It’s been many years and many midterms since Alex Johnson, then a third-grader at West Vernon Elementary School in South Central Los Angeles, first visited the UCLA bookstore. Alex’s earliest mentor and favorite teacher, Tom Nakayama, brought the youngster to his alma mater for a special tour, telling him that he, too, could someday go to college if he worked hard and believed. And, to seal the deal, the teacher bought little Alex a UCLA T-shirt in the campus store.

Nearly 40 years later, Alex Johnson ‘75 continues to return the favor.

Not only does he encourage and challenge his students at the University of Virginia School of Law, he’s also taken on new duties as chairman of the board of the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), the consortium of law schools that last year administered 107,000 LSAT exams to students hoping to learn law. The volunteer role takes Johnson on the road 20 weeks out of the year and has placed him front and center in the national debate over affirmative action and the use of LSAT scores in the admissions process.

Unlike the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which tests mastery of information and skills, the LSAT is purely a skills test, Johnson explains. While it reportedly can predict 20 percent of a student's chance of success in the first year of law school, it doesn't measure the remaining 80 percent, which can turn on simple hard work and other intangibles. So, Johnson believes, it should play only a partial role in the admissions process, alongside other factors: character, leadership, community service, undergraduate curriculum, life experience, and career interests.

Still, he says, the LSAT has an important role. "The LSAT is a great leveler, but it's important to use the scores properly," he said.

"That African-American students score lower on the LSATs, on average, than white students doesn't mean the test is discriminatory. It illustrates the problem of inadequate investment in African-American education in this country,” Johnson said. “But getting rid of the LSAT won't magically open the admissions door to minority students." In general, Johnson believes law schools do a good job of attracting and graduating African-American students and producing black lawyers who pass the bar. "The LSAC has spent millions of dollars over the past decade to encourage minority members to consider careers in law, and to take the LSAT and matriculate into law schools around the country," he said.

Johnson easily remembers the impetus for his pursuit of a legal career: “With the impact of Brown v. Board of Education, I saw that to be a leader in this country, law was the avenue.”

For Johnson, that avenue started at home, where his hard-working parents, neither of whom finished high school, extolled the value of education and encouraged their four children to accept whatever opportunities came their way.

Years later, when college acceptance letters arrived from CMC, Princeton, UCLA, and USC, he chose Princeton, but says he quickly realized he’d made a mistake.

"I was miserable," he said. "It was a good education, but it was too far from home and I wasn't into the eating clubs. Also, it was a very small school, smaller than my high school, now the George Washington Academy in Los Angeles. It was just an all-white, male, Eastern establishment school. Not my thing."

Johnson transferred to CMC in fall 1973, his junior year, and lived in Boswell Hall with roommate Gary E. Bean ‘77.

"Claremont was a friendly campus," Johnson recalled. "It was more California than Princeton was, more laid back. It mattered less where you were from than who you were."

Now a pediatrician in Oakland, Bean said he and Johnson got along well, but didn't see much of each other. Johnson was pre-law and Bean was pre-med, and both studied hard. On the rare occasions when Bean and Johnson went out together, Johnson would drive them into Los Angeles in his old car, and the streetwise city kid would fill in the kid from tranquil northern California about gangs, and about which street corners to stay away from at certain times on certain days.

Johnson grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, during the apex of the civil rights movement, and decided early on he wanted to become a lawyer. By the time he reached high school, he saw that CMC had one of the best records in the state when it came to graduates entering their first choice of law school. It also had other strengths that attracted him – a relatively low student-to-faculty ratio, the opportunity to take classes at sister schools, a relatively diverse student population, and a beautiful setting.

CMC professor Alan Heslop says Alex Johnson ’75 is “just the sort of person who should be Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”