The Outstater
Indiana’s Law School ‘Quotas’
CALL US SILLY but we had assumed that Indiana applicants, academic credentials being equal, would have priority at the tax-supported Maurer School of Law in Bloomington. We were wrong.
Some time ago we asked an adjunct scholar of the foundation, at the time a member of the law school’s admissions committee, to review the school’s policies on race-based admissions. His report to us, which was featured in the Indianapolis Star, prompted discussion among alumni. The law school, however, insisted it did not have “quotas” per se, and that was that.
But our man brought receipts. His memorandum to the dean made these points:
- The admissions committee maintained a de facto quota for a minimum number of certain minority students in each entering class.
- To meet that target, the committee routinely leap-frogged minority applicants with weaker credentials over more accomplished, higher-credentialed non-minority applicants. Heidt described I.U. as unusually willing (compared with nearly all other ABA-approved schools) to admit minority applicants with relatively poor credentials.
- More than 75 percent of the lower-standard minority admits were from out of state.
- In some years the admit/deny ratio for minority applicants was substantially more favorable than for non-minorities (e.g., two admitted for every one denied).
- One year the school admitted 67 students with LSAT scores below 150.
He eventually stopped participating in the admissions process. Here was the summary of his report to us: (1)
“Minority enrollment at I.U.-Bloomington has stayed steady at about 16 percent year in and year out for each of the last seven years and steady at 21 to 23 percent for the four years before, while the number of minority applicants has varied widely year to year. But whether any private plaintiff can overcome the expense and difficulty of proving that we employ quotas is something else again. With no possibility of a referendum against racial preferences like those that prevailed in California and Washington, Indiana’s policy is only likely to change if the state legislature or an enlightened administrator outside the law school insists that it change.”
Did that happen? Have quotas been scrapped? We don’t know. What we learned from the exercise was that even when confronted with internal data the university could not be trusted to tell the full truth. The woke demand for diversity at all costs was too strong — and is still strong. The suspicion remains that white Hoosiers are denied admission to the school in favor of lower scoring blacks and other minorities. The school does not willingly provide admission details that would decide the point one way or another.
Now a full data base of student records for at least one law school, Columbia University, is circulating on the Internet. If valid, we can extrapolate from it the likely implications of the I.U. admissions policy.
To help with that is an article, “The Hidden Arithmetic of Affirmative Action,” in the blog Right Rationalism. (2) It summarizes the Columbia data and finds that there were only two top-quartile black graduates at the school between 2007 and 2016. Again, if you take into account that the I.U. law school doesn’t get the same pick of black law students as does Columbia, it is plausible that some years there were zero black graduates in Maurer’s top quartile.
Please know that Maurer is a ways down on the ranking scale (49th compared with Columbia’s 9th). And it is estimated that if selected on academic talent alone even Yale Law School would admit less than 1 percent of black applicants. Indiana law school classes are still about 20 percent minority, according to my assistant Grok.
But the Internet sources may be wrong or misleading. Maurer may have been admitting students entirely on merit all this time. Or not. Unaccountable administrators may be skewing admissions to conform to their personal social vision. Again, we can’t trust the university’s word for it. We need an audit, especially after a 2023 Supreme Court decision restricting the use of race in admissions.
Indiana governors have broad authority over the university system. In addition to appointing trustees, a governor can launch audits and investigations and issue executive orders. Yet, five Republican governors have now been made aware of charges that administrators are manipulating admission standards at Maurer to the exclusion of otherwise qualified applicants.
Arbitrarily denying someone entry into a profession because of race is a serious matter. We are not a serious people apparently. — tcl
(1) Robert Heidt, J.D. “At Issue: Indiana University School of Law at Bloomington.” The Indiana Policy Review, p. 28, summer-fall 2003. (This work is not digitized but held in the foundation’s archive of physical journals).
(2) Werner Zagrebbi. “The Hidden Arithmetic of Affirmative Action.“ Right Rationalism, June 30, 2026.
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