March 13th, 2007
Law school deans bash site as racist, 'descpicable'
After the fallout from a the Washington Post story on AutoAdmit - a no-holds-barred message board for law students that hopefully is not indicative of the quality of American's future lawyers - two top law school deans have condemned some of its practices as being racist and homophobic, reports the Washington Post.
The deans of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania law schools have written a letter publicly admonishing the owners of the message board, saying some postings contained personal attacks against female students and racist and homophobic remarks.
One result of the negative publicity is that the founder of the site, Jarret Cohen, had to remove Google ads.
"Google has been asking me for awhile about the content" in response to complaints. "I don't want to create a war on multiple fronts," he said. "So I just decided to take [the ads] down."
In an open letter, Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School wrote:
(AutoAdmit) contains numerous sexist, racist, homophobic and other derogatory comments by anonymous posters. Some of these comments include the names and personal information of our students and other individuals, along with many false and hurtful assertions. Such anonymous, personal attacks on individuals are despicable. These malicious attacks, as well as racist, sexist and homophobic speech, have no place in the Yale Law School community.
Not surprisingly, the women who were the targets of the attacks on AutoAdmit, have engaged a law firm to explore civil and criminal claims. According to Cohen, the attention that the story is brought to the site is unnecessary.
"There are far more important things than what everybody's been wasting time complaining about over the past couple of days," he said.
