LSA President Michele Goodwin spoke at the Graduate Student & Early Career Workshop on Thursday, May 21, 2025 in Chicago, IL. Watch the video below to learn more about the importance of personal integrity in academic careers.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Michele Goodwin
I’m Michelle Goodwin, and I am the president of the Law and Society Association, and concluding my second year of the presidency. So following me will be Professor Mario Barnes, who is—yes, and can we give him a big round of applause?
It’s actually quite special. And I’ll spend a moment after thanking Ji Sun and John. Could you both stand up so that we can give you a round of applause?
John, how many grad students do you think we have in the room today with us?
John
35.
Michele
35? Wow. I like to give you all a big round of applause.
You know, it’s actually quite special that Professor Barnes is our next president. He and I were both graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, and it actually makes me feel a little bit tearful. Truly. The person whom we both followed to the University of Wisconsin, his name is Jim Jones. I know a bit of waterworks. Professor Jones was one of the first African-American, and really persons of color to teach in an American law school.
Jim had been a student at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he worked at night to put himself through law school. And the job that he worked was at the Greyhound bus station, I don’t even know if Greyhound still exists. And the work was not to count tickets. The work was not at an administrative office. He was cleaning the toilets of the Greyhound busses while his colleagues were able to study at night, without having to clean toilets for a bus. That is what Jim was doing. Nevertheless–and this was even during his first year of law school–nevertheless, he merited on to law review. And in fact, he did exceptionally well, despite not having the perks and privileges. And I actually want to take a moment to say that, not only was Jim cleaning the toilets of the Greyhound busses at night while studying to be a law student, Jim Jones was the product of a time in the United States where we were gripped in Jim Crow, which I think is also important context, right? So it’s not just a happy kind of place, and this just happens to be your work. Jim Jones came from a reality where it was not just the struggle that we see with the context of Rosa Parks, who was an activist far beyond how she is depicted, right? We know that that was strategic litigation that the NAACP was involved in, waiting for the day that a person who was well-positioned and looking like a grandmother will say no in defiance, refuse to give up her seat. And then with her nicely quaffed bun, and this sign with the numbers on it depicting her jail number, and an image that would go around the world. That’s how most people, I think, imagine Jim Crow and that’s it, just the unfortunate time and place of not being able to sit where you want to sit on a bus.
But we would do a disservice to the legacy of Jim Jones, which actually connects to my presidency, connects to Mario’s presidency, but in many ways connects to your graduate programs. Because Jim Crow in the United States is captured by Pauli Murray, and if any of you are not familiar with Pauli Murray, I encourage you to become quite familiar with Pauli Murray because she was the predecessor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. What Ruth Bader Ginsburg inherited in coming to the ACLU was what Pauli Murray had already laid there before her years before. What Ruth Bader Ginsburg gained by being first in her class, Pauli Murray had already been there, done that by being first in her law school class. What Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the 1970s was able to lead in terms of a discussion about equality, sex equality—in 1945, Pauli Murray, a queer black woman, had already written in the California Law Review, a profound article about sex discrimination in employment.
If you don’t know Pauli Murray’s name, it’s also a result of Jim Crow. Because Pauli Murray, through what she wrote while she was in law school, became central to Brown v. Board of Education. Literally, the paper that she wrote when she was a second-year law student became the foundation for what was used in that argumentation and what eventually became the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
But I mention Pauli Murray because she wrote this book on race laws in the United States, and this helps to contextualize Jim Jones. Because in that book, it’s nearly 800 pages, single-space of, not her description and narrative of race laws in the United States, but the actual laws themselves. The laws that said, if you are black, you could not swim in the local pools, you could not play checkers. You think, “Who’s legislating this?” Could not play chess, could not play billiards, could not be–and I know, you’re looking like, “That sounds strange.” Read the book Race Laws in the United States and you’ll see just how prurient Jim Crow was. No checkers, no chess, no going to the park, no swimming in the pool, in the park. Or maybe you get to swim one day of the week in the pool in the park, and then it has to be drained and new water put in. Specific laws, no new school books if you are black…
It is out of that that Jim Jones comes, makes his way to the University of Wisconsin for law school, and then cleans toilets at night and makes his way onto the law review, and then makes his way into working in government in Washington, DC, being the first, the first, the first, and then comes back to the University of Wisconsin, one of the first persons of color in the country to become a tenured law professor, and then has the idea that there are more people that need to look like the people in this room who are law professors in the United States. And so starts, before any other program in the United States, one that focuses on that, and that is very clear and specific in its mission with saying that we need a country where the academics look like this room and are representative, and that’s the work that Jim Jones did. Part of that legacy is also Kim Crenshaw, because she also came through the program that Mario and I did.
I knew Jim from when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, and I would go visit him as an undergraduate, and he would call me “Six-Footer.” I’m really 5’11” and ½, and I count that half. But I enjoyed that time with him. And as Mario will tell you, and I encourage you to talk with him about Jim Jones, Jim did not mince words. He was a very straight shooter, didn’t matter who it was that he was talking to, he would tell you like it was, like it is, and so much more.
But I just want to take that particular moment, as I think about this passing of the gavel that will take place in this meeting with Mario, and pay homage to Jim Jones.
In my talk today, I actually want to talk about what it means to be tested. And for all of you in this room who’ve been part of this LSA program, you’ve been tested. Your education is one of being tested.
For some of you, you may have actually come from spaces where the realities of you being where you were not too different than Jim Jones. There’s still parts of the world where it is very difficult to obtain an education, where you may be singled out based on your religion, may be singled out based on your sex, may be singled out because you happen to be LGBTQ, for any number of reasons. So we live in a society where we are tested. And I guess what I want to talk about is what it means for us to be tested, what kind of grit is necessary for us to have in these times. And part of that, I think, in terms of what I could share with you today, is a bit of my own legacy, of what brings me here.
I’ve been asked to give two talks at this meeting. I don’t think I’ve got enough for one big talk in my presidential talk, but it’s important, this talk. So I want to share personally with you in ways that may touch a bit in my presidential talk, but more really intimate with you because you all are facing new horizons. And across this space of getting to where you are, it has been quite the journey that you’ve had, and you’re still on the journey.
At my table, there’s one amongst us just finished the PhD, right? Others still in progress, still figuring it out. But your journey starts earlier. For me, part of that journey when I think about sort of naming where I really understood, perhaps throughout my life I understood the importance of an education and that was really instantiated in me by my forbears, my forebears who too came up during a Jim Crow era. One set of grandparents through Mississippi, one of the harshest places, if you experienced enslavement, to be. Mississippi and Louisiana were known as the two most notorious places, places that you did not want to be sold off to.
At my great grandfather’s funeral, which took place, he died during my second year of law school, and he had a son who came back who had moved north and didn’t come back south until his father died. And I understood why, because he had been cut down from a tree when he was a teenager, with the burns still at the back of his neck, and for that reason had not gone back south of the Mason-Dixon until his father died.
In fact, it was the first time that in fact, he had had a haircut, too, that I had seen, Uncle Robert Stone, because one could actually see the burns from the rope. He had actually been put in the trunk of a car and driven north, and then had not come back until his father’s death. My other set of parents, my maternal grandmother was the person who took me to opera. She took me to hear classical music and things, and for whatever reason, she had a fascination with folding doilies. I just remember Saturday evenings, after having beautiful days with her sitting folding doilies.
But between these sets, there was so much that was formed in me about the importance of an education. And of course, we all know and education is something that can never be taken from you, which is one of the greatest gifts that we can possibly get.
It’s why it is actually so alarming, what is taking place throughout the world right now with the threat to education, the threat to academic freedom, the threats against students, the threats against professors.
For me, I left home when I was 15-years-old with ten bucks in my pocket and a plane ticket to New York, back to New York. I understood how important it was. An education. And so, for the first time in my life, I attended what was a traditional public school. And boy was that also an education, it was really quite exciting, really, in so many ways, because of all of the great diversity. I had grown up in a space where I was usually the only person who looked like me in an educational environment, and then suddenly I was in a space that was very different.
But it wasn’t necessarily easy, right? And I don’t think that for a number of you, it necessarily is easy. You all have very different stories I share with you. Part of my story, it wasn’t necessarily easy because in order to be able to take care of myself, I was doing house cleaning for a doctor and an engineer, and I was grateful for the job that I had. In fact, after I left home with this ten bucks in my pocket and this plane ticket to New York and knew that I needed a job, it was as if serendipity had befallen me. I was walking down the street thinking, “how will I accomplish this” a job! I was literally sleeping in someone’s attic. And then as I was walking down the street, there was a person who was pruning his bushes. And I think there’s a lot to be said about human interaction and how we’re respectful to each other, what politeness does in terms of conversation and communication, because I don’t know who said hello first. But I do know that the second thing that happened was that this person looked down–his house was on a bit of a hill. And he looked down and he said, “Do you need a job?”
And I said, “Yes, I do.”
And he said, “My wife is Doctor Nina mazer. Look her up in the phone book.”
And I did. And–it was at a time in which there were phone books, they are these things that used to exist that were quite thick, and had people’s names and addresses in them and their phone numbers. And so I called, and what Doctor Mazer needed was someone to clean her floors, and clean her home, and do her laundry.
Now, I give you some backdrop. Before that, I had lived in Manhattan. I had gone to a very elite private school. This was all very new for me. But I needed that job. And I was grateful to be able to have that job.
And it’s interesting because I think about Jim and his cleaning of the toilets, because I did that too, although definitely this was not doing it at a Greyhound bus station at night. But I was in high school. I was a junior in high school, and I was involved with various committees because that was really important, on various sports teams, and I took seriously what was required.
They had a marble, a white marble kitchen floor. It was one that could only really become clean being on your hands and knees to clean it. And that’s what I did. Because that was my job, and I wanted to do it well.
But I think about that within the context of keeping it real and what it means to be authentic and authentically yourselves, because that will be tested.
One of the things that’s most important that I think about as we are tested is, what’s our integrity? What’s our accountability? What’s our dignity, what’s our perseverance? Because at any given time someone will challenge you and your values. They’ll think that you’re not too much of what it is that they think of you to be.
In my case, because I grew up studying French and German–In fact, when, I think I was about eight or nine years old, I became fascinated with, you know, studying German, so I started learning it on my own from the library, got some albums and whatnot. But at any given time, as you position yourself through the world, there could be someone who thinks you’re not authentically of a particular thing.
I think about that as the next test that I had after I left high school and being in college. My first year of college, I was moved three times, and FBI came to investigate because I got death threats. The University of Wisconsin, where I decided to enroll because my mother lived in the state of Wisconsin and I wanted to have a better shot at getting to know my mother.
And almost immediately after coming to college, there were a couple of things that I discovered. The first thing was not my discovery, it was everybody’s discovery, which was that there was a black woman who was a student who was beaten up, and there was racial hate in terms of her being beaten up. And the university seemed slow to respond and the city seemed somewhat slow to respond, and so I spoke out about it.
In hindsight, I’m trying to think about how I came to the attention of anybody because I was just a freshman, but I did speak up.
The other thing that had happened, two other things, is that there was a professor, Harold Choi, who taught African languages and literature, and just the year before I arrived, there was a group from a fraternity at the University of Michigan who had come to campus and came to his class.
And he had a class that had about 500 enrollment. People were very fascinated by this class. And they beat him up and assaulted him in front of the other students. And in that same period of time that same year, so much was happening in terms of the racial animus, was that there was a slave auction on campus where white students dressed up in black face paint, and did a mock raping of Oprah and various other things and videotaped themselves at a hotel while they did all of these different things.
The university established a commission to look into this, and I was one of the people who was appointed to serve on that commission. And because of the intensity of racial animus that had been taking place in the years leading up to that, the university had established a new policy just the year before about what it was going to do with regard to behavior with its fraternities.
When the commission decided that it would not do anything kind of give a pass to this particular fraternity, I stood out in dissent (there was a press conference. It was after that that I got the rape threats and the death threats and was moved three times.) But again, there’s the question of being tested. And I remember that in the backdrop of that, there being people coming to me and saying, “Well, Michele, if you just toned it down just a little bit, maybe you could sort of speak out a little bit less, than what it is that, that you do.”
And I always thought, “Well, what about if you do you, I can do me. You can do it the way in which you need to do it, and I’ll do what I need to do.”
After leaving undergrad, in law school—and I’m just taking you through little series because they just test you in different kinds of ways. But you see who you are, right? Doesn’t necessarily mean that people will see you completely in terms of who you are.
When I was in law school, by the time I got to go to law school, the last thing that I actually wanted to do was to be involved in some student leadership. I had certainly gone through quite a lot at the University of Wisconsin. I had become the first person of color to be president of the student government. And during that time, I also got a series of threats–and an effort to impeach me, so that was very interesting. (We had set up a sister school, Adanajja university in the West Bank; there was already a sister school in Israel, and I thought, “Well, we could do a sister school in the West Bank.” For that, and some of you may remember, Rabbi Kahani was flown to campus and did a speech where he mentioned my name, and I got more threats after that.) By the time I got to law school I thought, “Okay, this is enough, I need a break.”
And I was asked if I might become the president of the Black Law Students Association. And I ran and there I was. But even there, too, I think there was an effort to try to get rid of me there, because at the time, this was the late 80s, early 90s, and HIV and Aids were a very serious issue. They still are. And one of the ways in which there was an effort to try to address these kinds of issues and to raise money for research is that there were these dance-a-thons, right? What do you do? “Dance for it!” and then raise money. I thought, “Well, this is a great thing for volunteers to be involved with. All of us should sign on to participate in this and support this effort for HIV and Aids research.” And there again, two special meetings called against Michelle Goodwin. “How dare she associate us with gay people? We’re not down with that. How dare you do that? That’s not us.” And I remember sitting in this round circle with those who were like, “Why? We’re not that. We don’t do that kind of stuff,” and just thinking, “One day you will see.”
And of course, in the United States, the population that is most affected by HIV and Aids happened to be black people.
Why do I tell you these stories? Because in any given day, in any given situation, you should be holding on to your principles and values.
Doesn’t mean that people will necessarily see it. People may call you a sellout in one category, say you’re too much of something else, ask, “Why didn’t you do some other things?” But it’s important to think about and know from the start, what are your principles and values? What do you stand for on those days in which you will be tested? What do you stand for?
And to stand is something that takes courage, because you will be challenged. We live in a time in which there are enormous challenges. There are those who try to keep themselves safe, their heads in the sand such that no one will notice them. But one of the things that we can see in the United States today is that people who have thought that they could go undetected, become detected. Even in these times right now. It’s hard to avoid that, if you are living a principled life.
So let me say this. What are your values? For me, I think about the importance of perseverance. My goodness, how do we get to the spaces that we’re in unless we’re persevering? How do you get to this room? How did your forbearers get to where they were without some sense of perseverance?
One of the things that I’ve been asking of myself and asking others in recent years is, “What story does a mother tell her child the night before the slave auction?” And it’s an important question, it’s not reductive. Because I marvel at thinking about how generations of people over a series of centuries could somehow withstand a nation, states, colonies that would say that they’re no higher than a dog, pig, or a mule. That would say they have no right to speak before a court or to petition, no right to read, no right to count, all of those things punishable. How do you, what do you express to a child before that child gets sold off, or before you get sold off, to tell them, “You are somebody. You matter. Ignore the noise.” Because there’s some story. And it’s our fault in this nation that we don’t query that. Because to me, I think that’s a really important question. What was being done for survivability such that that nugget within could not dry up and be covered over? We just simply ignore black women. But if we actually did pay attention to black women, there’s much that we might learn about a narrative of perseverance, about a narrative of kindness, about wisdom, about how you can’t let your grievances get the best of you.
And then there’s a lot to be said about accountability, at least for me, and then also integrity and dignity. And I’ve come to think in recent years about the tremendous importance of empathy towards others, especially in a society where we see so little of it expressed towards others, and the centering of individual concerns. I urge you to think about what’s going to be your map as you go forward in the world as a professor, and what that will mean.
I’ll tell you one last story in terms of working all of that out, because you’ll not work that out just on the side of studying and being tested in that regard. You’ll work it out on the other side, too, as you’re a professor. Because in my very first weeks of becoming a law professor, I observed a colleague of mine who was in my field, grab a student—let me set the stage for this.
I was actually teaching here in Chicago at DePaul, which is where I began my law teaching career. And it was a public interest law foundation reception fundraiser. And there was a pie-throwing contest, and this student tossed the pie, the big thing was to toss a pie at the Associate Dean. Did somebody laugh? Yeah, it is pretty funny. But she had pie cream on her arm. And as she walked by my colleague—and this is pre-MeToo—she walked by my colleague, he twisted her arm behind her back, and he licked her. I was mortified, I know right? Gross. Really gross. I was mortified.
He’s a professor in my field, senior to me, and I was by the door. It was a Friday night, literally in my first few weeks of law teaching, and I thought, “I’ve got to report him Monday morning.” I would tell the Dean and then she could take care of it. But you can’t just grab a student. You just can’t lick a student, right? That seems like obvious, right? But I will tell you, one of my closest friends in the academy I came to know as a result of that, because after I reported him to the Dean, which I believed—the Dean was a woman, she was the third woman law dean in the country. And I found her, and she said, “I’ll take care of this. Thank you.” And I expected due process. I spent years serving on the executive board of the ACLU. I care a lot about due process. But one morning—it was a Sunday, I’ll never forget that Sunday—as I put my daughter down for a nap, and an email went out to the entire faculty saying, “Michele Goodwin is a liar. Michelle Goodwin is spreading a rumor about me, blah blah blah, blah blah.” And then over a series–and this was a new age. I mean, come on, this was like 30 years ago, or 25 years ago, it was at a time in which emails were still kind of new. I think the faculty was kind of like stunned, that this is how you could use email, for a series. It’s kind of paralyzing, I was like, “Wow,” right? For a series of weeks, these emails hitting every faculty members’ box. “Michelle Goodwin is a liar.” And then implicating another woman on the faculty who, as it turns out, had reported another man on the faculty just the semester before. And then the Dean coming into my office in the evenings crying, saying, “I’m sorry, I should have handled it. I turned it over to an associate dean.”
I say all of that, to say yes, we will be tested and challenged, and it won’t be just as a student. There are things that you may have to stand up for once you cross the line into being a professor.
But that said, what you will do in terms of the profession, what you will do for others, is important. I would not do anything differently than what I had done at that time in reporting my colleague, because what he did to that student was wrong, and I didn’t need a MeToo movement for it. And I was pre-tenure. I was the only black person on the faculty, and I was the youngest member of that faculty.
We all have our own decisions to make. But here’s what I share with you as I close, which is that your courage, your kindness, and your kinship with others will make a difference along the lines of not just a job. You’re here because you care about a career and all of this.
And I will also say this, that when you act with courage, when you act with integrity, it will in fact all work out. I say that standing before you, as I conclude the second year of my presidency at the Law and Society Association, and I thank you all very much.