In the Company of Attorneys: Alternative Careers in the Legal Profession

I graduated from the University of Iowa in January. That time of year in Iowa City is particularly bleak, and my prospects were bleaker. I started feverishly applying for jobs that would suit a graduate with a newly minted liberal arts degree. One of the avenues I pursued was employment with the federal government. A friend who worked for a federal agency in Chicago shared a job announcement with me. It was for an investigative position with the Office for Civil Rights, U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Ultimately, I worked for that agency in its Chicago regional office for 34 years, first as an investigator, and later, as a team leader. In all aspects, I worked closely with attorneys.

Although I am not a lawyer, I was fortunate to have a career closely aligned with the legal field.  As a federal investigator, I was responsible for determining if public schools and universities were complying with the federal civil rights laws. I traveled to various campuses in various states to investigate complaints or conduct government-initiated reviews. I wrote lengthy investigative reports with recommendations for action. Those reports were reviewed and approved by attorneys and issued to the educational institutions.
 
The regulations implementing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act were passed by Congress shortly before I entered the federal workforce. I got in on the ground up enforcing that statute, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in public schools and universities. One of the most challenging assignments under that regulation concerned the de facto segregation of public schools in the northern states. One typical instance of such discrimination involved a school district’s requirement that African American students walk past the schools in their neighborhoods to schools at a distance so that they were not in class with non-minority students. 

Another issue under Title VI was the disparate treatment of students whose primary language was not English. This led to wide ranging adoption of programs for limited- English students by public schools.

I was also a first-hand witness to the passage of federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, disability, and age (Title IX, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Age Discrimination Act). Those statutes did not exist when I was in college. After my entrance into the federal workforce, there was a rapid development of civil rights law. 

One of my assignments under the newly formed disability statutes was to review the football stadium of a large university. That led to extensive renovation of the structure to render it accessible to individuals with physical disabilities. Many complaints filed on the basis of disability concerned the treatment of students with physical and/or mental disabilities. School districts were required to develop individualized education programs for these students to ensure they had equal access to educational programs. As a team leader, I wrote and signed many letters of findings which are now published in the Individuals with Disability Education Law Report. Under Title IX, I was responsible for numerous complaints alleging sexual harassment. I negotiated a multi-district settlement of a complaint filed against 32 school districts in a large metropolitan area. The issue concerned the failure of the school districts to hire female administrators.

My career with the federal government in the area of civil rights was very satisfying and rewarding. As a team, the investigators and attorneys with whom I worked addressed wide ranging inequities on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, and age in educational systems throughout the Midwest.