Danielle Conway is making her presence felt at Penn State Dickinson Law in Carlisle. Conway took over as dean in 2019 and in 2020 helped found the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project, which won her an award from the Association of American Law Schools.
Then last year she started the school’s Antiracist Development Institute. Now the institute has received a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
The grant was given to support the growth of a book series and to develop workshops that will create paths to more legal education and a profession committed to antiracism.
“Penn State Dickinson Law, like other law schools around the country, has recognized the need for comprehensive diversity, equity, and inclusion in educational and administrative spaces, from admissions to alumni support,” said Claire Poelking, a MacArthur program officer in a statement. “The Antiracist Development Institute moves beyond performative diversity to disrupt systemic injustices, with a focus on oppression rooted in racist policies, practices, or acts.”
The institute is designed to address systemic inequality, by building a coalition of law schools to bring systemic racial equality to the forefront.
With the grant, the program will develop a book series titled, “Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession.” The series goal is to provide law schools with a starting blueprint for exploring the stages of system designs. The program doesn’t claim that this will solve all of the issues with systemic racism, but it should provide organizations with methods for solving issues.
The institute has also received investments from Penn State, LSAC, AccessLex and NALP. The MacArthur contribution brings the total investment of the institute to over $2 million.
“It is rare for one law school to attract an institutional grantor of the highest caliber, but the foundation understood this project was meant to involve all 200+ law schools to scale institutional antiracist work,” Conway said. “These investments say that we are onto something relevant, important, and necessary, and give us the confidence to move the book series and the ADI forward.”
Conway graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1992 and was a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law for 14 years. She was dean at the University of Maine School of Law for four years before joining Penn State Dickinson Law.
