Carolyn A. Wilson Lecture
Introduction: Lani Guinier
Wellesley College
February 16, 2000

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

Welcome, everyone, to the Wilson Lecture, our most important intellectual event each year. It is wonderful to see so many members of the Wellesley community assembled tonight to hear our distinguished guest--teacher, scholar, and author, Lani Guinier. Welcome, Professor Guinier. You honor us by your presence.

Wellesley's annual Carolyn A. Wilson Lecture is named for an alumna from the Class of 1910. A pioneering reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Carolyn Wilson was one of the few women anywhere in the world to cover World War I, bringing riveting stories back from the battlefront.

Years later (in 1962) she endowed this lectureship, hopeful that it would continue, over the years, to engage Wellesley students in the most significant issues of the day and provide opportunities to learn first-hand about them, from leading scholars and activists--people who could bring the latest news from the front, whatever it might be.

Many of you may know something about the public persona of our distinguished speaker tonight. Some of us vividly remember her own battle front-- the imbroglio over her nomination by President Clinton to be Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights, a nomination that was withdrawn after she was subjected to a hostile personal attack. She has described that experience as a nightmare.

Others here may only have heard about this incident, since you were not even teenagers when it occurred it is ancient history already for a new generation. But all of us have access to it through Dr. Guinier's book, which transformed this painful experience into a thoughtful assessment of the civil rights movement and race relations in the United States, Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice.

Lani Guinier is well known as a leading legal scholar, thinker, teacher, and activist. In addition, there is a side of her that may be less familiar to people here, but one that is highly relevant to this campus community.

Professor Guinier has been at the forefront of efforts to create new modes of public discourse and problem solving in our increasingly global society. In 1994 she founded Commonplace, a non-profit organization dedicated to transforming public discourse, particularly about issues of race.

This year, the Wilson Lecture is the capstone of a series of programs sponsored by the Lecture Policy Committee on the broad theme of Reflections on Wellesley College. The Committee has sought to create opportunities for the campus to come together to think about what makes Wellesley College the institution that it is: our special strengths, and the challenges we face. Professor Guinier's work on civil discourse centers on one of our important challenges.

Born and raised in New York City, Lani Guinier is the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Jamaican father who met in Hawaii. From her earliest days, she was exposed to different cultures, different perspectives, different ways of being and knowing and of being known.

An honors graduate of Radcliffe College, Professor Guinier reports two Wellesley connections -- her sister and her half-sister are alumnae from the classes of '78 and '57, respectively.

After receiving her law degree from Yale, she clerked for a judge on the US Court of Appeals. She then moved to a litigation practice in the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice and as Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

After more than a decade practicing law, she became a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and, as of a year and a half ago, at the Harvard Law School, where she was the first black woman to receive tenure amid much fanfare.

Professor Guinier is acclaimed for her legal research and writings on voting rights and affirmative action. Her most recent book, Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School, and Institutional Change, examines teaching methods in law schools, many of which, she demonstrates, are biased against women. And she is a true teacher-scholar, a combination we especially value here at Wellesley.

In this vein, it is telling that on a long and distinguished curriculum vitae, including more than 20 honors and awards, the credit listed first is an award as the outstanding teacher at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1994.

A theme that runs through much of Lani Guinier's work is the belief that power need not be organized around winning and losing. As a generative force, she argues, power can bring people together as collective actors in a common cause.

We can find new ways of working, and being, and communicating she insists, if only we will rethink the nature of our conversations so that the focus is not just on performance and on talking but also on listening, mutual understanding and mutual respect.

She sees this transformation as an absolute imperative in our increasingly diverse society if we are to move beyond the current breakdown she sees in our ability to talk meaningfully about difficult issues.

A strong and steady voice for justice, for civil rights, and for the possibility, with hard work, of finding a collective voice, Lani Guinier has much to teach us. It's a great privilege to have her here with us this evening.

Please join me in welcoming to Wellesley College Professor Lani Guinier.

Betsy Lawson elawson@wellesley.edu
Office for Public Information
Date Created: February 22, 2000
Last Modified: February 22, 2000