Marcia Sells

A coalition of 10 Harvard Law School student affinity groups called on Dean John F. Manning ‘82 to establish a Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in a letter published Monday in the Harvard Law Record, the school’s student publication...Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells wrote in an emailed statement that the school has created a number of new mentoring and advising initiatives in the past year such as a new online platform to help students connect with each other, a pre-orientation course for incoming first-year students, and a preferred lender program for student loans. “The Law School has long had an unwavering commitment to creating a strong and inclusive community that is diverse along multiple dimensions,” Sells wrote...Demarquin D. Johnson, a second-year Law student and one of the letter’s authors, said the Law School needs to do a better job understanding these issues.“Currently, the Law School is unable to recognize the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity in every aspect of it,” Johnson said...Lauren D. Williams, a third-year Law student and president of the Black Law Students Association, said her organization’s main concern was the lack of a consistent faculty position dedicated to teaching critical race theory.

Harvard Law School celebrated its bicentennial last year, but women were not fully included in that history for more than a century. The first class of women graduated from the school in 1953 — and 65 years later, Law School alumnae, students, and professors gathered last Friday and Saturday to celebrate the anniversary...Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’97, an assistant professor at the Law School, wrote in an email that she was “heartened” to see many of her former classmates and commented on the great advances women have made in the past 65 years.“While 1953 seems like shockingly recent history, one recurring theme throughout the celebration was the incredible strides women have made within the law in the last half century,” Kamali wrote...Rebecca F. Prager, a third-year Law student, said she wished that more students had been a part of this “amazing experience.”...Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells wrote in a statement that “students were involved in every step of the process” and “forg[ed] connections” with many of the alumnae....Dean of the Law School John F. Manning ’82 also commented via a spokesperson on Celebration 65, calling it “inspiring.”

Two gender neutral bathrooms at Harvard Law School that were previously inaccessible for most of the day will now have 24/7 access for students, after student groups raised the issue with administrators. The bathrooms, located on the second floor of Wasserstein Hall and near Harkness Cafe, were set behind two security doors that restricted student access when the cafe—which is open from 7 a.m. until 2 p.m. on weekdays—was closed...Lambda, the BGLTQ organization for Harvard law students, and the Queer and Trans People of Color organization brought the issue of restricted access to gender neutral bathrooms to administrators last fall. Gender neutral bathrooms are not limited to Wasserstein Hall. Both Han Park [`18], co-president of Lambda, and Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells said that there is access to other gender neutral bathrooms on campus and this was an isolated issue...In an email Monday, Sells wrote that temporary construction had been completed and the bathrooms were now accessible to students.

Race-related activism is re-emerging at Harvard Law School after a group of Law students wore pink armbands and hung posters last month to “stand in solidarity with people of color” following incidents of racism at Stanford Law School in the fall...First-year Law student Felipe D. Hernandez [`20], along with 11 other students who chose to remain anonymous, wrote a Feb. 2018 letter published in the Harvard Law Record arguing the Law School also struggles with racism...While the campaign was not officially organized by any formal affinity groups, president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association Jazzmin A. Carr [`18] praised it in an emailed statement, writing her group “stands in solidarity” with its organizers...The Harvard Law Record letter specifically criticized the structure of the financial aid system, the perception that the school is not geared toward public interest, and the first-year curriculum. Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells emphasized the school takes these issues seriously and is working to improve the school’s culture and offerings. “The student financial services office advisory group is looking at the Loan Income Protection Plan. LIPP is something that is always being looked at,” Sells said in an interview last week, addressing criticisms of the school’s financial aid and public interest programs.

When the Dance Theatre of Harlem was founded in 1969, it did more than prioritize African-American ballet dancers—it inspired them. That’s the effect the company had on Marcia Lynn Sells, a young dance student in Cincinnati. After attending a performance, she recalls seeing classical dancers who looked like her and who made her believe that she could achieve her dream of becoming a professional ballerina. In 1976, Sells moved to New York City and joined the Dance Theatre of Harlem under the direction of its co-founder, Arthur Mitchell. Fast-forward four decades and Sells is now dean of students at Harvard Law School, and her legal career has been as impressive and inspiring as any grand jeté.

Harvard Law School is expanding its advising and mentoring programs four months after a school task force studying diversity and inclusion released a report calling for more advising opportunities on campus...John F. Manning ’82, the school’s recently appointed dean, said the Law School changed its policies to foster more organic and effective advising relationships between students and faculty. "The value added by mentoring and advising is not evenly distributed across the population and the propensity to seek mentoring and advising is not evenly distributed across the population,” Manning said...I. Glenn Cohen, a Law School professor who leads student reading groups, said he thinks the new advising program will help connect students with mentors and advisers more likely to share their specific interests and are more capable of answering their questions. “The reading group topics are connected to areas the students may be interested in, and by having the reading group instructors serve and be advisors for the students, we’d be more likely to get a match between what a particular student’s interest is and what the faculty member’s expertise is,” Cohen said...Marcia Sells, the Law School’s Dean of Students, said the school also instituted a program for students to take faculty out to dinner with all expenses paid by the school, similar to the College’s Classroom-to-Table program. In addition, administrators created a new peer advising program, she said. “We said to [the peer advisors], ‘You are a resource to them, plan a time to meet with them and talk—they didn’t have to take them out to lunch—but just to be there as a sounding board,’” Sells said...Sadie Hillier [`20], a first-year student at the Law School, wrote in an email that she thinks the new faculty advising program is very helpful. She wrote that she thinks she got “lucky” with her reading group and advisor, Law School professor Michael J. Klarman. “I've been provided with an abundance of mentorship opportunities in the last couple of months, and I have seized onto every single one,” Hillier said...Still, David Sackstein ’14 [`20], another first-year student who said he was in Cohen’s reading group, said that he fears some people may not get the resources they need despite the new programs. “There’s always, always, always going to be students who slip through the cracks,” Sackstein said.

More than a dozen handmade stickers reading “It’s okay to be white” surfaced around Harvard Square Wednesday, prompting Cambridge officials to remove them and a Harvard Law School Dean to denounce the signs as “provocations intended to divide us.”...“It seems likely that these anonymous postings, made in the middle of the night, were provocations intended to divide us from one another,” Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells wrote in an email sent to Law students Wednesday after the stickers were spotted at Wasserstein and Hastings Halls. “HLS will not let that happen here. We live, work, teach, and learn together in a community that is stronger, better, and deeper because of our diversity and because we encourage open, respectful, and constructive discourse,” Sells wrote.

Harvard Law School is set to conduct a mental health survey of its students in November, part of a trend in which legal educators are playing a larger role in the well-being of their J.D.-hopefuls...“We recognize it as a first step in not only helping our students, but hoping to effectuate some change in reporting in the legal and professional community,” said Amanda Lee [`18], vice president of Harvard Law’s student government...Harvard law dean of students Marcia Sells said that the school on Nov. 1 would email a link to the online survey to just over 1,800 law students and give them about three weeks to respond...“What are the things we can do to provide more support or to understand when those points of challenge for students happen,” Sells said. “What can we do to support them?”...Student Government President Adrian Perkins [`18] said that he and Lee ran for their positions on a platform that included putting students first by creating a healthy environment at school. “The student body absolutely has been one of our priorities,” Perkins said.

A University-wide task force focused on diversity and inclusion recommended Monday that central administrators work with individual schools to devise plans to ensure historically marginalized groups experience “full membership in the Harvard community.”...“I’m certain there will be some discussion as to what do these recommendations mean, but I think at least it’s a helpful starting point, as opposed to sort of throwing it up in the air and saying ‘we’d like the school to be like this,’ in a very vague way,’” Law School Dean of Students Marcia Sells, a task force member, said.

Harvard Law School debuted a remodeled Title IX training for new students this fall in response to student criticisms and recommendations from a University-wide task force on sexual assault prevention. While Deputy Title IX Coordinator and Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells heralded the training as an improvement over previous iterations, she and Law School students said it was still flawed, and emphasized the need for further changes to the programming...Minjoo Kim, a second-year Law School student who became involved in brainstorming Title IX training reforms after creating the student government’s Health and Wellness Title IX subcommittee, found the process disappointing. With many students and administrators intently focused on activism surrounding race and diversity at the school last year, Kim said she felt Title IX issues were not accorded the attention they deserved...First-year student Devony Schmidt thought both the online and in-person programs focused too heavily on procedure while failing to address rape culture and bystander intervention strategies.

Harvard Law School first-year students arrived on campus last month to an orientation program redesigned to better help them understand the educational road ahead and foster an inclusive atmosphere...We spoke with dean of students Marcia Sells about the revamped orientation and what was new at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, school this year.

Following a year of of tension and discussion related to diversity at Harvard Law School, administrators unveiled a total overhaul of first-year orientation this year to acclimate students from varying backgrounds...Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells oversaw the restructuring process—a year-long project in which she consulted students and faculty to re-envision a “holistic approach” to orientation. “We really looked at the whole shape of orientation, from the key vantage point that it’s about how do we provide an opportunity for students to feel like they are acclimated to HLS and their surroundings and what the whole law school experience is about,” she said....As early as last September, first-year students dissatisfied with their orientation experiences brought the issue to Sells’s attention. One of these students was now-second-year Charlie Fletcher, who felt the Law School’s orientation fell short compared to the program at the Kennedy School, where he was a joint-degree student...Fletcher and Cameron Clark, who is now a second-year Law student and member of the student government’s Diversity and Inclusion committee and several affinity groups, also felt there weren't many affinity groups contacting incoming students at the start of the semester, leaving students feeling lost.

Marcia Sells, BC ’81 and the dean of students at Harvard Law School, emphasized the importance of self-discovery in her keynote speech at Barnard’s 127th convocation on Tuesday. Sells, who served as the dean of students at Columbia Law School before arriving at Harvard, was also the vice president for employee and organizational development at Reuters America and the assistant district attorney for the Kings County district attorney’s office. In an elaborate “The Wizard of Oz” metaphor, Sells described the many parallels she saw between Dorothy’s journey through Oz and a Barnard student’s experience at the college.