I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about this and whether I should talk about this—but I want to share some thoughts, I guess about the bar exam and institutional betrayal.

I started thinking about this because the reaction I had to the “waiting for bar results” part of the process was objectively outsized. I was quiet-ish about the extent of it, even to those closest to me, but the waiting period was the worst my mental health has been for years.

I think it is probably normal to be somewhat anxious, depressed, angry, etc. during that period. You work for something for months and then just have to wait. It’s hard.

But for me, those feelings were next-level. At times I grew frustrated with /myself/ because I know that I have faced what seemed like greater challenges with more grace. And yet, I felt what I felt.

I spent a lot of time soul-searching (and in therapy!) trying to figure out why I was responding this way to something that others around me seemed to have somewhat accepted and had been handling more-or-less in stride.

In order to understand, you need to know a bit about the 2020 bar exam. If you haven’t been following along, it’s hard to sum up what happened to 2020 bar examinees in a tweet or two.

Thousands of us were made to risk our health and safety to sit in person for a bar exam that never should have happened. Many others had an exam supposed to take place in July deferred all the way until October, often without the ability or opportunity to work in the meantime.

The October exam was given in an online format that wasn’t sure to work. The proctoring software failed to recognize the faces of BIPOC applicants. It didn’t accommodate applicants with disabilities. It wasn’t secure and may have exposed applicants’ personal information.

It didn’t allow some applicants to complete the exam. It was a mess that disadvantaged nearly every applicant that encountered it.

And it all made me so deeply mad.

And what I eventually realized that the pain of the entire experience bar examinees had this summer felt deeply personal and for me deeply familiar because it was, in every sense, an institutional betrayal.

Again, some background is needed: If you’ve been around a minute, you might know “my story.” Like a disgustingly large portion of women, I experienced sexual assault as a college student.

And because I enjoyed the power, privilege, and platform to do so, I have shared that story fairly widely. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/20/us/harvard-sexual-crimes-complaints-alyssa-leader.html

There is obvious harm in sexual violence, and I felt that. But what I’ve focused on in sharing my story is the harm that is less obvious to those that haven’t been there: the harm of institutional trauma and betrayal I faced when I went through the reporting process at my school.

Before this happened, I had a belief that if I ever needed help, my college would do the right thing for me. When I reported, I expected that someone would hear me out. I expected that someone would care that I didn’t believe I was safe.

I expected that someone would intervene to keep me from being further harmed. I expected that someone would demand accountability. But no one who was a part of the institution did that.

Instead, there was a lot of closing ranks. There was ignoring and avoiding. The whole time, I believed if I just followed their procedures or advocated for myself passionately or somehow moved them, they would care about me and do the right thing. I did, & they still didn’t.

Maybe you can look back at my story and say that I was naïve or stupid to expect anything from an institution. Maybe that’s right. But the fact remains that at the time—when I was 20, alone, traumatized, and scared—I did have that expectation.

Learning that that was incorrect shattered basically all of my foundations. It rocked my entire worldview to its core. It caused substantial issues with trust and anxiety that I still live with, over five years later.

There’s a name for that experience. It’s institutional betrayal. And it is so common in the situation I was in that a lot of the research that has cropped up around institutional betrayal came out of the response to campus sexual violence and other experiences of sexual violence.

I decided to pursue a career in law because I hated how that betrayal happened to me, and I believed that being an attorney would give me the power to fight back against institutions that similarly harmed and betrayed other people.

I decided to become a public defender because I believe that the criminal legal system is an institution that does something similar to criminal defendants, especially those that are in a position where they cannot afford counsel.

And I thought that being a lawyer would give me the power to start interrupting that.

So back to the bar exam:

Applicants spent months trying to explain to the bar examiners that making us sit for this exam in the middle of a pandemic put our health, safety, finances, and careers at risk.

I say we, but before I even showed up to the conversation, others (see @DiplomaPriv4All) had spent months more—since March—pushing bar examiners to see this.

In a lot of jurisdictions, this was met with indifference at best and outright disdain at worst. We’re talking about bar examiners rolling their eyes, making nasty comments, and making applicants concerned for their character and fitness outcomes.

In Virginia we submitted a petition to the state Supreme Court and the board of bar examiners that included extensive research, impact statements from applicants, and over 1,000 signatures. No one ever responded.

All of that is to say, we (or at least I—I shouldn’t speak for everyone) came to the table with the good-faith belief that once the institution understood the harm we were experiencing, they would be interested in setting it right.

So imagine me, nearing the mountaintop of the experience of becoming a lawyer, realizing that to summit, I was going to have to deal with another institution that didn’t care about my health and safety. That really couldn’t be moved by knowing that they were causing harm.

That I could submit to all of their policies and procedures exactly as they requested, and they would still just ignore what was happening.

And that if, in spite of all this, I was successful in becoming an attorney, the prize was to be tied to and regulated by that same institution for as long as I choose to practice.

It was, and is, devastating. It was, and is, triggering. It is enraging.

I tweeted about this while studying at one point and felt, based on some of the responses, like my position wasn’t being understood. I knew (and know) that the the institution doesn’t care for me. I knew (and know) that the bar examiners are distinct from the profession.

But none of that means that there wasn’t a very real harm being dealt by a very real institution, and that that harm would necessarily color the way I and others interacted with our profession going forward.

I say all of this to say, what happened to bar takers this year was a very real thing. So real that there is a name for it. So real that it's something I've spent years in therapy dealing with before now.

So real that those of us who have had the misfortune of encountering this before felt in our bones what it was, even before we knew how to name what was making us so mad and uneasy and anxious.

What happened to exam takers this year was an institutional betrayal. That kind of betrayal can shake someone’s foundations and worldview.

If you are feeling it and still reeling, your experience is valid. You aren't overreacting or having some sort of outsized response. You're reacting normally to an institution acting with abnormal indifference and cruelty towards its constituents.

Anyway, I wish there were some sort of mechanism of accountability for this, but I am afraid there is not within the system we are working in.

Which is why I think that accountability has to look like abolishing the bar and moving forward with some institution––if we must have one––that recognizes the humanity, dignity, and worth of the people it is supposed to serve.

Also ofc I forgot to TW/CW this for sexual violence and I’m really sorry as it’s likely to not be what people expect upon opening this thread.