is without doubt the only law school program that has survived legal and political challenges to reach this year’s 50th anniversary milestone.
The Minority Student Program was born 50 years ago, in 1968, out of strife and dissatisfaction, but with hope for a better future. The 1967 rebellions in Newark, Detroit, and other American cities planted the seeds, and the national and state responses nurtured the embryonic development. This was both a painful time and one of heightened aspirations for Americans and New Jerseyans of color.
Rutgers Law School in Newark was at the eye of the storm. It occupied a relatively new building in downtown Newark on the developing Rutgers-Newark campus. In a sense, it was of the city and had been since its predecessor law schools were first established there in 1908.
From the start, its student body differed from those of most American law schools of the day, reflecting immigrant groups, those whose families didn’t have a tradition of attending schools of higher education, and even women at a time when that was unheard of in legal education.
But the Rutgers Law faculty and student body of the 1960s bore little resemblance to the emerging population of Newark. Both faculty members and students were overwhelmingly white and male. The law school was a highly visible white bastion in an increasingly black city. Indeed, Ackerson Hall, its new home on University Avenue, looked rather like a fortress designed to protect its inhabitants against hostile forces outside.
http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/...50-still-a-centerpiece-of-rutgers-law-school/
At the half-century mark, Rutgers’ MSP has transformed the face of legal education at the school where it began and across the country
This past Saturday, April 14, Rutgers Law School celebrated the 50th anniversary of its Minority Student Program, an enormously successful effort to diversify not only the law school, but also the entire legal profession in New Jersey. At a full-day symposium and an evening banquet attended by 700, many of them from among the program’s 3,000 alumni, current MSP students, and supportive faculty and administrators, there was a mix of serious talk and celebration about a pathbreaking program. The MSP may have been the first such program at a law school in the nation. It was adopted and implemented three years before the “Harvard Plan” at that law school, and it is without doubt the only law school program that has survived legal and political challenges to reach this year’s 50th anniversary milestone.
The Minority Student Program was born 50 years ago, in 1968, out of strife and dissatisfaction, but with hope for a better future. The 1967 rebellions in Newark, Detroit, and other American cities planted the seeds, and the national and state responses nurtured the embryonic development. This was both a painful time and one of heightened aspirations for Americans and New Jerseyans of color.
Rutgers Law School in Newark was at the eye of the storm. It occupied a relatively new building in downtown Newark on the developing Rutgers-Newark campus. In a sense, it was of the city and had been since its predecessor law schools were first established there in 1908.
From the start, its student body differed from those of most American law schools of the day, reflecting immigrant groups, those whose families didn’t have a tradition of attending schools of higher education, and even women at a time when that was unheard of in legal education.
But the Rutgers Law faculty and student body of the 1960s bore little resemblance to the emerging population of Newark. Both faculty members and students were overwhelmingly white and male. The law school was a highly visible white bastion in an increasingly black city. Indeed, Ackerson Hall, its new home on University Avenue, looked rather like a fortress designed to protect its inhabitants against hostile forces outside.
http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/...50-still-a-centerpiece-of-rutgers-law-school/
