Saturday, October 30
Plenary Session
9 AM – 10:30 AM
Memorial Fieldhouse
“Rethinking Race and Class Within the Context of Our Crisis in Education”
Plenary Speaker:
Professor Lani Guinier, Harvard Law School
In 1998, Lani Guinier became the first black woman to be appointed to a tenured
professorship at Harvard Law School. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she was a
tenured professor for ten years at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. During the
1980s, she was head of the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and
served in the Civil Rights Division during the Carter administration as special assistant to
then-Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days. Guinier came to public attention when
she was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1993 to head the Civil Rights Division of
the Department of Justice. Professor Guinier is described as a “a prophetic voice” for
issues of racial justice, gender equity, and democratic transformation. Her primary
teaching and writing interests include voting rights, democratic theory, law and social
change, and the legal profession and the responsibilities of public lawyers. She cofounded the Racetalks Initiative, a research and public education project that seeks to
develop new interdisciplinary paradigms for linking racial and gender justice to the
project of building more inclusive institutions. Guinier’s engagement in the conference
will address questions related to intellectual and institutional leadership in relation to
issues of differential rights, power relations and access in higher education, and also in
terms of the ethical and material responsibilities for change that academic, legal and other
constituencies carry.