Financial Times: Elite fellowship backed by Wall Street struggles amid diversity backlash

Sujeep Indap writes:

A prestigious law firm fellowship for minority students is withering under attack from critics of diversity initiatives, despite the organisation’s backing from conservative Wall Street titans and law firms close to President Donald Trump.

The organisation, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, placed fewer than 100 law school students into top law firms this summer, roughly half the number of previous years, as several firms have backed away amid scrutiny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

“What we have seen is the nations’s most important and prestigious law firms blatantly violating title 7 of Civil Rights Act,” said Clegg Ivey, who founded the Washington-based Americans for Equal Opportunity earlier this year.

“SEO exclusively hires those folks [minority applicants] and discriminates against those who have the wrong pigment. It is brazen.”

Ivey, an entrepreneur and former corporate lawyer and clerk to a federal judge, told the FT that he grew up poor and that his reading of the civil rights law would allow for fellowships to have socio-economic criteria instead of ethnic or racial guidelines.

The best-case scenario is that the firms will agree to a deal with the EEOC to abandon SEO and other similar racial diversity programmes, he said.

The 44 law firms include giants such as Paul Weiss, Skadden, Kirkland & Ellis and Davis Polk. Clegg said several law firms among the 44 he has targeted have reached out to him to understand his goals or begin settlement negotiations.

“Those conversations have been bizarre — they ask, ‘what are you after?’, and they get out their cheque book. I don’t want money. It really is as simple as, just stop discriminating.”

Read more at the Financial Times.