“Legality with a Vengeance”: Reclaiming Distribution for Sociolegal Studies

IT IS WELL ESTARTIsH.n THAT educational attainment is related to career opportunities. Increasingly, society is requiring highly trained personnel for more complex jobs. A college education is becoming an essential part of the normal preparation for many occupations. Society encourages youth to aspire to these jobs partially through an ideology of equal opportunity for education. Clark' states that the ideology of equal opportunity, "strictly interpreted, . . . means selection according to ability, without regard to extraneous considerations. Popularly interpreted, however, equal opportunity in obtaining a college education is widely taken to mean unlimited access to some form of college." Therefore, according to popular reasoning, to deny a youth access to a college, even for past poor academic performance, is to deny him equal opportunity for education. Many public universities, in submission to this ideology, have adopted an open door admissions policy. Yet at the same time, to protect their academic standards, they utilize a formal suspension procedure which structures the failure of low achieving students.

Ronald M. Pipkin

Papers

Appeals Day: A Study of Academic Justice