A Black law professor received a historic promotion in Tennessee. Her resignation followed.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Law professor Alena Allen wanted to be what she didn’t have through all her years of school — a Black woman teacher. 

She's been part of the faculty at the University of Memphis for more than a decade, teaching in the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. 

Diversity at the school is a point of pride, with press releases pointing out a ranking among preLaw Magazine’s “Best Law Schools in the Country for Diversity.” Last November, the school announced a diversity scholarship for students with funds from an anonymous donor, inspired by a student who integrated one of Memphis’ high schools.

But for its outward promotion of diversity as a priority of the law school, the university falls short of implementing that priority when recruiting diverse faculty and considering the experience of those faculty and students, Allen said.

So, she resigned.

Had she stayed, she would have started the next semester as the first Black woman to become full professor, the most distinguished rank attainable for academic faculty. It was her husband, now Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, who was the first and now only Black full professor at the law school, a promotion he attained in 2016. University of Memphis’ law school opened in 1962.

When Allen wrote to law school faculty in April, she announced her resignation, effective at the end of the academic year, and alleged racism endures in faculty recruitment, dean searches and campus safety.

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“No institution is perfect, and I have worked very hard for the past decade, but I have reached a point where I believe that diversity and inclusion matters only when institutionally convenient,” Allen wrote.

Publicly, the school has admitted that it, like the rest of the legal field, struggles with diversity. The school, officials have said in the past, wants to be more diverse and is making investments to become so.

A review of the law school's enrollment, graduates and faculty shows that while the share of Black students has grown, the share of Black faculty has remained stagnant. 

What the data show

When Allen joined the faculty in 2010, the law school had 433 students. Only 7.6% were Black, the lowest share of Black enrollment in recent years, according to a review of data since 2007. A first-generation law student from New Orleans, Allen came on as one of two Black faculty at the time. Harris, who joined the faculty in 2005, was the second.

Since then, the share of Black students enrolled at the college has doubled. Black students accounted for 16% of the law school's student body in 2014 and has risen and fallen between 16% and 19% in the years since, even as enrollment dipped to a low of 311 students in 2017. 

Though inconsistent, the law school has also made improvements on the share of Black students who graduate from the school, data show.

"It's been encouraging," Allen said. As the Director of Diversity for the 2017-18 school year — a position she departed after the birth of her third child — it has been special to watch the most recent class of graduates matriculate from the law school, she said, because she had a hand in selecting them for admission.

But for the gains the university has made among Black student enrollment, Black faculty recruitment and retention has stagnated since 2014, until a jump in 2020.  

Since 2014, the latest data available, the law school has had three Black full-time faculty among its slate of 22 to 25. With the addition of a fourth Black faculty member in 2020, Black people grew to represent about 17% of the faculty, the highest that representation has ever been.

"For me, there isn't anything encouraging until we can sustain Black full professors, plural," Allen said. "Hiring is great. The university has hired Black faculty. They have not been able to retain them. That for me is when I can say, 'Aha, progress has been made.'"

Full-time faculty at the University of Memphis generally reflect the racial make-up across the United States as a whole, a Faculty Senate study found. But the make-up is much less representative of the racial demographics of Memphis and Shelby County, which are both majority Black. 

Across the university, a Faculty Senate study commissioned by an anti-racism committee last fall found that Black faculty do not achieve tenure at the same rate as faculty of other races. It is also true that Black faculty are more likely to be in a non-tenure track position than to be tenured, the study found. The reverse is true for white, Hispanic and Asian faculty, who are more likely to be tenured.

At the law school, Black faculty are as likely to be tenured as they are to be in non-tenure-track positions as of 2020, data shows. That's on par with the university for non-tenure-track positions, but ahead of university-wide statistics for tenured Black faculty; university-wide, that figure is only 31%.

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The study did not address faculty ranks, which progress from assistant to associate to full professor, each promotion earned coming with bumps in salary and prestige. 

A dean search, a promotion, a resignation 

Allen was promoted to full professor, the highest rank, in early 2021, during her eleventh year at the law school. Promotion and tenure processes are fairly extensive, requiring recommendations and several academic and professional qualifications determined by each school, as well as rounds of votes and approvals by other faculty, university leadership and university boards of trustees.

Of the 630 tenured or tenure-track faculty members across the university in 2020, 204 reached the top ranking of full professor. Of those, 17 are Black. None of the full professors at the law school in 2020 were Black. 

Circumstances of Allen's promotion, though, ultimately led to her resignation. 

While she received news of her promotion in a letter to "Ms. Allen," the other faculty to receive promotion was addressed as "Professor." Two months later, Provost Tom Nenon, who had sent her promotion letter, questioned the rigor of the law school's promotion standards in a call among all of the school's faculty and Dean Katharine Schaffzin. After that meeting, Allen resigned. 

In both letters of resignation, Allen referenced prior dean searches at the law school. While Black candidates were considered in the two most recent searches, which took place in the years since she has been at the school, none were hired. The most recent search began about two years ago and the university hired Katharine Schaffzin, the law school's first female dean.

That dean search process disappointed Allen, eroding her trust in the law school's diversity commitments and the university's commitment to an honest and transparent search process. Schaffzin's appointment also further divided a law school faculty that didn't, for the most part, support her hire, Allen said.  

Schaffzin was interim dean during the search, and before that, a member of law school faculty as well as the first faculty member representative and only lawyer to serve on the University of Memphis' first independent board of trustees, which began oversight of the university in 2017. 

The university's faculty senate chose Schaffzin as a trustee through an application and voting process. She was replaced by David Kemme in June 2018 as she became the interim dean. (Schaffzin recused herself from a tenure and promotion vote concerning her husband, also on law school faculty, in 2017.)

When the law school voted on her during the dean search, though, more faculty voted against Schaffzin becoming dean than for. While the law school's dean search protocol only stipulates that faculty have a chance to vote, the American Bar Association recommends that the faculty vote on a dean candidate is favorable in order for the person to move forward, Allen has pointed out. Allen has said she did not apply or have interest in the position at the time.

Faculty Senate evaluation survey results from this year suggest the faculty are still divided on the dean. Among evaluations for all deans at the college, the provost and the president, Schaffzin received one of the lowest scores. In responding to various evaluation metrics, the faculty were often split, with 64% evaluating unfavorably and the other 36% of the 14 respondents evaluating favorably.

Nenon and President M. David Rudd both sent apologies to Allen when she was titled "Ms." in her promotion letter. After the meeting that prompted Allen's resignation, Nenon sent a second direct apology and another apology to the faculty. The dean also called to apologize. 

"I have had my accomplishments minimized throughout my life and such behavior is par for the course," Allen wrote to faculty about the provost's comments a month later in April, when she told them about her resignation, "but I didn’t see it coming on that occasion, and I don’t think his (Nenon's) email to the faculty was the proper remedy." 

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The university did not respond to inquiries and requests for comment for this article. In a statement to Inside Higher Education, for a report about a trend of Black faculty resignations nationwide, U of M said in a statement that Rudd and Nenon would meet with law school students after final exams to hear concerns. 

“Critical attention will be given to these issues, a review of the office of institutional equity investigation completed and action steps developed, as necessary, for a collaborative and productive path forward,” the university told Inside Higher Ed. 

Student group adds to call for change

In the wake of Allen's resignation, the school's Black Law Students Association chapter wrote to the "Memphis Law Community" with a list of demands, including a new dean search "ending in a hire of a qualified Black candidate." The organization called for inclusion of a student representative from the chapter to sit on the dean and faculty search committees as well as the addition of a "commitment to diversity" metric added to promotion and tenure standards. 

Both the Black law student group and Allen said complaints made to the dean and university, including at least one formal complaint to the Office of Institutional Equity, alleging repeated racial profiling by a campus police officer went unresolved. Allen said she received notice that her complaint was being investigated this April, after she brought it up during a meeting about retaining faculty of color. 

The officer, she said, on two occasions told her the parking lot was only for faculty, and blocked the entrance to the law school until she showed identification. The Black student association addressed similar concerns about the officer with the dean a year ago, and have since called for the officer to be removed.

"For me, that's an example of just basic, low-hanging fruit to ensure that people of color, students of color, faculty of color feel safe within the building, that they (administration) just didn't do," Allen said. "And if you can't do the basic stuff, we can't even talk about the harder stuff."

She described the "hard work" as "creating an atmosphere where faculty of color are thriving, and they are getting promotion, and they are rising to the ranks of administrators."

Nationwide, legal professions lack Black representation 

Allen didn't know what to expect at Yale Law School. She hadn't predicted a future in law for herself. Plus, with frigid New Haven winters the opposite of warm, vibrant New Orleans, Allen felt like a "fish out of water." It didn't help that none of her teachers looked like her.

"One of the main reasons why I wanted to get into teaching," Allen said, "was to be a resource for people from marginalized groups, from people who felt like they didn't belong." 

Allen remembers one of her most rewarding moments during her second year of teaching at the law school, when she made a recommendation for who should take the student plane ticket to a conference in Washington, D.C. Like her, he was a Black first-generation law student. But he hesitated. 

"He admitted that he hadn't been on an airplane before," Allen said. Now, the student works in law in Memphis.

Various studies in recent years have displayed the extent of the lack of diversity in America's legal field. Between 2010 and 2020, the share of Black attorneys in the U.S. dropped a tenth of a percentage point, hovering for the last decade at 5%, American Bar Association data show. 

In that same time frame, there was an increase in the share of Black people in the total legal field, up to 8.6% in 2020 from 6.5% in 2010, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Still though, in both 2010 and 2020, Black legal professionals are least likely to be a lawyer when considering all other legal occupations, like paralegals, judges and legal support workers.

As for representation among law school faculty, Allen points to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Ole Miss, each with a few Black women on faculty as full professors. Data on tenure among Black law professors is not reported by a single entity, according to a recent American Bar Association Journal report. Anecdotal data suggests some possible shifts: In a two week span this spring, four universities announced Black women as incoming law school deans, according to the Faculty Lounge, a higher education website.

Allen struggled with her decision to resign and how to tell faculty. "However," she wrote to them in her resignation, "having to fight and speak up against systemic racism is an unfair burden to put on people of color." 

Still, she said she remains committed to higher education.

"I believe that higher education is responsible for trajectory shifts for students," Allen said. "Watching the shifts happen has been really meaningful for me. And that's not something that I plan to give up."

Follow Laura Testino on Twitter: @LDTestino.