Lecture One: Merit\, Privilege\, and the A merican Dream: Universities Then and Now
Speaker: James Forman Jr.\, Yale University
Respondent: Guy-Uriel Charles\, Harvard Law School
This is the first of two Tanner Lectures.
About the Lecture
Decisions by the United States Supreme Court and the Trump administration have compelled universities to revise their admis sions policies. These lectures ask whether higher education can still funct ion as an engine of social mobility in today’s political and legal climate— and\, if so\, what kinds of admissions policies might help fulfill that pro mise.
The first lecture situates American universities within the lon ger historical arc of meritocracy and exclusion\, tracing how they have ser ved–for good and for ill–as gatekeepers to the American Dream. The second l ecture turns to the present moment\, analyzing recent political and legal d evelopments and highlighting new approaches to fostering campus diversity a nd inclusion.
About the Speakers
James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law. He attended public schools in Detroit and New York City before graduating from the Atlanta Public Schools. After attending Brown University and Yale Law School\, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington\, D.C.\, w here for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with cr imes.
During his time as a public defender\, Professor Forman became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for hi s clients. In 1997\, along with David Domenici\, he started the Maya Angelo u School\, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had been arrested. In the decades since its founding\, Maya Angelou School has expa nded to run multiple schools inside D.C.’s youth and adult prisons—its succ ess was chronicled in the 2023 short documentary film “Welcome to School.” The Maya Angelou leadership team dreams of a world in which no person is behind bars\; in the meantime\, they believe that everyone — including those incarcerated — deserve a high-quality educ ation.
Professor Forman’s scholarship focuses on schools\, police\, a nd prisons. He is particularly interested in the race and class dimensions of those institutions. Professor Forman’s first book\, L ocking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America\, was on many top 10 lists\, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017\, and was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His second book\, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change\, was published in 2024 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Co-edited by Forman\, Premal Dharia and Mario Hawilo\, the anthology focuses on how to undo the damage and depredations of the carceral state.
Guy-Uriel E. Charles is t he Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he also directs the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice. He write s about how law mediates political power and how law addresses racial subor dination. He teaches courses on civil procedure\; election law\; constituti onal law\; race and law\; critical race theory\; legislation and statutory interpretation\; law\, economics\, and politics\; and law\, identity\, and politics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Law Institute. He was appointed by President Joseph Biden to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is cu rrently working on a book\, with Luis Fuentes-Rohwer\, on the past and futu re of voting rights\, under contract with Cambridge University Press\, whic h argues that the race-based model that underlies the Voting Rights Act has run its course and that the best way to protect against racial discriminat ion in voting is through a universal\, positive rights model of political p articipation.
About the Tanner Lectures
In col laboration with the Office of the President of Harvard University\, the Mah indra Humanities Center hosts annual Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The p urpose of the Tanner Lectures is the advancement of scholarly and scientifi c learning in the field of human values. That purpose embraces the entire r ange of moral\, artistic\, intellectual\, and spiritual values\, both indiv idual and social – the full register of values pertinent to the human condi tion\, interest\, behavior\, and aspiration.
The Tanner Lectures on H uman Values is a nonprofit corporation administered at the University of Ut ah. They are funded by an endowment and other gifts received by the Univers ity of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner. More informatio n: www.tannerlectures.utah.edu.
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