The Tanner Lectures with James Forman Jr.: Lecture One

Decisions by the United States Supreme Court and the Trump administration have compelled universities to revise their admissions policies. These lectures ask whether higher education can still function 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 promise.

The first lecture situates American universities within the longer historical arc of meritocracy and exclusion, tracing how they have served–for good and for ill–as gatekeepers to the American Dream. The second lecture turns to the present moment, analyzing recent political and legal developments and highlighting new approaches to fostering campus diversity and inclusion.

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., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.

During his time as a public defender, Professor Forman became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. In 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had been arrested. In the decades since its founding, Maya Angelou School has expanded to run multiple schools inside D.C.’s youth and adult prisons—its success 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 education.

Professor Forman’s scholarship focuses on schools, police, and prisons. He is particularly interested in the race and class dimensions of those institutions. Professor Forman’s first book, , 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 the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he also directs the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice. He writes about how law mediates political power and how law addresses racial subordination. He teaches courses on civil procedure; election law; constitutional 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 currently working on a book, with Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, on the past and future of voting rights, under contract with Cambridge University Press, which 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 discrimination in voting is through a universal, positive rights model of political participation.

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Paine Hall, 3 Oxford Street, Cambridge, United States

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