It wasn’t easy being a Latino in high school in eastern New Mexico in the 1960s, Fred Alvarez recalls. He was thrown out of stores, refused service in restaurants, and told by white fathers he couldn’t date their daughters. “It was pretty raw stuff. You had to learn to adjust.”
He adjusted his way to a Stanford bachelor’s degree with honors, followed by a law degree, after encountering a campus recruiter who visited his high school.
“My counselor told me I was foolish even to talk to the guy, but Stanford represented a way out,” says Alvarez, JD ’75 (BA ’72). “I always felt like I was different. When I told the counselor I got my acceptance letter, he said there must be some mistake.”
Today, Alvarez is a prominent employment lawyer with a long record of public service and leadership in the legal profession. At Stanford, he has served as a member of the Board of Trustees and on the Dean’s Advisory Council for the law school. He founded the Stanford Law School Latino Alumni Association. And in April, he received Stanford Associates’ Gold Spike Award, its highest honor for volunteer service. He shares his knowledge of the profession as a guest lecturer at Stanford Law—as does his wife, Beth “Muffie” McLellan (BA ’72), who is a lecturer in residence (the two married three days after graduating from Stanford and will celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2022).
“Fred was a fine student in my very first labor law class here at Stanford. He has had an extraordinary career in the...
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