Georgetown Law is promising an investigation after a professor was recorded disparaging Black students in a Zoom call with another professor. “We learned earlier this week that two members of our faculty engaged in a conversation that included reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of Black students. We are responding with the utmost seriousness to this situation,” William Treanor, the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, said in a statement Wednesday promising a “thorough investigation.” Treanor did not identify the professors in question, but the Georgetown Black Law Students Association named them as Sandra Sellers and David Batson. Video of their conversation was reportedly leaked by a student after the recorded Zoom conversation was left readily available to students for several days.
In a brief clip circulated on social media, a woman identified as Sellers can be heard complaining about interacting with students she said were “jumbled” before plunging into a tirade. “You know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester, that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks,” she says. “It happens almost every semester, and it’s like, oh, come on. You know, we get some really good ones but there also usually are some of them that are just plain at the bottom.” Batson, having listened to Sellers disparage Black students, offers no similar statements of his own in the video but appears to nod along in agreement. The BLSA is now calling on the university to immediately fire Sellers, an adjunct professor, and require a public apology from Batson for his “failure to adequately condemn” her comments.
