After a decade of progress, minority law professors are finding that the environment at the nation's law schools is becoming an increasingly hostile one.

In a letter circulating among the nation's law schools and addressed to "Our Colleagues of the Majority Race," 22 minority law professors are making their views heard. Citing "decreasing institutional support" and "increasing challenges to our legitimacy as teachers in the classroom," they write that "the professional lives of minorities of color teaching at the nation's law schools have been deteriorating in recent years."

Increasingly overburdened with committee work and a heavy student counseling load, minority professors wonder whether law schools are as committed minorities as they once were. Add to that an alarming exodus of minority lawyers from the teaching profession, and many law professors say they find themselves increasingly discouraged and disappointed with their profession.

"It's a very frustrating and demoralizing time for minority professors," says Regina Austin, an associate professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. "You see a sort of rolling up the carpet of welcome for minority professors."

"There's a very distressing redirection in legal academia," says Ronald Delgado, a visiting professor of law at the University of Southern Illinois. "It's a much tougher, colder environment psychologically" for minorities.

"We're no longer the priority we once were," Delgado adds, referring to the effort law schools make to attract minorities.

The Bell Incident

Those fears were confirmed, minority law professors say, during a controversy earlier this year involving Harvard Law Professor Derrick A. Bell. While teaching constitutional law to first-year students as a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Bell experienced what he terms "the worst moment of my professional life."

In what Bell wrote was a response to "student-reported teaching inadequacies," members of the Stanford law faculty scheduled a one-week lecture series designed to supplement his course and compensate for perceived deficiencies in its coverage. After members of the Stanford Black Law Students Association protested, charging that the lectures were "a hostile and racist response to the teaching style of Professor Bell," the series was cancelled.

Stanford Law School officials maintain that there was no racism involved. "The matter originally arose from widespread complaints about his teaching," says Jack A. Friedenthal, associate dean at Stanford Law School. "It's hard to believe that they were racially motivated."

But several minority professors, citing Bell's well-established reputation in the legal profession, dispute Friedenthal's claim. "Bell was a visiting superstar," Delgado says. "He was at least equal to his white colleagues."

"No white professors with those credentials would ever have been challenged," says Robin A. Morris, an assistant law professor at Tulane who signed the minority professors' letter.

Getting Racism Out of the Closet

The Bell controversy generated national media attention and prompted the minority professors--including three from Harvard--to write the letter to the nation's deans.

"It has served as a catalyst to get the issue [of racism] out of the closet," says Northeastern Law Professor Denise S. Carty-Bennia, adding that the incident sent "a loud and clear message that this is still the bastion of white male supremacy."