Check out this excerpt from the New York Times. I'm in his Con Law class this coming semester:
Every day before his lecture "Introduction to Constitutional Law," Prof. Richard Primus conducts a ritual that Hollywood might call "Socratic method meets social engineering." In an office tucked off the law library stacks, he takes out two piles of index cards adorned with the face-book pictures of his 91 first-year students. Like a blackjack dealer in a casino, he shuffles the piles, which are split by sex, then deals out 10 cards from each, the first step in compiling the list of students to be called on during class.
"I've got three black students out of 20, which is plenty," Professor Primus said one recent morning, now the coach adjusting his lineup. Surveying the selected men, he sighed and sent the top three back to the pile: one had been grilled the day before, another already had four hash marks, indicating the number of times he had been picked, and the third belonged to Richard Hoeg, a white man known throughout campus for his conservative views. "Mr. Hoeg talks every day," Professor Primus explained. "Sometimes he has good things to say, but I don't need to call on him."
Once he had 20 viable cards, the young professor turned to the more delicate process of sequencing, starting with the women's pile. Given the persistent pattern of men speaking more often in classrooms, he tries to pick women two of the first three times he calls on students.
"I want to make sure the conversation in the first few minutes includes some women," he said. "I won't call on three men in a row. It's just too much." The first man in the deck sits too close to the first woman, so he shuffled again. "I want to move the conversation around the room," he said, swapping Kristin Cleary, who sits to the professor's right, for Umbreen Bhatti across the room. Then he picked a man who sits toward the back, then a woman down front. He stopped for a demographic check: two of the first four on the roster were minority women. He was set.