Lani Guinier

Lani Guinier, the first black woman to become a tenured professor at Harvard Law School, is perhaps most famous to the general public for a job she didn’t get. In 1993, Bill Clinton nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, but some of her views became sufficiently controversial to convince Clinton to withdraw the nomination before it came to a vote. She has professed (or does one mean professored?) on at Harvard, written several books and continued to opine in the areas of both voting rights and civil rights. On Friday, she was in town to speak at a luncheon of the Minnesota Black Women Lawyers Network. I had a short interview with her and between that conversation and her talk to the MBWLN, Guinier said...The U.S. system of democracy needs updating and it could benefit by looking around the world at other democracies that do things differently.

[Lani] Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School, became famous when her nomination to be assistant attorney general for civil rights was derailed by the raging culture wars of the early 1990s. Her book does not advocate the kind of mechanically redistributive race-based policies she was then accused (not always fairly) of promoting. Instead, she denounces the “testocracy,” in which students are sorted into elite colleges based on the narrow, individualistic measures assessed by the SAT. This, she argues, has the effect of both reinforcing inherited privilege and convincing the “testocratic” victors that their spoils are well deserved.

An op-ed by Lani Guinier. I was raised from an early age to be skeptical of how admission to elite schools works. My father, a black man who had been accepted to Harvard College in 1929, was told on arrival that he was not eligible for scholarship aid because he had not submitted a photograph with his application. He was also not allowed to live in the dormitories. This, he later discovered, was a ruse to discourage his matriculation. Harvard’s official policy was one in which “men of white and colored races shall not be compelled to live and eat together nor shall any man be excluded by reason of his color.” But Harvard’s unofficial policy was to admit one black student per class — a policy it had inadvertently exceeded by accepting my father’s photograph-less application. Harvard University no longer excludes people because of their color; nor does it reject students who come from poor or working class families. But, like other elite universities, Harvard’s official policy still remains far removed from how it unofficially admits students.

As a high school student, Lani Guinier wrote a letter to the College Board over a math question on the SAT that she found problematic. When she got to Harvard's Radcliffe College, her roommate announced that she was worried about something: With her perfect SAT score she'd have trouble finding someone to marry. "Her bragging ... and my nagging," were two sparks of a lifelong interest in what Guinier calls "the testocracy." Now a professor at Harvard Law School, she has written a book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, that calls for a rethinking of who gains admission to schools like Harvard. You talk in the book about the correlations between SAT scores and family incomes. But some people argue that the SAT is more meritocratic than the networks of influence that it replaced. Most of the students admitted to competitive colleges are not poor or working class. There may be a few but it's very few.Part of the reason that upper middle and upper class students are more likely to get admitted is because they're more likely to do well on the SAT.

We all understand the importance of college in the modern economy. This signal economic importance leads to the SAT becoming the sole difference between getting into a great school and potentially being set for life, or not. Students sweat the process. Families spend thousands to prepare children, and schools pride themselves on their students’ average SAT scores. It’s time, writes Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier, that we question not just the value of that one test, but frankly, the entire system that claims this test measures merit. “[W]e need to change our understanding of merit,” she says--it is too narrow. Her new book, “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy,’’ “propose[s] a new framework, one focused on advancing democratic rather than testocratic merit.” It is a scheme that reminds colleges that their duty “is to give students an educational experience in which merit is cultivated, not merely scored.”

Lani Guinier, the first tenured woman of color at Harvard Law School, went through a trial by fire in 1993, when President Bill Clinton withdrew her nomination for assistant attorney general for civil rights. Negative publicity about her political and academic views had made her a polarizing figure. Conservatives called her “the quota queen,” though her essays, published in “The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy,” make it clear she opposed quotas and was seeking voting systems that would promote representation not just of the majority but also of a greater range of groups. Her new book, “The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America,” returns to the theme of inclusion, making the case that college admissions has become a “testocracy” in which standardized test scores are seen as the most important measure of merit, and character counts for little. She argues for a rethinking of merit that would better reflect the values of a democratic society.

Elite colleges admit students in a way that will fail to diversify higher education -- and the current use of affirmative action has little impact, according to a new book by Lani Guinier. Her new book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America, has just been published by Beacon Press. In it she argues that current admissions systems are based on tests, rankings and prestige -- in ways that undermine American democracy. And she argues for replacing what she calls "testocratic merit" with a new "democratic merit." This shift would place more emphasis on the good to society of educating a diverse group of people than on identifying the people with the best credentials (as currently defined by society) for admission. Guinier, a professor of law at Harvard University, responded via e-mail to questions about her new book.

It’s nearly the end of the college application season and, for many high school seniors, that means the end of a years-long process full of AP tests, extracurricular activists, volunteer hours and SAT prep — much of it a means to an end: getting into the highest ranking college. For years, SAT critics have argued the test disadvantages poor students, but now, Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier is saying the test has hurt the mission of higher education. She outlines that position in her new book, “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America."

A book excerpt by Lani Guinier...Call it what you will, the SAT still promises something it can’t deliver: a way to measure merit. Yet the increasing reliance on standardized test scores as a status placement in society has created something alien to the very values of our democratic society yet seemingly with a life of its own: a testocracy. Allow me to be clear: I’m not talking about all tests. I’m a professor; I believe in methods of evaluation. But I know, too, that certain methods are fairer and more valuable than others.

The “testocracy” is the term that I use to describe the overemphasis by many institutions of higher education on the applicant’s ability to do well on an SAT or an LSAT or some other test that is presumed to predict performance in college. What these tests really tell you about is the financial stability of your family. The focus of higher education has become extremely competitive as opposed to courageously collaborative. The testocracy doesn’t take into account the important roles that higher education plays or attempts to play in a democracy. Those roles are a form of teaching leadership, of teaching scholarship, and producing citizens who are going to contribute not just to their own family but to the larger society.

Two decades ago, Lani Guinier became a liberal icon when President Bill Clinton proposed—and then withdrew, under conservative pressure—her nomination to head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division...Her latest book is The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America. As the subtitle suggests, Guinier turns Clinton’s unfair characterization of her writings on its head, advocating more democracy, not less, in American universities and life. And far from endorsing racial quotas, she suggests that affirmative action is a poor substitute for rethinking our admissions process from top to bottom.

An op-ed by Lani Guinier and Penda D. Hair (co-director of the Advancement Project). Contrary to popular belief, Americans’ right to vote is not guaranteed. Sure, the Constitution mentions voting more than any other right – forbidding it from being abridged on the basis of race, for example, or the ability to pay a poll tax. Yet it contains no language that makes this right explicit. This missing safeguard has become more glaring in recent years, as politicians have enacted laws that make it harder for certain people to vote. The Supreme Court’s gutting of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 in the Shelby County vs. Holder decision made voting rights more vulnerable than ever. In the past two years alone, the Advancement Project and other civil rights organizations legally challenged restrictive voting laws in Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina and other states.

Hayat Mohamed, a Tougaloo College senior, and Laurel Oldershaw, a 2014 graduate of Brown University, recalled their experiences on each other’s campus…Their conversation, joined by several current and former students from both schools, was part of Freedom 50, a conference on the Tougaloo campus commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bloody 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi...Lani Guinier, the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard University, presented findings from her current research on meritocracy in academia. She said standardized tests such as the LSAT are placing students who are not from upper middle-class backgrounds at a distinct disadvantage. “It’s what I call a testocracy,” she said noting that 86 percent of the time LSAT scores are “totally irrelevant” in predicting student performance in law school.