Penn State Dickinson Law Dean Danielle Conway stepped down effective immediately after a Texas veteran told Congress he quit the school rather than complete her mandatory anti-racism course.
Danielle Conway is out as dean of Penn State's Dickinson Law School, two days after David Blackman testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about why he walked away from his law degree. Conway will stay on the faculty. Laura Williams is serving as acting dean while Penn State Executive Vice President and Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos searches for a permanent replacement.
Blackman is a former 911 call operator and Texas State Guard veteran from Plano who arrived at Dickinson Law in August 2025 on a 50 percent merit scholarship. On his first day of a required first-year course called Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws, a faculty member explained why the class was mandatory. Blackman later requested an exemption. A committee convened by Conway, who created the course in 2020, turned him down.
"Faced with the choice of completing my degree in a system that demanded my intellectual submission, or walking away to maintain my integrity, I chose the latter," Blackman told lawmakers, according to his written testimony. "I withdrew from Penn State Dickinson Law after one semester, forfeited my scholarship, and returned to Texas to pursue my master's degree."
Blackman's account did not surface in a vacuum. The Washington Free Beacon first reported his story in May 2026, publishing internal audio recordings from the course that captured a transgender faculty member telling students why the class was compulsory. The outlet's follow-up reporting on Conway's resignation, published this week, described her exit as a direct response to Blackman's congressional testimony, which was submitted as part of a hearing on American Bar Association accreditation standards that require law schools to teach on "bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism."
The College Fix and Legal Insurrection both picked up the story, and law professor Jonathan Turley wrote on his blog that the episode raises serious questions about whether a public law school can compel students to "acknowledge the reality of systemic racism" as a condition of their degree. Protect the Public's Trust, a watchdog group, has separately filed a civil rights complaint against Dickinson Law over its broader diversity, equity and inclusion strategic plan, which the College Fix reported made "anti-racism" a core institutional mission.
The First Amendment Problem for Public Schools
Dickinson Law is part of Pennsylvania State University, a public institution bound by the First Amendment in ways a private law school is not. Requiring students to affirm a contested proposition as a condition of graduation looks less like education and more like compelled speech, the kind of mandate the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down when government actors have tried to force citizens to endorse a viewpoint. Denying Blackman's exemption request, rather than offering an alternative assignment or a different framing of the material, is the detail that turned a curriculum dispute into a national story.
Conway's course was born in 2020, in the wave of institutional promises that followed George Floyd's death. Six years later, it became the reason a decorated Penn State dean lost her deanship, not because a legislature passed a law banning it, but because one student refused to sign on and had the nerve to say so under oath before Congress.
Penn State has not said whether the course itself will be revised, dropped, or left untouched now that its architect no longer runs the school. Sotiropoulos's choice of a permanent dean will answer that question either way. Students already enrolled in the course this fall, and any future applicant weighing Blackman's public account against Dickinson Law's admissions pitch, will be watching for the answer just as closely as Congress is.
Also read: Walz-honored institute rolls out trans dolls for Minnesota kids as young as 4 • DOJ probes whether Harvard's China-funded aid programs shut out Americans • Report finds $225 million in K-12 fraud as Vance leads crackdown
