i'm sure. so depends on your math. >> host: who first used that, that term, quota queen? >> guest: i don't really know who used the term. it was first i believe published in the "wall street journal," but i can't tell you who came up with the quota queen term. i think they were just copying from somebody early on. >> host: was it a fair term? >> guest: no. >> host: why not? >> guest: because i wasn't a queen, and i didn't believe in quotas so -- [laughter] i guess somebody liked the fact that there were two qs, so -- .. the media soon defined to me. i kept waiting for the white house to put together a strategy. meanwhile, the right wing had the field to itself. >> guest: that's true. >> host: you go on to write that conflated three racialized images welfare, quotas and unmarried loud demanding black women. heit became part of an organized campaign that continues still to convert the 1960s slogan power to the people into quotas for unqualified and undeserving black people. the right wing story was that one or more black less for whites, apparently by any means necessary including the destruction of democracy. "quotas queen" made any further communication superfluous. but it announced my agenda loud and clear, a black woman who did not know the place. i would to to whites what centuries of whites have done to blacks. >> guest: it speaks for itself. i don't know that i've anything to add. that was written in a way that reflected what had happened a year or two years or three years ago. right now we're talking of something that happened 22 years ago. so i'm not sure what the value is in repeating what they were doing. i think they speak for themselves in their terminology and, it's always precociousness. this assumption that they can attack people based on nonsense but as long as they keep attacking them somehow the challenge will become like a tsunami. you just get caught up in it. so you need to know how to swim but on it and you also need to know how to exit. >> host: back to you both, "the tyranny of the majority," i'm sorry "lift every voice" and we considered ourselves, you write, a group of serious long-standing friends to be the president and first ladies intellectual is not political peers. each of us shares a sense of importance, arrival we believed in him bill clinton, in his bighearted has in his passion for justice. how did you get to know the president and mrs. clinton? >> guest: i went to yale law school and they were there. they actually were very helpful to me because while i was at the law school i was conceding for something called -- were you get to do a fake litigation and if you do a good job then you get to move to the next level. and they played the role in determining who gets to be a participant in the barristers union, and although there was another student who was challenging me they were much more sympathetic to the arguments that i was making as a result i ended up participating in the finals of the barristers union. so in that sense i got to know them. and then later on after i graduated from law school it was a program an annual program on i guess south carolina's right off the coast during the period between december and january the first part of january. and they were both, hillary and bill were at that retreat, and my husband his daughter and i also came to the retreat and that's what got to know them a little bit better because hillary and i were on the same panel. >> host: june 3 1993 want to show a little bit of the president's press conference. >> could you just give us an idea of what part of whose writing you really have trouble with? >> yes, i can give you an idea. there was, in the michigan law review, there was an article lani guinier analyze the weaknesses of the present remedies under the progress act and many other analyses i agree with. but seem to be arguing for principles of proportional representation and minority veto as general remedies that i think are inappropriate as general remedies and anti-democratic very difficult to defend. >> host: very difficult to defend. lani guinier, where were you when the president had that press conference? >> guest: boy he had a press conference in the evening and then i had an opportunity to speak the following morning where all of immediate team and find out who was this evil which? and the news at the time came much more fair-minded and much more realistic. i spent before president clinton did that talk i had spent about an hour and a half explained to him what was in the long review articles here and at the time he didn't have any objection to them. there was no argument he made to me personally that explained his subsequent remark. >> host: and that was the same evening as that press conference that you met with the president in the oval office and then you drove to the department of justice, heard the press conference. when you are the words difficult to defend, how did you feel? >> guest: that he was under a lot of pressure to retreat. >> host: that night he also with your nomination, correct? >> guest: yes. he called the up on the phone and said i'm sorry but i'm going to have to withdraw your nomination. and i said okay. and then there was no further comments. i hung up. he go back and he said you just hung up on the. why did you do? i said i'm sorry, i thought you were finished telling me what you have to say. and so then he continued and he said, the next day he gave a very friendly talk about how he would give me some money if if he could that he was very fond of me but he just couldn't make this move to consider. some of the argument i was making, which by the way our arguments that are derived in part from what happened in germany, and who made the german system the united states of america after world war ii. so these concepts are not unusual. and effect the united states has adopted them for other people. >> host: the right that the president like many others who are unfamiliar with the law reduced on the of simply skimmed the text and failed to appreciate that i was describing a particular strategy, promoting black faces in high places, but not agreeing with many of the basic ideas behind the strategy. was a lot review style? >> guest: well a lot review style requires number one, that use a lot of footnotes. it also wants you to articulate all of the other options that could be considered in addition to what it is you're trying to introduce or to develop further. and although it is based on examples, it's often much more theoretical, and thus people are not law professors are often not aware of or able to distinguish the difference between an argument that is scholarly and implementation of a particular set of assumptions that haven't really been developed. >> host: did you ever get the chance to publicly testify? >> guest: wrecks on your nomination. >> guest: yes. i got that opportunity through the media, not through the justice department or through the other branches of congress. >> host: would you have liked to have testified? >> guest: yes. i was looking forward to it. i mean i wasn't as upset about -- let me put in the affirmative. i was eager to play a role in the clinton administration at the beginning of the administration. i had been as the justice department's, and the civil rights division, in the late 1970s and knew a lot about the civil rights division because i had been there for four years. so i felt very comfortable with that nomination. but on the other hand, i had a great job at the university of pennsylvania law school. i enjoyed teaching. i enjoyed writing and exporting some of these ideas. so what offended me was not the fact that the nomination was withdrawn but the way in which it was withdrawn and absence of any particular issue of the substance of my comments. it was just trying to create an image of me that was apparently -- apparently no politician would want to touch base with me or even touch me. >> host: so professor guinier, if you got in front of the senate judiciary committee at a republican senator at you and said, do you believe in quotas, what would your answer have been? >> guest: know. i never articulated, i was called the quota queen but there was no basis for this because i wasn't arguing about quotas but i was arguing about the allocation of power in a way that respected the citizens of the united states that it was a single i do have a particular amount of white people are black people or latinos or asians americans. i was talking about a more fair system of allowing citizens to have a larger voice in the election of and the operation of our senators or our congressmen or women or of the people who actually come in the state, the governor, the representatives of their, that there were other ways of ensuring that the citizens of the united states were playing a significant role in determining what the responsibility was elected officials, and whether the elected officials were in touch with the citizens themselves and representing the citizens and themselves rather than an ideology or some other identity that the elected officials had almost complete management and power over and the citizens themselves were in some ways very much ignored except to come to the ballot box and, you know elect a, b c or d. that they really were in a position of making decisions or influencing the decisions that were being made because we have a system of elections that was created in the 18th century. we are not in the 21st century, and the idea that we are stuck with what people in the 18th or 19th century were doing is ridiculous as far as i'm concerned because they didn't have computers. they didn't have cars. i mean, there are lots of ways in which citizens now have a lot more or could have a lot more influence and opportunity in the democratic processes of the united states. >> host: what you think of majority rule? 51% determine who gets to rule. >> guest: well there's certain circumstances where 51% versus 49% makes sense. the question is is that the way it should always be? and the answer, in my view is no. in fact, if you go read and look at germany, or look at south africa, or look at australia there are lots of other countries, lots of other ways of ensuring that the citizens are making decisions, not the corporations that are subsidizing the individuaindividua l who then gets to draw up lines to sure he or she gets reelected, and the whole procedure becomes foreign to most citizens potential voters. >> host: one of the things that a lot of your books in the voting rights act, something we're talking about now in 2015 as well. what are the strengths and weaknesses, in your view, of the voter rights act? >> guest: which voting rights act are you asking me about? >> host: you can take that where ever you want. >> guest: the court only rights act is without a lot -- current. without a lot of its strength so it's difficult to discuss a big effect i just had dinner last night with somebody who was in the voting rights act, who's in the voting rights division of the civil rights division of the justice department, and she said that once they killed section five there was very little left for people who have been working very hard in the voting rights section to have something still to do. so in a way it is getting more and more power to the states to determine what the election process, particle is even with regard to federal election, not just with regard to state elections. >> host: what is section five? >> guest: section five was, past tense a section of the voting rights act that covered a certain number of states because of the ways in which they had behaved in the previous 75 80 100 years in terms of the allocation of the opportunity not just the allocation, but the commitment to ensuring that the citizens of the united states and the citizens of that state should have a genuine opportunity to influence the decisions of the people who are ultimately elected. and we have a system in the united states in which the allocation of representatives positions is done by the representatives who are already in power, and they draw districts that look very strange, and they draw districts that put people but they don't want in their particular district out of it and they create districts in which they are pretty much guaranteed to win, or at least that political party is guaranteed to win. and so it's a way of quieting the citizenry when, in fact in a democracy the people that you want to speak out are the citizens themselves, not simply the people who get elected and then ignore the concerns of other people because they're not in the district or because they have drawn the district that is people who are in the district but they have no allies. >> host: before you move on to some of your other writings, some other topics how did that period of time april to june of 1993, change it, change your life? >> guest: well it changed my life and i would say very good ways. i got to write a number of books and i got to write books that people were willing to read. so that was an opportunity. and also i just gave me -- and it also i guess it gave me more of an opportunity to speak to be able to get people engaged in the conversation but this is not just about what academics think. it's also in many ways much more important what the citizens themselves think. and very few people are willing to challenge the way in which we divide up power in this country. because we are stuck on what the founding fathers did in the 1700s. and the founding fathers were people, like george washington, thomas jefferson owned slaves. see the founding fathers determining for the rest of the countries life how to allocate power and how to determine who represents him. >> host: "lift every voice," we did that term come from by the way transferred it comes from lift every voice and sing. it's a song that is important in the black community. >> host: why? >> guest: because i think the black community, its great strength is its sense of community, and it has a sense of community, unfortunately, in terms of what makes it a community is the feeling of accidents, the feeling that blacks have not been respected. -- feeling of accidents. slavery dominated the united states and really punish black people in ways that are still being felt you know, 200 years later. 150 years later. so i think at least in terms of my experience, especially as a litigator when i was working for the naacp, the legal defense fund, there's a tremendous sense of community in the black domains of a particular state or a particular city. but there's also an interest in, not just improving life for black people because there's interest in making things more fair for all people, and so one of the potential opportunities our options have not in my view been taken advantage of or develop is to find ways to encourage poor blacks, poor whites poor latinos and just poor people generally to work together to think about a fairer way of incorporating their views into the political process. right now we have corporations determined to get elected rather than the population determining who even has the money to run for office, much less win. >> host: one more quote from lift every voice and this could apply today. and if you could expound on this certainly you write no one had prepared me for a soundbite litmus test for public service. >> guest: that seems to speak for itself but what i was saying is the media comes in and they put a name on you or put a position on you, then that's the end of the conversation. i don't mind people challenging my views but unlike an opportunity to respond. >> host: lani guinier, professor at harvard, curly. how long have you been at harvard? >> guest: since 1998. >> host: why did you move to harvard? >> guest: it was a difficult decision but i pretty much enjoyed working at the university of pennsylvania law school. i had a colleague, susan sturm we co-taught a class together but it there were several reasons why harvard was appealing. number one it was something that was challenging the university for a long time and that is that they didn't have any black women working at the law school and very few black people working at the university. it's an irony because not only did i attend bread clip which become part of harvard which is now part of harvard -- radcliffe. but my father had gone to harvard college in 1929 and he had applied to the college. he had been accepted, and then when he showed up at the school, they were appalled because he failed to submit a photograph with his with his application. and so he couldn't come they refused him. the students wouldn't talk to them. it was a terrible experience to the first person to talk to him was ralph bunch who was there as a graduate student and ralph bunch directed him to other places, like in the kitchens of the dormitory. that's where my father could feel comfortable. so, and of course, he then told me how proud he was when he was admitted to harvard but also the challenges of being at a place where you have a lot of people who come from much more elite, much more important or at least well supported families. but so, there was a sense, and he left harvard after two years. so this is during the depression and he could no longer afford it and they wouldn't let him live in the dormitory, et cetera. so my going to harvard applying and going with something about i think i felt as a tribute to my dad. but -- >> host: what did he do after two years of harvard? >> guest: he went to new york. he had been, he had done very well in high school. he was the valedictorian in his class. he went to boston english high school. he had been the editor-in-chief of his student newspaper at high school, and there was a group that brought all of the students who had been the editors of the high school journal to a meeting with someone from the new times it came to harvard to recruit people who are interested in journalism to come to the new times. so my father, after he had left harvard, said i was one of those people in that room when you're inviting us to come to work at the new times. the first thing, they wouldn't let him into the building to the second thing, he was was persistent so they can let him, he can only be in the elevator and they had a conference with him in the elevator and the editor of "the new york times" on the floor. they decided they would hire him as the elevator operator. so that's how he got to work in the new times. he was the elevator operator in the red the times each day and cover to cover as he was operating the elevator. then he went to school city college. >> host: and from there? >> guest: and from there well, he graduated from city college and the ultimately went to law school but that was several decades later. there was a world war ii in the middle of that. so he had a lot of other things that he felt responsible doing. >> host: so you were raised in new york city? >> guest: yes. >> host: who was your mother? >> guest: you mean what was her name? >> host: tell us about her. >> guest: so my mom was the daughter of jewish immigrants who came to the united states. her mother, so my grandmother was from poland and she came to the united states unabated -- on a boat which is about eight years old. my grandfather, my mother's father came through canada from russia to the united states. they get married. they set up a restaurant, their two children to my mother was the oldest, and the header as responsible but she was i think sixers old taking care of her four year old brother and at some point she was very worried that her brother was not acting responsibly. she took the elevator down. she was six years old. she takes the elevator down to the first floor, goes down the street and stands across the street because she was told to never cross the street, waited for one of her parents to look out through they had a little store at that time, to see her and then get her back to her apartment. they ultimately moved and had a restaurant. >> host: when did your parents get married transferred my parents got married in 1945 in honolulu to. >> host: interracial. what was the reception transfer in hawaii it was fine. they were in hawaii. >> host: your father was in the service? >> guest: is. he was sent to know why. she went to hawaii to get she wanted to be a red cross person, but she was offended by a lot of the racism in the red cross. so she left the red cross in hawaii and started working at an organization associated with some of the people in the army and that's how she met my dad. and they met in august and were married in october. >> host: what were some of the troubles they face having an interracial marriage in 1945 when we moved back to new york? >> guest: well my mom had trouble with her parents. they were not happy. but they grew to respect my dad. i don't know that they had a lot of problems when they came back to the united states, well hawaii was also part well hawaii was not a state yet but it was part of the united states. they live in manhattan. i don't know they never told me about issues of racism. and my dad had a lot of very good friends who were black but were relatively powerful. so the person who experienced the racism was me. >> host: how so? >> guest: oh, because we moved, the first thing is that i remember, i took ballet lessons. this is when i was i don't know, four years old, five years old, and i remember having to memorize, they picked me to speak to the audience to introduce the valley that i was been participating in. i remember having to memorize this introduction. and at the same time that i was doing that, which was fun it was chanukah -- hanukkah. my mother is jewish. she took me to a hanukkah event, and the people there were very unpleasant. i was four or five years old and i can remember that they couldn't understand why my mother would be bringing this black kid to a jewish event. so that was i mean i remember that to this day. and being four or five and remembering something, in my view suggests that it had, you know, a long-term effect. on the other hand, you know, i got along fine with my cousins on my mom's side. >> host: something to write about in your books why you wanted to become a civil rights lawyer. why? >> guest: well black woman, escorting james meredith in mississippi in 1962 and i saw her walk either to the court or to the school and she had such stature and such confidence and this was an area where it was very dangerous but i thought well, she did not i'm on a 12 years old, you know i can do that too. >> host: good afternoon and welcome to booktv's "in depth" program. this is where we invite one author on to talk about his or her body of work. and this month it is law professor lani guinier. she is our guest she is the author of six books by getting in 1994, the tyranny of the majority "becoming gentlemen" came out in 1997. "lift every voice" the we've talked about a bit came out in 1998. 9/11, 2001. the miner's canary which will get a little bit later in the program came out in 2002 and professor guinier has just published this book, "the tyranny of the meritocracy." this is a brand-new book. now, one of the aspects of in depth is your participation want to hear from you. will put the phone lines up on the screen to get elected dial in and join our conversation this afternoon, (202) 748-8200 if you live in east and central time zones. 74882 their one for the lead in the mountain/pacific time zones. if you can't get to on the phone lines and want to make a comment, try social media. we have e-mail, booktv@c-span.org is her e-mail address. we've also got a twitter feed at booktv. you can make a comment there as well or you can join the conversation on our facebook page facebook.com/booktv. we will be getting to those calls and e-mails et cetera in just a few minutes. professor guinier come in your most recent book, "the tyranny of the meritocracy," if you could explain what i'm about to read that would be great. the s.a.t. is actually more reliable as a wealth test than a test of potential. >> guest: okay how much time do we have? >> host: professor guinier you've got three hours. go. >> guest: i did want to say something about the articles that you mentioned. several of them i co-authored and i want to give -- >> host: i promise you we will ask you about your co-authors. yes. >> guest: okay. in terms of "the tyranny of the meritocracy" and the s.a.t. as a means of determining who has access to wealth or to the opportunities, practice before you take these tests in the book i borrowed a term called the volvo effect which i did not coin, but it basically suggests it's the parents who can provide a $30000 that is often required in order to prepare the student to take the s.a.t. or the lsat or whatever the particular test is in order to get selected for a position in college or a position in law school. and my concern is in part based on some of the research that i ended up doing as a result of a student at the university of pennsylvania law school, who was, she initially came to me. i do know if you want all this background. so this young woman came to me and the first thing she said to me, she was in a course i was teaching on law and the political process and does talk about the civil rights movement and the adoption of the voting rights act of 1965 and i was showing some of the people who are participating in that effort, and she came up to me and she said, you know you have shown us pictures only of men? with any women involved? i was so ashamed that i had not noticed. so i was very grateful to her. i came back the next day with women who were very important to anyone who -- am pleased that i took her comments system. system. so she then came back to me with another concern, which was again it was played at the everett a pennsylvania law school but has also played at other law schools and is called, well i don't have a lot to say -- ass coal then go. >> host: we are c-span. you can say that. what does that mean? >> guest: so it's a way for the students who don't talk as much in law school classes as their peers because their peers they feel are dominating the conversation and they think of their peers as quoted quote assholes. they play this game was equivalent of a bingo box where if you get you have to put three in a row, like a tic-tac-toe but three and row, either diagonally, horizontally or vertically. if you picked the right people who are raising their hand and speaking of taking up a lot of time, you have scored again how do they let the other people in the room know the other typical but everybody but the other people playing the game with you, how do you let them know you just scored? use of pre-agreed upon word in question to give a sure hand and that lets everyone know that you know, he or she at the time although he had succeeded. and the men on the bingo board for assholes and the women were feminine nazi dr. chu is one of the women who was consistently on this game. so she came to me and said she had seen a video where it was not about law. it was about medicine and was about looking at the body of a woman and all the people who spoke in the class were women, and there was a man who raises his hand and he is tentative, and he says what if a man gets this disease? and the woman looks down on them. she twirls around she says you're smart extrapolate. she wanted to do something like that, what was done in the med school for the law school. she came to me because i had been responsible in she said where the women of the civil rights act. so i told her, i don't know anything about video to and i don't know that your experience is only your experiencexperienc e. so maybe you should do a survey and say what's happening with the men and the women in law school. two things happen. she did she basically had people answer questions and she had a 52% response rate, so she had really good data. that i went to the dean was a new dean indicating access to four years of information for got the lsat score undergraduate cpa scores, the law school scores for years a student at the university of pennsylvania law school. and that's when i became much more aware of the lsat and it's predicted to affect. and from that data and to also reinforcement of that data from people who do who are involved in creating the lsat which is the equivalent of the s.a.t. for high school and the lsat score for law school. what we found was the lsat predicted 14% of the variance in first year great and 15% second your. >> host: what does that mean? >> guest: that means that there was accuracy between your lsat and your law school grade that it was predicted. but it was not predicted for most student but it was predicted for 14% of the students but not for 86% of them. so that's when i got very come as a long way to explaining but that's what got interested in our preoccupation with tests that are not really predictive of performance but are in many ways accurately affecting women in terms of their performance in law school rather than an index of wasn't just a reaction as a woman to asshole bingo. it's also the fact that women in law school at least in the law schools that i've been involved in are not doing as well as men even though they come in with very similar credentials. so there's something happening in the law school in private or the law school culture that is inversely affecting women. >> host: what do you think that is? >> guest: well, that's where this new book comes in. so what a think is happening is that there's a kind of competitive individualism at stake in legal education, whereas for women, they are not as competitive and they are also very, very much more likely to collaborate. and so it was that that sort of door opening that got me involved in looking more deeply at, at this disconnect. and then looking at the work of people like anita wooley and others. anita wooley did a study with somebody at mit where they were trying to see how groups are making decisions or solving problems. and she and her cohort created these groups, some of which were on it, some of which were all some of which were men, some of which were women. the more -- the men in the group tended to be much more individualistic and vomiting. they wanted to show they were smart. the women were trying to actually solve a problem so they were trying to get input from everybody was many people as they could integrate. so her finding was that the more women you have up to 85% women, the better the group is that solving a problem. once you get to 85% then having to mean that there is fine. [laughter] >> host: professor guinier would you do away with the lsat and the s.a.t.? >> guest: what, if i was god lex. >> host: you know what can you take that question however you want to. >> guest: . if you were president of harvard and could make that decision. >> guest: see, that's the problem. if i were in those positions it would be very difficult to make the position or to articulate the position that i'm making. i don't have anything to lose by speaking out about my studies of women in law school. if i was a dean dean or if i was the president of harvard, i would have multiple constituents, right? it would just be the students were admitted. it would also be the former student who are now in positions to provide money for the school. that graduated, they've gotten a really good job making a lot of money. they feel proud of the school that enable them to proceed, and so the alumni are much more comfortable thinking about the kind of law school or the kind of undergraduate school that they were admitted to him that they graduated from. .. racial diversity empowers those with dissenting opinions to speak up. explain. >> guest: well, what i'm saying is that you want people that you disagree with to be able to talk and to feel comfortable in projecting their perspective. it doesn't mean you agree with them but it's important you hear them and they feel comfortable in providing their open perspective. you want to have an environment in which people are honest and in which people have very different backgrounds and are prepared to share that. and i say that because we'll all benefit from having these diverse perspectives, rather than determining somebody who went to a private high school and then went to an important college and then gets to law school, somehow that person is superior to somebody who went to a state school or high school and a state school for college, and then they get to law school and they're not as sharp in some ways with those who went to more lead schools, but they have a perspective, they have information they have a context that can represent some of the holes in the argument that the people were very smart are making but they're jumping over streams or they're not necessarily engaged with all of the dimensions that need to be addressed. >> host: so, as someone who has taught at law school for a long time when a student comes in what do you look for? what a good predictor for you of success? >> guest: well, i'm not in a position to predict people's success in general but i can tell you about the students that i hire as faculty assistants. they tend to be people who have a different focus than i do, because that means that there are areas of understanding that i don't penetrate or focus on as much as i should so having students who are looking at the issue from a very different perspective than i do, i find that very helpful. i had a student who came from the ed school, who had been a lawyer for ten years and now she was getting a degree from the ed school at harvard, and this woman was brilliant at drawing things. she was brilliant for many reasons. so when we were trying to figure out a problem she could draw a picture of it and map it out in a way that made things very clear. so that is not something that you measure on the s.a.t. or the g.r.e. or the l.s.a.t. she is now a professor. so there are ways that people demonstrate talent or demonstrate their own experiences or build on and work from their own experiences, and give you a different perspective, and if you're open to that it really opens up your mind and that's why i find collaboration with my students and collaboration with my research assistants very enjoyable, very helpful. >> host: okay, people out there listening heard 50%, at least 50%, women, and i'm sure there's a couple out their screaming, that's a quota. >> guest: 50 percent women what. >> host: should be at least 50% women -- >> guest: that's not a quota. that based on the number of women in the country. half of the anymore the united states are women. -- half of the people in the united states are women. that's not an arbitrary quota. that's just reality. that's a -- the point that i'm making is that we want to ensure that everybody in the united states whether they're men or women, have an opportunity to excel. and the fact that they're 50% women or 50% men i have no control over that. >> host: professor, we're talking about her most recent back "the tyranny of the marry tookcracy." do you give your students tests and what kind? >> guest: depends what course. along the critical process, they have a take-home test usually three, sometimes four days and i do that because having worked as lawyer these are all people planning to be lawyers when i was writing a brief, i would often seek the help of somebody else in the office -- i was working at the naacp legal defense fund -- and i found it very empowering and very helpful to show what i was doing to other people and they would give me feedback or they would identify parts of the issue that i had ignored and they would introduce that. so it comes from my own experience of being a litigator trying cases where you really do have to be able to work with your colleague or you're not going to win the case and not only are are you not going to win the case you're not going to win a friend. so my sense was -- has always been that it is really important to be able to work with other people. on the other hand, there's some people who are very individualistic and who conceptualize things by themselves. that's fine. i'm not saying everytime you have a thought you have to talk about it with somebody else. but if you're trying to challenge or to stop a -- solve a really hard problem it's very important to bring together people with different strengths. so here's where some of the other social science literature scott page for example, talks about a -- he is a professor at the university of michigan, and the talks about having a test with ten questions, and what if you have somebody who gets seven out of the ten questions right, and you have other people who got six out of the ten questions right, and then you have somebody who got only three out of the ten questions right but they got the three questions that the person with seven had missed and he was saying in that situation, you want to have the person with the highest score and the person with the lowest score working together because they have different perspectives and it's bringing those different perspectives together that gives them greater power, greater insight into how to solve complex problems. >> host: that's one form of test that you give which is the take-home test. how is the internet affected the grading of those tests? >> guest: i don't think it's -- you mean that people are cheating and just going on -- i haven't found anything new from the internet. in fact never even occurred to me. >> host: oh. >> guest: because you give -- you give -- if you're teaching at a law school like harvard you give the students -- you have a big textbook and lots of cases and then there are questions after the case, and so you would have to not come to any classes and even then if you went to the web site you would be in a difficult position to be able to do well on the test by just going off into outer space. so it's very focused on what we talked about in class. it's focused on what we read in class. so it's not a good example of cheating. now, people may think that some of those students are cheating but i don't think so because if you give three students or four students the opportunity to write an exam and somebody is not doing their -- not using the rowing oar, they'll bring that to my attention or divide up the requirements so that this is what x wrote, this what y wrote, what z wrote and this over here is what zero wrote, and we don't have anything to do with it. and so zero gets basically a zero. >> host: have you noticed a trend when it comes to students today as opposed to the 90s are they getting smarter? are they learning the basics more? are they better writers? what have you noticed as somebody who has been in the teaching profession? >> guest: unfortunately i don't think i've noticed a lot of change in the past 20 years. i'm sorry to say that. >> host: why? why are you sorry? why is it unfortunate? >> guest: because i think that the culture of law school and the dynamics of legal education in the classroom haven't changed very much in that 20-year period. and so in particular the issue that i've been most concerned about is the fact that women don't do as well as men at harvard law school. they come in looking very similar. and the men rise to the top of the class and the women -- a few of them may be at the top of the class, but if you log at the magnas and the cum laudes most of the names are men. not so much in the cum laudes, and it's -- i think part of it has to do with -- there's a book called "the female brain. "pie i'm not a doctor. i can't say this is accurate but what the author says is that in a man's brain, the information is in one place and then the mouth is right there and it goes straight from the information to the mouth and the person speaks. whereas in the women's brain, the issue goes to several different portals before the women speaks and so the woman tends to be slower at working through the problem, and the man speaks right away. that shows on the one hand he has a lot of confidence but it also suggests that he is not considering some of these smaller points that the woman is grappling with so the two of them working together, that's a good team. but what often happens is that the men dominate and the women come knocking on my door and start to cry. >> host: what's your advice? >> guest: well, my first advice is to give them a tissue. no. if they really -- just to give them a sense, once you graduate from law school once you start working as a lawyer, you will find places where you can work as a team, and you will feel rejuvenated. that the -- this is -- being a lawyer is not working to become a lawyer is a test but being a lawyer is much more complicated in terms of what is one's strength. in one of my articles i cite a lawyer who is unfortunately now deceased who is at a very well to do law firm, and he said that the student who do very well as lawyers are not necessarily the students who did very well as law students. even as a large new york law firm. >> host: well, we have been talking for an hour and so we have two hours to hear from our viewers via phone calls and social media. you can't -- here are the phone lines and then we'll cycle through and show you the different social media addresses as well. and we're going to begin this segment with a call from andy in california. hi andy. >> caller: hi. and nice to have professor on. a quick comment. i deplore political correctness, as the conservatives do but they practiced against the professor in 1993. >> host: what do you mean? how so. >> caller: well, they applied this name of quota queen instead of actually looking at what she was trying to say and trying to understand what she was trying to say and i remember back then very much wanting to hear what she was talking about what you were talking about professor, and wasn't given the opportunity. i was unhappy that president clinton did not stand behind you, even if you would have been voted down, much as president bush stood behind john power, who was a capable person but flawed and let the senate do its job. so i wish we had not -- i wish the republicans and then president clinton had not followed political correctness in labeling the professor. the question i have is -- i'm a fan, by the way, of the founding fathers and the system we have but i would very much like to hear your suggestions professor, as to changes you think ought to be made. >> guest: well andy, thank you very much for -- am i looking -- >> host: right at this camera. and you can talk to a face over here. so andy will understand. >> guest: okay. so what i was talking about, andy, at the time and think then in the courses i still teach, that we need to look around the world to see what other countries are doing and so one example of alternative forms of voting comes from germany, and it's an example that we the united states imposed on germany in 1945 after world war ii. so it's not something that was developed in the closet somewhere else. it's something we, the united states, approved for germany, and my point is well, if we could suggest this to germany, why can't we suggest it nor united states? what is the system in germany? they have each citizen get two votes, and they can -- they use one vote for a political party and one vote for someone to represent their community. so one person is representing their ideas and the other person is representing their needs. and that is the system that germany has used since 1945 and i think it's an interesting system that -- if we thought it was good for germany, we might want to consider. i'm not saying that's the only system or the best system but i am suggesting that 300 years after this country, united states, became a country, it may be time for us to reconsider what the slaveholders, george washington and thomas jefferson, they were the ones creating our electoral system and i have lots of respect for both of them in many ways but on the other hand, both of them owned slaves and they were supportive of the constitution that essentially said we'll count slaves for the purpose of determining how many people are in a congressional district but we're not going to give the slaves any voting power. so it's not about political correctness. it's about trying to consider the range of elections -- election systems or electoral systems that will engage the american people to participate more actively in the political process. >> host: leon posts on our facebook page something that andy referred, to the only major problem i ever had with bill clinton was when he kowtowed to the republican opposition and withdraw her nomination. i saw it as a cowardly act. do you agree with that statement? >> guest: well, i like the statement. and i appreciate leon saying it. on the other hand, i don't want to be seen as somebody who 20 years later is still complaining. so, i just want to say i've moved on. i don't regret the fact that i'm still a law professor, and i think i've outgrown the sadness, the sadness i was not given a chance to speak for myself. it wasn't so much a concern about getting the nomination approved. what made me feel sad is i never had an opportunity, as leon suggested, as andy suggested -- excuse me -- to explain these ideas. so i was -- it was as if somebody was going through a factory and just decided arbitrarily to print some information on my forehead which had nothing to do with what in fact was behind my forehead. >> host: in her 1998 book, "lift every voice." very concisely talks about her meeting with the president on june 3, 1993 being in the oval office and so if you're reading that book you'll get a very good description of what that day was like in her life, but one other thing you note in that book is -- that was written in 1998 -- that was the last conversation you had had with the president june 3 1993. is that still hold true today? >> guest: yes. he has -- he has people who work for him call me but it's never clear why they're calling me. if they called me and said that bill clinton would like to talk to you, i'd be happy to go, but they will call and say well bill clinton will be at this particular event on this particular day. maybe you would like to go there. but -- and i'd say where and how many people will bell there? oh a thousand people. that's not the kind of interaction that will in some way relieve some of the questioning, i guess of what pushed him to -- i don't want to say throw me out but that he just never gave me a chance to speak. that was my concern. if i had not been voted by the senate to hold the job that another story. but i felt that in his case, he was -- i think he was scared. i think he felt that i was -- i just don't think he understood what i was ultimately trying to do and to be frank there were other situations -- he and i were friends -- in which he said he would come and testify on behalf of my clients. this was a case in arkansas, when he was governor, but he never came to testify, and that was before the nomination. so he is a man with good ideas and i think a warm heart, but i think he gets distracted. >> host: have you seen mrs. clinton or talked to mrs. clinton? >> guest: no, i haven't seen her and she hasn't contacted me. only he -- >> host: could you support her in 2016? >> guest: well, i mean issue could support -- i don't know. i don't know what kind of president she would be. i know she was a good secretary of state, but i can't say what kind of president she would be at this time. i thought that bill clinton gave a brilliant speech at the democratic convention in 2012. so, -- i mean, i respect him. i admire him. but i don't think i want to be in his company, at least not without some prior conversation. >> host: timothy is calling in from the bronx. timothy, you're on with harvard law professor and author lani guiner. >> caller: good afternoon. my question is, is it significantly more painful for a person of color to -- >> host: timothy, please turn down the volume on your tv. you're going to get a little delay, and blake when he talked to you on the phone, he tells you turn down the volume, it's very important. jo go ahead and talk through your telephone. we're listening to you and don't worry about the tv. don't look at the tv, and turn down the volume. now go ahead. we are listening. >> caller: my apologies. i was concerned about the status of american civil rights equality for all people and i'm concerned about whether a victim of a violent crime who is stabbed in the back, and a person who is discriminated against by a society, and the courts which is more painful for us to live with for all of us who grew up in the '60s who have college degrees and masters degrees and served in the community, where do we go when we find that the courts fail us and then we go to the law sort of as a victim and the victim is penalized? >> host: you have a followup question for timothy, professor? >> guest: timothy issue apologize but i'm not entirely sure what your question mean -- can you give me an example at of what you're describing? instead of talking about it abstractly, give me a concrete example of either what you experienced what you're describe organize you have a friend who is experienced it. >> caller: i have personally experienced owning a major company, earning 3.3 million a year being injured in a box store by a 17-year-old who was illegally driving a forklift disabled me, filed a petition to the court. the court procrastinated and found a way to deny me a negligence case when they were absolutely wrong and i found that the judge was the recipient of funds and had a fiduciary relationship with the box company, a very large corporation, and at the same time going home from court i was robbed. and stabbed. >> host: timothy, you want to put this into a civil rights, race-based issue? that? >> caller: well,ey this terms of the courts relating to the rights of individuals and how the corporations now consider individuals can -- this precociously disregard the rights of people who are injured as citizens of the united states. >> host: thank you sir. let's hear from professor. go. >> guest: okay. so,. >> host: where do you start with something like that? as a law professor, as a lawyer -- >> guest: i think -- >> host: your client comes to you with this. what do you do? >> guest: as a lawyer you do different things that an law professor. so, as a law professor i would just say we would have a long conversation so i had a better understanding of exactly what was happening and the more -- just the fact that he asked the gentleman who has been injured that -- and then he was robbed and stabbed going home. this is a very complicated and serious bit of different kinds of problems put together in one stew. so, for example, this -- he was disabled and injured by a 17-year-old that he was robbed and stabbed going home and then he was denied the money that he was entitled to. there's too much going on for me to be able to work through it without -- he and i would have to sit down and talk for at least an hour. >> host: well, abstractly then if he had called in and just said i think that the court system is unjust to african-americans. >> guest: then i would have asked him, can you give me an example of what you're saying. i certainly agree that mass incarceration, which is related to what happened through the court system, is not functional for the black community, not functional for the white community, not functional for asian americans or latinos because we're spending too much money keeping people in prison rather than taking that money and educating them so that they in fact can find a job so that they are less likely to end up in prison. so it's -- what i'm saying is the intervention needs to be made earlier in someone's life and we need to spend more money educating people rather than imprisoning them. >> host: and in fact that's something that professor guinier addresses in her book the miner's canary. how is that related to your book? >> guest: okay. so the miner's -- this is based on 100 years ago the miners would take a little canariry into the mine with them, to alert them when there was a potential problem in the mines and the canary, because of its more fragile system would note that something was about to happen and would then alert the miners that they needed to leave the mine. and that is the thesis that professor jerald and i are working with that the problem is not with the canary. the problem is with the mine. so you want to have people becoming more alert the way the canary is to identify a problem in advance of the capitulation of people's lives et cetera. but the miner's canary is very valuable for alerting you in advance there is a problem and that you need to step back and focus on it and then do something about it. >> host: from the miner's canary those who are racially marginalized are like the miner's canary, their distress is the first sign of a danger that threatens us all. who is gerald taurus. >> guest: a prefer of -- a professor of law. i first met him, he was a professor of law at the university of texas. now a professor of law at cornell university but presently visiting at yale law school. so he is a man of many schools. >> host: and he is your co-author. yes. >> host: another call from the bronx, this one from leo hi, leo. >> caller: good afternoon, how are you doing? >> host: good. >> my question to professor gunier is my understanding that associate justice clarence thomas was a beneficiary of affirmative action, yet he did opposed to affirmative action. do you have any thoughts about this contradiction? >> host: what is your view leo of affirmative action so-called affirmative action? >> caller: i just think that people should be judged by their abilities. it's just that if someone takes a position -- someone is a beneficiary of something and then turns around and says, hey i'm against it, it looks like it's contradictory or their vacillating. i expect someone who is a judge to have some consistent theories and concepts as to what the law is. >> host: thank you sir. professor? >> guest: well leo you've asked -- you're asking somebody who knows clarence, and i know him well from having gone to law school with him and at the time i actually got him his first job, he was interested in being a civil rights lawyer. he wanted to go back to georgia because that's where he grew up, and i got him his first job at a law firm in savannah georgia. he and i had gone to hear elaine jones, who at the time was a lawyer with the naacp legal defense fund. she was a fantastic speaker. i went up to her after the talk and i told her i wanted to work with her. she said when you get the money you can work with me. meaning i had to raise the money as a law student to -- but she didn't have the money. the organization had the money. but clarence and i went to this event together and after i had found a position at the naacp, legal defense fund for the summers with elaine jones issue also worked with clarence to get him a job working at an integrated law firm in savannah georgia, and he and i were actually going to write a law review article together after that summer because the reason at the time he wanted to work in georgia is that it was a lawsuit challenging the georgia bar about the way in which black applicants were being denied the opportunity to become lawyers. in other words, they would take the test and then they would fail the test and invariably they would fail the test because they were black not because they put down the wrong answers. at the time, for example, elaine jones, the person i ended up working with took me to a meeting involving the same kind of case in alabama, where she was interrogating one of the people who executed the bar exam and on the piece of paper she was using to question him, he had the names of the people who had taken the state bar exam in alabama and then next to the names of some of the people who had taken the bar were the letters col period, and so she was questioning the gentleman who was in charge of all of this and she wanted to know why do they have the words col period next to the names of some of the people. turns out the people, of course were all black, but the answer that she got was well they may have been colonels in the army and that's why they had col period next to their names. i tell you all of that because at the time collapsar thomas and i were not only people who were at yale law school and clarence thomas intended to be a civil rights lawyer at least at that time and i agree with you that people should be judged by what they're saying and i cannot predict -- i cannot explain to you why justice thomas, who, as you say, benefited from affirmative action and certainly when he was at law school was also very concerned about integrating the number of lawyers in georgia which is where he wanted then to go back so i can't explain clarence thomas' school -- schooling but i can give you the facts. >> host: is he still a friend of yours? >> guest: he is very friendly with me, yes. >> host: are you friends with any of the other supreme court justices acquainted. >> guest: i'm acquainted, yes. to be friends of somebody who is on the supreme court is a little intimidating and it's also -- there's an awe about it and my son actually just is going to be -- he graduated from harvard law school and has gotten a clerkship on the supreme court. i'd rather not put him in a position where it's now all of these people start to call him, but i mean -- i think it's a great opportunity to be the clerk to any of the supreme court justices. i do think -- i do think that supreme court could use a little attention in terms of having a court with nine justices having a court that is a very powerful position but i'm just not convinced that our current system which made sense in the 18th century is necessarily making the same sense in the 21st century. >> host: that said what is one change you would make to the court? >> guest: i would probably put a ten-year period that you get on the court and you're there for ten years, maybe 12 years, but that you're not there for life. i think it's very important to bring in other people's perspectives and not feel like the country's rules and values are dependent on the same nine people over a very long period of time. i think there needs to be more refreshening. >> host: is clarence thomas treated fairly in your view in 1991 at his hearing and was robert bork treated fairly at his hearing in 1986? >> guest: i was not a paying attention to robert bork so i can't really say. in terms of -- and with that hearing, that is full of so many different beings and so many different views. i can't say whether he was treated fairly or unfairly. i do think that anita hill was treated unfairly. i do think that she had other people that she wanted to testify and that the senate decided they weren't going to bother to hear them. i -- there's several people including a gentleman named -- who is trying to rewrite how the supreme court might be redeveloped, that we shouldn't be relying on the same nine people over a period of time and i don't object to the idea of having a supreme court but i do think that it should be a court where there's more rotation, where more people have access or come in and -- so we're not locked into the views of a particular group of people who then get a chance to determine what is allowed for ten, 15, 20 years. on the other hand, having said that, there's some justices who in my view have been terrific. i think justice ginsburg is doing a great job, and she has been there a significant period of time. so i'm not the right person to be organizing the supreme court. >> host: well, did you get borked? >> guest: no, because i never got -- i never got to say anything. >> host: you got preborked. >> guest: that's it. i like that. preborked. >> host: sandra, another call from the bronx you're on booktv. >> guest: hi sandra. >> host: san dray d.a. >> caller: yes. >> host: please go ahead. we're listening. >> can you hear me? >> guest: i hear you. >> caller: can i. thank you so much professor. i just want to say it's an honor to have the opportunity to speak with you. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: and i've followed you from the time i was a teenager and learned a lot from you. currently i am a social justice advocate. i did study law through the urban legal studies program. i decided not to practice, and over the past couple of years a lot of people would come to me who knew i had a legal background, and ask me if i could help them with their eeoc cases because they couldn't afford attorneys. so i've been able to help quite a few individuals actually do the state agency the new york, and do eeoc. what i've been noticing over the past, i'd say, three years, is that i'm not sure what it is but something is going on with the eeoc where valid cases are being ignored, dragged out and in my estimation killed, and i've been able to, through writing letters to the department of justice, directly to eric holder, and directly to the president, really pushing for them to do some oversight so that these cases, these valid cases don't get dismissed. do you have any insight into this and any recommendation? >> host: we'll keep her on the line in case professor has a followup question. >> guest: first of all sandra i'm really interested in what you're doing. i think it's very honorable what you're trying to do in terms of helping other people who are not in a position to find somebody else who can give them guidance, but i frankly don't know anything about what is going on with eeoc right now so i can't answer your questions. but what i would urge you to do is to -- you said you have written and you have tried to reach out. my suggestion would be to think about writing something like an op-ed that could be published in a newspaper that might then be read by other people who could -- who would then contact you and give you perhaps better suggestions because they're more knowledgeable. i think you would benefit and just having the issues you're putting out today, put out more publicly with something written in "the new york times," in a magazine, on the web. i just think that you're in a position to try and get more people engaged in the issue that you're trying to raise. >> host: all right. we're getting a lot of these comments on facebook, so i thought i'd just let you address them. we'll get them out of the way. jane asked wasn't she paying tacks or social security onmer nanny. >> guest: she has me confused with another woman. >> host: have you heard this before? >> guest: , i haven't. i'm a grabbing woman, zoe is a white woman, we're not the same person. >> host: and she was nominated, the first nominee for bill clinton as attorney general, followed by kemba wood followed by janet reno. ... i also thought while she was attorney general back many of the a's that she did do were helpful, significant and should make her and her supporters feel proud that she played that role. >> sheila is calling in from new york city. go ahead sheila. >> hello dr. guinier. it's a pleasure to listen to your interview. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: there are things that really disturb an operation in one as an operation you want is for this education of african-american students. there are districts in new york city, primarily serving african-american students who consistently fail to educate. consequently, we are continuing to destroy another destroy generation and are destroying another generation of african-american students. what are your thoughts about vouchers? a lot of the critics believe that vouchers would enable segregated schools segregated schools. but i. but sco, new york city is one of -- has went up in the segregated school systems in the country. >> host: sheila what do you think about vouchers and charter schools in these newer concepts? >> caller: there are good charter schools of nursing very poor ones. i think a lot of the teachers that are appointed to lowood county schools are not very good teachers. i have had some tutors from some of the colleges in harlem, columbia nyu downtown who can't teach specific subjects. science,, better than most of the teachers in the public school system. what if you don't have the laces you cannot teach in the school system. for instance, louis armstrong couldn't teach music in the school system and on and on. everyone says education is the key. but i don't see the year chintzy about wreck define what is happening in the public school system. >> host: we are going to leave it there and get a response from harvard professor, lani guinier. >> guest: she let coming you raised so many different aspects of the education challenge. i am not sure which one to address or to emphasize. i think you make an excellent point that in the united states of america, we are not teaching. we are not taking advantage of our skill sets and there is a sense that people in affluent communities deserve to have excellent schools and people in poor communities are entitled to go to school but there's less concern about the excellence of the school. so your first comment that you're disturbed about the education of the african-american students, i agree with that. i think there is a failure to educate not because people are unable to educate, but because we haven't as a society really invested our attention and our knowledge and identify the opportunities that are available for more people to be teachers. i think we could use a lot more teachers because you have classes sometimes that are 30, 40 p. o. and that there should be more emphasize on having students go to the library. having opportunities to use the library as a place of learning and i think it is also important for our country to understand that a better educated citizenship, not just one's own children, but the children in the community of the event for the children in the country you live that we will all benefit if there is a better sense for a better commitment, a stronger commitment to the education of all students. you go to other countries. or to finland and the children they are scores so much better in some of these tests than in the united states. and it is cold and finland but they manage to ensure that all of the children get a good education. what i think it's a big problem in the united states is we basically have decided that the people who can afford to pay a lot more for education are the people who deserve to run the country and ultimately i think that family to lots of problems that are complicating the lives of many people. that is mass incarceration. you have people who are trying to make a living selling illegal drugs. there are all kinds -- many things are happening that wouldn't happen if we were to just invest more time, more energy and more money in the education of all of our children, not just those who are the children of middle and upper-middle-class families. >> host: we have a little less than an hour and a half to go in our conversation with lani guinier this afternoon. the tyranny of the majority, came on a night to 94. her co-authors for that book. lift every voice 1998. "who's qualified" 2001 susan stern she mentioned earlier from the university of pennsylvania. -- who is now a cornell. and "the tyranny of the majority" is her most recent looked just out in march of 2015. what are they reading, some of their favorite books. here is a look at with lani guinier told us. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ five ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> host: lani guinier, one of the books you listed was the case of dr. insincerity by felix frankfurter. didn't even know he had written a book on not case. just go i learned about paco vincente who i'm ♪ my father who for some reason they have learned about it when he went to law school. that is how i think i wrote a paper when i was there junior high school or high school because i sat down. i used to sit down with my dad at the dinner table and my sisters would go because it was boring, but my dad and i would have a conversation about some esoteric because it's been along time since their child. if i was looking for a topic for one of my classes, this was when i was in junior high school or high school and at one point he came on and said you should learn about paco vincente. >> host: so you showed untreated shows his book. >> guest: i didn't read his book so much as a chat during the hour just excerpts about the case. >> host: cheaper by the dozen. what is that? >> guest: that is really fun book by an author who was trying to get his family of 12 children to be very efficient in the way in which they use water for the way in which they did their chores. so it was all about his effort to be more efficient because he has so many children and he didn't have a big house in though she had to figure out ways -- i think he taught them how to take a shower that you go from the bottom up, not the top down. >> host: why did that book make your influential list. >> guest: because it made me think about efficiency and a few you know, that you're taking up too much water, doing some being that is not good for the larger society or for other people. you just focus on yourself. >> host: lani guinier is our guest will continue taking your phone calls. we'll put up our social media address as well. rick in st. paul, minnesota. you have been very patient. please go ahead with your question or comments for lani guinier. >> caller: i went to think your screener for taking my call. i have studied the works since only about concealment of me at six of revelation and concealment with the book of secrets that none her book lying, moral choice in public and private. i was just wondering if she would be able to tell me anything about this earlier balk and her husband, derek and i would like to hang up and listen. >> host: you talk about the former president of harvard? >> guest: >> caller: yes. >> host: thank you. >> guest: sorry he hung up because i don't know anything about cecelia bach. i was a student however at harvard and the college when derek lockwood is the president of harvard. i am not sure since he hung up what he wants to know about the president of harvard at that time. i can tell him there was a lot going on in terms of the vietnam war, in terms of having more attention paid to african american students in the study of african-americans. is also the same time that my father would apply to an attended harvard college for two years, he came back in the beginning -- 1969 1970 at the beginning of the african-american department -- african-american studies that meet another students have been mobilized to consider adding not to the syllabus. >> host: were you successful? just so yes yes. my father came. he was the head of the african-american program. >> host: when is your graduate? >> guest: 71. what did she get involved personally and double right clicks and in what fashion? >> guest: when you say above in some way is involved. my mom for example went to the 1963 event when martin luther king gave his amazing >> host: march on washington. >> guest: right. i think it is one of -- if you ask all of the students in the united states about the march on washington and martin luther king speech i think 90% or 95% of the students know about i have a tree and speech. that is like the most famous speech in the united states. anyway, that was when i was 13. my mom went and took my baby sister with her to that march and my father and i watched it on television. >> host: at at harvard did you participate at all? did you go south at all? >> guest: with the civil rights movement? >> host: yes ma'am. >> guest: yes, first of all when i was at harvard college i didn't go south then, but i did work for the various organizations that were interested in the issues affecting black people in general and black students in particular. but i ended up doing much more once i went to law school because then i had an agenda and realized i wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. so getting to know eland shown striving claire and to the pirate. we show from new haven to philadelphia. that was an important moment in my life because i got to work for her at the naacp. that was the beginning in some ways of my feeling that i had a contribution to make good >> host: april 6, 1968 you would've been at harvard. >> guest: this is when dr. king was assassinated. yeah, i remember that day. it was during our spring leaks. i was in new york and i've just come back either from the doctor. my mom and i had gone to bed not. we were still living in queens. that is where i grew up. we came home and my father was sitting in the living room and he said that there came have been assassinated. ibis terrible. >> host: kathy, marina california. >> caller: hi great talking to you. i like the idea that you are not for or you are for having different opinions than having everybody's opinion able to be voiced in this country. part of the problem is with the media and for other different reasons, you know, different voices and opinions are vilified or labeled as hate for that kind of thing. i think what we're think what we've been in need of the country and it seems like this is something you engage in your schoolgirl to have the ability to look at all sides of an issue and i'm not talking about being kind of gray. i hear people say you are too black and white. but gray is just kind of muddled and i'm not kind of wishy-washy. if you look at greg what makes a great, it is made out of black and white. so you can bear it through and see things and i think we need to much leisure time because it takes a lot of thought to get through things. again the next sample of something on facebook the other day. people are leaving california to go to texas. more opportunities than freedom so there was a translation chart. so california if you are a single mother raising kids by many different fathers, i can't remember how they put it on the chart you know, an unfortunate soul who needs money. in texas, it is a freeloader sponging off the system and the guns in california, you're an evil person in the guns need to be removed. texas getting dinner tonight and protecting myself from nature radical government are just a thief. and then it went on and on and on for every topic you can imagine. >> host: kathy, where are you going with this? >> caller: i wanted to mention to her i read that charred and i thought okay, sometimes there's people sponging off the system and are freeloaders. sometimes a woman -- a mother really is in need lost a job, husband died. you know sometimes a person having a gun is fanatical about it and kind of crazy. >> host: kathy, we are going to leave it there. do you know where she's going with this? >> guest: no. >> host: i'm sorry too. just so it is interesting she is sane people leave california to go to texas and i would like to understand more first about what evidence is there people are leaving california for texas and where are they going quite are they going to some other part of texas and whether they doing >> host: if you're watching on tv and you see professor guinier head down. you've taken pages of notes that every call that is coming. why? >> guest: i want to respond to what happens. you listen to it in a vacuum and you may respond but often not to the central point. >> host: is that lawyer training to take copious notes? >> guest: that is a good question. i am trying to remember if i took copious notes when i was in junior high school or high school or even college. i think i take copious notes through elementary school to be honest. i got in trouble actually in fourth-grade. i skipped third grade and i started fourth-grade who is the teacher and i skipped third grade so i didn't know how to write in cursive and i've tried to track disc but it takes a little while. so she was giving this test in one of the questions was on the age of nine she went to the next word so i went up to her afterwards and said some of us are just learning cursive and you think because he'll give us another test that you can go more slowly so we could write down all the letters because some of us don't write in cursive yet. she said okay i'll think about that. the next issue dated even faster. she and i did not have the greatest experience of my friends. on the other hand, i felt very brave in her classroom part in the middle of her class a number of students are added to the class and most of them were black. their presence in the back of the room because that's until then, most of the student in the class i'm in 90% of them were white. 85% were white and then there were a couple of asian-americans. but once there was this sense that there were other black students in the class, i would raise my hand all the time and ask questions like it is one thing to celebrate george washington and are proud of how thomas jefferson. they both owned slaves. do you think we should deal with that? she thought i was so out of touch. she was quite offended that george washington, thomas jefferson were here is another sneaky not hoaxing inappropriately. speaking out gave me a sense of confidence because i had a lot of the black students who had just come into the class. .. >> caller: thank you for your wonderful freshman program and you are a very able moderator. my question to your guest is i am an irish jew living here into the united states very happily and very fond of this country for what it has done. and i know we have had problems over the years and the history of this country but the interesting thing i find these days and it has been going on for some time and that is a trumendtrulot of anti sumetic behavior in the black community. other members of the black community from time to time come out with statements that are -- can be nothing else but anti semitic and considering the contribution the jewish community has made in this country in supporting the black community and the obtaining their rights. people died in the south where two jewish young men were killed. i would like to see what your guest has to say about this. >> guest: brian, i am sorry but i don't think i have had any experience that is similar to what you are describing. you are talking about anti- anti-semetics within the black community but i have not experienced that. do you have an example of what you are talking about? >> host: brian is gone. but as somebody who is jewish and african-american you have not had -- rare? i don't know how to ask the question. >> guest: the only time i have experienced any kind of concern about the relationship between blacks and jews was when i was five years old and the jews were saying that i needed to do my hair differently and i was looking too black. but i was only five years old. it didn't occur to me to do anything about it. it did make me feel like i didn't belong. >> host: lani i get it is. this goes back to socretes and how to unite people and come up with good judgment. do you agree? this is from robert. >> guest: robert would need to give me more information. i am not sure where to go with that -- what is there like five words in the sentence? he is not giving me enough background i am afraid. i am sorry, robert. >> guest: let's try jb in toledo. you are on live. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. first of all, i would like to start with the last question. i don't think socretease had much to do with what they say he implemented. he probably learned much of what they taught him to be the originator of. he killed himself allegedly and the greek society was not a part of this current mix they indicate was suaccurateic. but anyway withdrawing from the attorney general position where wonder why and how much? >> guest: that is easy. >> caller: two can you indicate what policies clinton enacted you might admire. three, if you campaign for president obama on any of his runnings and what policies did you admire? and i would on just in this there is a question. >> guest: the only one i have information on is the first one about bill clinton offering me money. he is the one who said if i needed money he would give it to me. that was his way of saying he liked and supported me. i didn't have any -- >> it was not an offer of money it was i would do this for her and that is something you write about. and you quote in "lift every voice". i would recommend picking up that book. >> guest: and the other question about policy and the obama comparison -- i don't have. >> host: no i think we asked what policy of president clinton's do you support. so think about that. and did you campaign for president obama at all? >> guest: yes. >> host: and what policies of president obama do you support? so if you could think of a policy with president clinton and president obama. >> guest: i have no views about president clinton and his policies. and with regard to obama yes i did campaign for him. and in terms of his policies i think the idea of trying to create a system of -- a system in which the people of the united states will be able to get well stay well and find doctors and nurses and others who can enable them, not only to get well but to stay well. i support all of that. in fact i would probably go even further to look at what some of the european countries do in terms of providing medical assistance to the citizens of their country. i think it is a really important intervention. and i wish that there was -- i would like to see more of the relationship between the amount of money that a very few people in the united states have and the absence of money that very many people in the united states have. and what i am speaking to who i say that is a study done in ohio where they had 6,000 people answer the question: if you saw a distribution of wealth in three different ways which one would you pick? one case everybody is getting everything exactly, you know, the same. the people who are rich -- they have a third of the money. people who are poor have a third and etc. it turns out that in this study of 6,000 participants that 90% of them preferred a swedish model than the existing model. that is they thought that too much money was being aggregated to too few people. they only saw it when they saw the three circles. not in the abstract. so i think it is hard to talk about people's plans when they are in the abstract. but if you could show people these examples and say look at the united states and the way we distribute money and compare that to sweden or compare that to other countries that is when people say well, maybe it accept as fair in the united states as it should be. and so i would like to see more comparison with what other countries are doing in terms of the distribution of wealth. and i would like to see people drawing pictures because i think that helps them to identify who has all of the wealth and is that fair in a democratic society to have 3% of the people or maybe 5% of the people having about 30% of the health in the united states and then you have 30% of the people who have very very little. so sometimes it is just more helpful to have visual images than to talk about it at this abstract level. >> host: darcel, you are on with author and professor lani guinier. >> caller: yes i am so excited to speak with you today. i am a fan. and during our mother's con frons frons fronsference and talks with jacky will of america a lot of the moms believe you were thrown under the bus with president clinton. just want to make a note of that. but i want to know your opinion of the current ag that is up eric holder's position. i am a fan and i am a member of delta sigma. what is your opinion? i believe once she is confirmed and this is my own brain trust but i believe she will be the first black supreme court justice. just a thought. i am wondering your opinion. and we love you much here. >> guest: i am delighted to make your acquaintance. if you would like to send me an e-mail with some of these questions i would be happy to answer them. in terms of the current nominee i have not been following that. my own experience in washington made be less willing about what is happening in washington because it is brutal and often something that is unpredictable. so i may not be doing my work as a good citizen in terms of worrying about if this or that person is getting -- is being treated appropriately -- because it brings too much of my own experience into my current thinking. and i tried to put that a side. my goal is not to intervene or interrupt what is going on in washington, d.c. i would rather to talk people outside of washington, d.c. about ways of changing the country but at a larger level. not just what is coming out of one small part -- one small physical part and one large set of power part of our country. >> host: is eric holder someone you know? >> guest: no i don't know him. >> host: you mentioned derrick bell as one of your influences. >> guest: derrick bell who is deceased now, but he is a black man who was the first black male i believe -- actually not necessarily the first, but one of the first, who was hired as a professor at harvard law school. he was a very important teacher for me. not a teacher in the sense i didn't know to harvard law school but a teacher in the sense i could call him up on the phone and talk to him and he would give me very good advice. so the example that is the most clear i would say is after i graduated from law school i went and clerked for a wonderful person who is still alive, he is in his 90's damon keith. i liked being in detroit so much. i was so surprised that i stayed for another year and worked as a referee in juvenile court in the wane county court. that was a really eyeopening experience. i was essentially the judge of other people's lives and didn't feel very comfortable being in that position when i had to rely on other people to give me the information that i would need to make a fair decision but the other people themselves were not necessarily open minded. so i learned a lot from that position. but after clerking for two years and being a referee in juvenile court and loving detroit i was offered this position at the justice department and within the civil rights division and accepted it. and so that is when i moved to washington, d.c. and it was an interesting job as assist want to the head of the civil rights division. but i got to law school and really wanted to do what i had seen montly and other brave people do and that is be a lawyer who takes on cases that involved going to the south and not being in a part of the country where i was necessarily welcomed in terms of the people in power play have not. among the black people in the south they were very happy to see me. i ended up -- and really really self affirming examples of working on a case with the governor of massachusetts. he and i litigated a case in selma, alabama. it was a wonderful experience. very challenging. this was a criminal case and jefferson boguard was the u.s. senator in the case and we were up against someone with a lot of power. so i guess my point is i just learned most of what i know working for the naacp league of defense and derrick bell is in many ways an important reason i did that because after working in the civil rights division i had these other options and he is the one who said you need to go out and litigate -- meet the people who are hurting. and it gives you not only a sense of confidence but a sense of value that this is important work. >> host: and in "lift every voice" lani guinier talks about selma, alabama and the historical context there. it is much broader than if you just seen the movie. there is a hundred more chapters that need to be added oo what the movie shows. is that a fair statement? >> guest: yes i enjoyed the movie but it was giving you the top of the cake; the frosting. they were trying to reach a broad audience and i think they succeeded in doing that but i would like to see something follow up that goes into greater depths and gets the people living in selma and that era to tell their story. >> host: including jay justment. >> guest: yes, he is a black lawyer in selma. he feels he has to identities. one one hand as a lawyers and litigator he has to get the judges on his side and the judges to trust him and believe when he makes an argument there is merit to that argument. on the other hand he identifies with the plaintiff who is challenging the status go. dale chesnut was one man with two personas. >> host: and manny from california is on the line. >> caller: hi, how are you doing? i want to thank c-span and lani. i live in havana cuba where i retired about three years ago. so i am getting a new view of america from down there. and i went to yale undergrad and university of law school. and i was a professor at places like tulane and sued lawyers for malpractice in california and even sued lawyers for obama and the fdic over the failed banks. i have been all around. and one of my complaints, i guess, is two things. a sort of lack of diversity in the legal profession including academia within the latino. and also at the federal government latinos are only about 8% of the federal employees. and most of them are candors. so at the level i was of being a lawyer i was the only loy lawyer. and i don't think harvard had a tenure tenured latino professor either. i wonder what your thoughts are about having latinos in the legal profession and specifically education. and the other thing i have since i live in havana and i have been a socialist all of my life i see there is not a socialist voice in the united states. there is a gallop poll in 2010 that said 37% of americans have a favorable view of socialism but at the politics bernie sanders is the only socialist. in the "the new york times" you don'ts see any socialist or latino columnist. and i don't know if harvard has a nom chomsky or not. >> host: what years were you at doj? >> caller: i was at the fdic. >> host: i am sorry. house education and workforce committee -- how many years were there? >> caller: december 2011 was my last day. 2011 and 2010. >> host: what are the mechanics of moving to havana? do you have to reannounce our american citizenship? what are the mechanics? >> caller: for 12 years have ab going back and forth and under obama i can go legally and i am married to a cuban woman. so i bought a house there. i bought a car. i am one of the 1% of cubans that have a car. it is a very different culture. but i was born there and left when i was eight and my heroes are vidal but i married a woman whose heroes are bush and the republican party. >> host: does she live with you in cuba? >> caller: yeah she is an american citizen so we go back and forth. i am in la jolla right now. i have four very american children in there. i have a book out there. it is called "cuba e-mails; my happy place" and the novel is "cuba, tricky women and humans" my new passion is trying to explain cuba to the rest of america. >> host: thank you sir. that was an interesting call. lani guinier? >> guest: i didn't get a sense there was a question other than are there more latinos -- >> host: he wanted your perspective on the issue of latinos. >> guest: i think he is correct. there is not a large percentage of faculty with a latino background. that is something people are working on to change. but it hasn't yet succeeded. >> host: is there a nom chumsky-like person at harvard law school? >> guest: i would say those people are tired now. they feel it isn't worth -- there is no much emphasis on educating a small group of people, most of whom come from families who some wealth. and there was a time when the faculty as well as the students were much more engaged in political activities. whereas now, for the last i would say ten years, it is much more quite. at the same time giving what happened in the last year with the police killings of a number of black males that the has been a renewed interest in issues of race and in issues not just of plaque or white but also of asian americans and clear ohio of latino americans. >> host: are there any conservatives at harvard law school? >> guest: of course. i will not out them but they will speak for themselves. it depends on what you mean conservative. i would say a good number of people are interested in raw economics which takes you into a different domain of law. and it is much more about the economics of it and less about the law. this e-mail from maurice. explain the significance of tyranny of the majority and this country is moving from white majority to white minority. are there things expected in the future for loosing the majority? >> guest: well i am not -- i got the facts but i am not clear on what the concern is. >> host: do you have a sense of what this person? tell us about the tyranny of the majority -- which is your first book. and secondally, as we move into more of a pluralistic society pre white population is less than 50% in this country, what are your thoughts. >> guest: well the thoughts are very consistent because what i am suggesting is whether than think about black and white or republican verses democrat. we need to expand our opinion of people's views, politics goals and having just a two-party system really limits that sense of connection based on commitment. in other words you are either this or that but what if you don't feel comfortable in either space. you don't have much choice. if you had a system that was more like germany, more like south africa more like countries where there are multiple parties, not just two parties either democrat or republican. then you have the opportunity to -- and i know an important opportunity to get more of the citizens involved in the electorate process and involved in focusing and watching and thinking about what congress is doing. if is only the democrats verses the republicans you have to make a choice that doesn't necessarily represent fully what your concerns are because it is arbitrarily just saying you can only have these two choices. where whereas there might be a couple things republicans are doing, a couple the democrats are doing, and a couple things neither are doing that you would like to do; where do you put yourself? there are groups of people who are either very much to the right, very much to the left, but they are very small and they have not necessarily been of influence. we have a two-party system and i don't think that is -- i don't think that is democracy at its best. i think it is democratic. but we could do better. >> host: do you ever find yourself feeling uncomfortable being in one of the two parties and presumably the democratic party? >> guest: i just feel it is inadequate. i feel like there is no choice. this is why the system we imposed on germany at the end of world war ii i think has a lot of value we should consider. we offered it to somebody else they are using it and that is going back to those who haven't been listening for three hours and that is in germany you get two votes. one for somebody who represents your district/your community and one for somebody who represents your ideas. and you get a diverse congress that way that can create different kinds of connections depending on what the issue is. people are not required to vote a particular way because they are only two parties. it is just much -- it is much more engaging and as a result i think if we did something like that in the united states we would have higher levels of participation. that is another thing we don't admit that we should. we have at the most 65% of the population voting at most. in other countries it is 80%. you go to australia and you are required to vote. if you don't vote you are punished. here in the united states somehow, we want to make it difficult for some people to vote or it is not necessarily that we want to make it difficult it is we are comfortable making it difficult for people who don't have access to to a car truck, or van. people that don't have time to talk off work to engage in political activity. and we blame the people instead of the electorate system. i am thinking of a case i litigated with tim carland who is a professor at stanford in arkansas in which we were challenging on behalf of some of the people in arkansas the decision that you had to have a -- you had to get at least 51 percent of the vote even if you got let's say there were three people and you got more of the vote. you had to get more than 50%. 50% plus one. and what that meant in this part of arkansas is that for many of the worker class and poor people whether white or black, they didn't feel enough incentive to participate and it was too expensive because they had to have access to car truck, or van because of where the voting places were. so to me that is -- it is not -- we tend to put the burden on the individual and say well they could vote, but the fact they didn't walk 13 miles to get to vote is there problem. oor we could say our goal is to get as many people as possible participating in the political process because number one it will influence the outcome of the process in a way that is more fair and number two it is a way of inviting everyone to reconsider our initial commitment and begin to think, well, i may not agree with my "direct opponents" but there is some measure of the future of the potential if i consider what this third person or fourth person is saying. we are not locked into democratic or republican. there is more diverse and i think as a result it is better. >> host: next call is from kenth in york, pennsylvania. hi kenneth. kenneth we are going to put you on hold. got to turn down the volume on your tv. craig in tulsa, oklahoma. >> caller: first, it is an honor to speak to you. seeking a better society is a lotable goal. i wanted to raise the question have you ever considered educational philosophy? what i mean by that is this: since the publishing of the aquerren conspiracy there has been two educational philosophys used in america. one is damaging, not only to minorities but to all communities. if we don't have our children what do we have? i did a study of oklahoma schools and what i found was one educational philosophy puts out productive citizens and the other puts out on large amount of youthful offenders. instead of graduating it is a given they will get the orange jump suit. what i found was this: the two flawsphilosophy philosophy are based in measures one they need discipline all the way up to corporal punishment and the other is children are born pristine and will always do what is right and they just need a counselor and they will do it. but that fails because the bullies get counseled and go back out and bully. that turns into the bully kids getting into gangs. it feeds gangs because they have to protect themselves because the adults won't. and then that leads to columbine which is kind of what made me wonder about all of this. my question would be have you entertained educational philosophy? i found the biblical philosophy of child raising works and has worked since the founding. the new philosophy of plato came in and it is destructive. >> host: all right. hang on just a second craig. there was a lot there. and professor, lani guinier, it is your turn. >> guest: i want to thank him. i don't think he was asking a question i think he was making a statement. >> host: anything you want to agree with agree with? disagree? >> guest: i agree with i would say three quarters of what he said. there is a part we would have to talk at greater lengths. but i agree with him that there is a difference between building a society that has emphasis and commitment to developing productive citizens verses a society that abandons certain groups of people and you get youthful offenders who don't make a contribution to society through the ways in which our country works but instead end up costing the united states millions and billions because they spend most of their life in prison. >> host: in your book "becoming gentlemen" is that a tongue and cheek title? >> guest: it is a title based on my own experience and that is when i was at yale law school there were not many women -- maybe a fourth of the student body was women. and i was taking a course in corporations with a professor that came in every morning and said good morning gentlemen every morning. and there were seven women in the class and he said don't worry you two will become gentlemen. gentlemen of the bar. this was in a room that had larger than life portraits of men. so it never -- where didn't focus on it -- i -- when i was in law school. but ten years later i was asked to come and speak at an event at yale law school in support of the, i think, it was the 40th year of the brown versus board of education decision. i was on a panel. and all of a sudden i felt as if i couldn't talk and i wasn't sure why. but i gave my little talk very quickly. and then i looked and there were those same portraits of these gentlemen that i had experienced when i was in that same room taking corporations. and that is when i realized that being in an environment in which you don't feel that you belong makes it very difficult to concentrate and difficult to feel competent and feel as if i can do this. so since this professor said good morning gentlemen every day and then being in that same room ten years later i realized it had lasting affect. so that is the reason that i addressed or challenged this notion that our goal as educators is make men and women "gentlemen". >> host: lani guinier recent book is out and we are discussing it. richard in denver go ahead with a question or comment for lani guinier. >> caller: earlier caller brian about 15-20 minutes ago, wanted to review the followers of those brands wright and sharpton and the caller noted the aid given by jewish young men and others. your guest responded to her own experience. and didn't address the question. >> host: tell you what instead of that, why don't you put it into question form and make it your question. what would you like her to respond to? >> caller: i am just saying you neglected having the guest respond to the question. so i am bringing this up to you. >> host: i understand. i appreciate that. is there anything you would like the professor to respond? >> host: tell us what brian said in your own words. >> caller: i just told you he was -- you forgot already? >> host: there is a lot of words going on. >> caller: i just reviewed -- >> host: i am not sure where he was going. i apologize to you professor if i didn't follow as closely. i am not a law school prospect. anthony is in mount sinai, new york. what is your comment or question? >> caller: thank you for spending the afternoon with us and this opportunity to ask you a question. and to the moderator i thank you for your patients and apologize for the last caller because i don't think he realizes the degree you go to. it is not easy your job and i know you are doing the best and i greatly appreciate that. i have two questions. one is what can we do the state of democracy seems to be in decline. there seems to be no safeguards and i will use the co-presidency of bush and cheney. they came to power and their biggest funder was a group called enron. that was where a lot of their munoney came to rise to power and they came in with the degree of baggage as well as bad motives and they led the largest industrial complex into a war against a nation that complied with 12 years of sanctions. and two other my other question -- >> host: are you there? >> caller: another call is coming in on my phone. >> host: it is you. we are all listening. >> caller: okay. great. bush and cheney started a war basically -- i felt like they came into the the presidency with a conflict of interest. haliburton does business before the government and he had a vested interest in starting a war he has profited from. my last question obama's first signing statement as president of the united states was to let go or should i say grand immunity to the telecom industry for spying on the american people for a great number of years. there was at&t executive named cline who was on c-span and part of the class action lawsuit. president obama is a constitutional law scholar. how could he grant immunity for what was basically defying the constitution and stopping that court case from going forward? >> host: anthony, hang on. let's see if the professor has anything for you. >> guest: it is interesting, anthony, what you said at the beginning i completely agree with. and that is we are in a state of democacy in decline as oppose today a state of democracy that is budding and blooming in ways that encourage more people to participate. but once you got beyond that you lost me. i apologize. i don't know anything about the idea of george bush and cheney coming into power through the war. you are moving into an area where i frankly don't have expertise. >> host: do you consider yourself to be political? are you involved in politics? >> guest: i am not running for office. i can assure you that. >> host: do you write position papers? >> guest: you mean for candidates? no. because i am critical of our democratic -- our understanding of a democratic mission. i certainly vote and i am happy to engage in a conversation about why i would vote for x versus y but i am very disappointed with the american system of voting where for example you have these new rules with the supreme court is interpreting cases from around the country particularly in the south but not only in the south in which we are discouraging people from voting and then claiming that those people who are the problem, as opposed to rethinking or even conceptulizing systems that might engage more people in the voting process. and i would be very excited for a system that got 80-90 percent of the people to vote and to feel like they are engaged in a democracy society. >> host: what do you think about the voter id laws? >> guest: in a democracy, the burden, in my opinion, should be on the state to make it easy for the people in the country to participate in the election. i feel we as a society should be committed to encouraging people to vote rather than discouraging them. >> host: thomas is calling from columbus, ohio. >> caller: thank you for having me. it as a present and honor to talk to ms. lani guinier. my hobby has been reading for 47 years and i am 60. james baldwin said not everything that is faced can be changed. but nothing can be changed until it is faced. and i am a alcoholic. when i really face my alcoholism where was able to get sober. i have been sober since 1986. and every day i let myself know that i am an alcoholic. i faced it. and what i want to say to make my comments shorter is it was written in the united independent context a text book for thought, speech and accent for victims of racism and white supremacy and he said in the book do you understand the concept and the dynamic of racism in this country? everything else will only confuse you. and i am a firm believer of that. what i want to ask her is shouldn't we put the names racism on the actions and the laws that they are passing and make it daily part of the speech because it does affect every area of our life and our ancestor's life. >> guest: first thing is congratulations. he has been sober since 1986 and that is hard to do and i am proud of him for that. i'll also like his idea of naming what is happening more honestly. but i could not give you a sense of how that would be done or how it would affect people. i think his goals were very understanding. >> host: let me put my spin on a state he made and get your reaction. which is everything in this country is about race it always has been and always will be. i am overstating it and making it way too obvious but -- >> guest: yeah, i didn't hear that. he was saying the dynamic of racism and i think what he intended, but of course i would have to talk to him and get to know him better before i could speak on his behalf but i think he was saying that as a 60-year-old alcoholic who has been sober since 1986 that he has been in a position to observe the way in which he as black man and other people have faced challenges throughout their lives and haven't really been respected for taking advantage of the help that was given to them and working together to overcome some of the challenges. for him he has been sober since 1986 and that is an accomplishment for somebody who is an alcoholic. so he is successful at that. but i think he feels unsuccessful having been sober and living until at least his '60s and he still feels, i think that -- it is time for people and society to engage people like him with other people in conversation so it isn't just bleeping him. it is trying to identify what in this particular community or what in terms of your children or what in terms of your gran children would you want to change or do you think should be changed in order to encourage more people to be participating in the afffirming way rather than a judgmental way. >> host: if somebody picks up your newest book are they going to learn whether or not you think $60,000 a year harvard education is worth it? >> guest: you mean if they read that book? >> host: yup. >> guest: i don't think they will get any decision on if they should go to harvard or have the money. i would say a large percentage of students at the family come from family where $60,000 a year for each of one's children is not that difficult. that is a large percentage of the students are -- parents are alums or people whose parents have a -- have enough money to subsidize their children. on the other hand and i don't happen the data and i don't want to mislead anybody, but there are students at harvard, i had some come and take law school classes. i had one brilliant student who came and became a research assistant for me. and my sense is that -- and they didn't have any money and harvard was happy to make it possible for them to enroll. i do think that as a society it is not about fixing harvard or fixing yale or fixing stanford it is about fixing higher education generally so we are more like canada where if you have a high school record of i think about 80% of your classes you did well that you are entitled to go to college. and for me that is -- it is partly generated by the commitment to the importance of democracy and of engaging people in a democracy that is being ignored. what i am trying to say is a lot of the people who go to places like harvard or yale or stanford come in with desire to make a contribution to the larger society. and they graduate with a different commitment which is to make a lot of money. so the democratic mission of higher education gets lost. that is the part that worries me. it worries me in part because focused on competitive individualism rather than on collaboratives and working together and problem solvings where you bring people of different strengths together and they learn how to use those strengths in a way -- not to dominate others but collaborate with them. >> host: don't worry about it. we are almost out of time. lani guinier, if somebody were to pick up one of your books, tell them which one to pick up. >> host: the newest one! >> guest: the newest one. >> host: why is that? >> guest: it is my newest book and i would appreciate feedback on do you agree with what i am doing or suggesting, have you had a similar set of experiences, are there better ways of educating our young people? so i am very interested in an ongoing conversation about higher education. >> host: there are quite of few courses now offered free online. >> guest: see, that is not what i have in mind when i am talking about higher education. what i am thinking is this is an experience where you have a chance to work with others and solve problems. it prepares you for challenges in the world and the colleges you are attending. i think it is really important to engage people in decision making that is going to affect their lives and the lives of their children. but it is important they can engage in that collaboratively meaning you are bringing together people with different expertise and strength and you are challenging them and benefiting from their differences not trying to remake them so they are all of the same. >> host: e-mail. chester baity, class of '74 at buckingham brown and nickels -- does that ring a bell? >> guest: i have a sister who went there but i did not. >> host: what is buckingham brown? >> guest: k-12. >> host: double question. i wish to hear your thoughts on proportional representation voting that i believe happens in cambridge municipal elections. and on the school i went there with your sister and where she is now and how is she doing? if you don't want to address personal questions that is up to you. but proportional voting. >> guest: proportional representation voting -- there are lots of different approaches. the key point and i think a better example than cambridge is what i have seen in the south. and that is everybody in the community and the county gets a concern number of votes. like four votes. and this is also in other communities as well. and you can use those four votes in any combination you want. you can put all four on one. pick four different people and give one vote. two votes to one person and two votes to another. it is a way of ensuring the people in the community are making the decision as to who is elected rather than the people in a position of great power determining who should be elected and choosing who should be the candidate. so the idea of proportional representation is similar to what i mentioned earlier in terms of germany where everybody gets two votes. one voting for the party and the other vote for the individual who is representing their particular community. but that is not the only system of proportional representation. there are many alternatives we could kr. and the only reason i am going on at length about this is we are currently using a system of voting that was brought to your attention in the 18th century. we are in the 21st century. ...

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