Penn State Law Dean Steps Down After PPT Complaint Targets School’s DEI Plan

Former Dickinson Law Dean Danielle Conway was ‘cornerstone’ of discriminatory Strategic Plan

Penn State Dickinson Law professor Danielle Conway has resigned from her role as the law school’s dean after the school was hit with a civil rights complaint by watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) for violating presidential executive orders and civil rights laws.

In its May complaint to U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice, PPT accused the law school of pushing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and “institutional antiracism” in all levels of its programming, including curriculum, admissions and hiring, as evidenced by its own Strategic Plan.

In the plan, Dickinson Law boasted about appointing Conway as its “first woman and first African American Dean,” and credited her “vision priorities” as “the cornerstone of the current strategic plan.” Elsewhere the plan says, “Law schools must recruit, retain, teach and research according to antiracist principles” and states an intention to admit on the basis of race by prioritizing “diverse” and “inclusive” admissions practices.

As cited in PPT’s complaint, former Dickinson Law student David Blackman quit the law school after being forced to take a mandatory anti-racism class that Conway reportedly helped create and attended every session of.

The class included lectures calling white people “privileged” and to “eradicate patriarchy,” which is discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The students were then required to write essays based upon this instruction.

When he asked for an exemption to this compelled speech, Blackman was denied by a committee that included Conway, a possible violation of his First Amendment rights.

In July, Blackman gave Congress this testimony, and Dickinson Law announced that Conway had stepped down from her role as Dean but would continue as a professor two days later. She appears to still be the executive director of the school’s Antiracist Development Institute that she launched in the wake of the 2020 BLM protests.

PPT has also filed complaints against school districts in Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin, and universities in Arizona, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Utah over similar allegations, and continues to call for a federal investigation into Dickinson Law’s Strategic Plan and polices.

“Danielle Conway stepping down as the Dean of Penn State’s Dickinson Law School is a small but hopeful sign that the DEI fever in American universities is finally starting to break,” said PPT communications director Alexa Moutevelis. “We still have a long way to go but as long as these discriminatory policies continue to corrode our nation’s brightest young minds, curb their free speech, and violate their civil rights, PPT will blow the whistle.”

###