Lani Guinier Speaks at Ramapo College

• Originally published in The Record (Bergen County, NJ) September 23, 2004 

Copyright 2004 North Jersey Media Group Inc.,

Diversity, education 'integral' to democracy;
Harvard professor speaks at Ramapo

By PAUL H. JOHNSON, STAFF WRITER, North Jersey Media Group


Colleges need to educate a diverse student body so that the next generation of leaders represent all of America, Harvard Professor Lani Guinier told students at Ramapo College on Wednesday.

"Diversity and education are integral to our functioning democracy," she said, emphasizing that colleges need to recruit students of all races, genders, and socio-economic background.

Guinier, the first and the only African-American tenured professor at Harvard Law School, gave the keynote address at Ramapo College's convocation, the ceremony celebrating the start of the school year.

She said that race is often the canary in the coal mine, the bird used by miners to warn of trouble. If more took the time to notice, Guinier said, they would realize that the problems suffered disproportionately by minorities affect whites as well.

"Too often race is used as a decoy," Guinier said. When minorities have problems, it is assumed they are the only ones, unlike the miners who knew to run when they saw a sick canary.

"We notice what happens to people of color," Guinier said. "But rather than follow the miners, we pathologize the canary."

She said her work is guided by the experience of her father, who attended Harvard University in 1929 and was denied financial aid and housing because of his race. She described his plight as being "present but invisible."

She said one of the main goals of higher education should be the training of a diverse workforce to become participants in civic life.

"There is an intimate connection between higher education and democracy," Guinier said.

William Sanborn Pfeiffer, Ramapo's interim president, said the college has started a diversity action committee to review the college's record on recruitment and retention of minority students and faculty. The goal, he said, is to develop a detailed plan to improve diversity on campus.

Currently, African-Americans make up about 6 percent of the student body at Ramapo, Hispanics 7 percent, Asians 5 percent, and Native Americans less than 1 percent. Blacks make up 8 percent of faculty, Hispanics 5 percent, and Asians 6 percent. The college has no Native American faculty member.

Guinier, a one-time lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department during the Carter administration, was a legal counsel for the NAACP and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1998.

But it is as a "Friend of Bill" that Guinier became famous. In 1993, President Clinton nominated her to be the assistant attorney general for civil rights. Guinier attended Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1970s.

"We all knew Bill was going to be president," Guinier recalled in an interview. "He had an outsized personality. He filled a room not just with his ambition, but his charisma." Guinier was also classmates with future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, another Yale Law school graduate.

But Guinier's confirmation descended into a brawl over the legal scholar's works, which suggested there were different ways to hold elections that would provide better representation of minority groups. Critics also zeroed in on her staunch support of affirmative action. She was labeled a "quota queen" by her opponents, and her nomination was withdrawn without a hearing.

Since then she has written several books and continued to study the operation of democracy.

When the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that widespread voting failures led to the disenfranchisement of thousands of minority voters in the 2000 presidential election, the debacle provided a measure of vindication for Guinier, she said. Guinier wrote many years ago that voting methods needed to change to improve democracy. The incident reminded Guinier of something her sister told her long ago.

"The philosophy of one century becomes common sense the next," Guinier said in an interview before the convocation. "I didn't know how prescient she was."