MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA – Lani Guinier, Harvard law professor and pioneering
civil rights advocate, will deliver the annual Baker Lecture at the West Virginia
University College of Law on Thursday, November 5, at 12 p.m. in the event hall.
Admission is free and the public is invited to attend. A reception and book signing
will follow the lecture.
In her latest book, “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education
in America” (Beacon Press, 2015), Guinier calls for a reshaping of higher education
to better serve society by educating more students from diverse backgrounds. The
current higher education model in the U.S., she argues, fails its mission of equal
opportunity and social mobility by continuing to serve and reward the privileged.
Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law and the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. Throughout her career, she has addressed issues of race, gender, and democratic decision-making, and sought new ways of approaching questions like affirmative action while calling for candid public discourse on these topics.
In 1993, President Clinton nominated Guinier to be the first black woman for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. The nomination was withdrawn following a wave of controversy and negative press.
The Baker Lecture at WVU College of Law is presented annually in honor of C. Edwin Baker, a leading constitutional law scholar who died in 2009. He was the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
In 2011, Baker’s family donated his papers to the West Virginia University College of Law. Housed in the George R. Farmer, Jr. Law Library, the C. Edwin Baker Collection is a window into the life and work of one of the 20th century’s foremost experts on constitutional law, free speech and communication law.
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