I heard Lani Guinier's Thomas Lecture at YLS Friday afternoon. She's a delightful speaker: clear, articulate, passionate. (I overlapped with her for two years but didn't know her.) Her subject was higher education admissions decisions, and her view is completely statist (she would say 'public'). Her talk apparently is drawn from an article she is publishing in the HLR. She took the 'mission statements' off the websites of several prominent universities and law schools and read excerpts, which were high-flown, humorous and intended to support her view that universities, whehter public or private, have a public (or statist) function. Ironically, the YLS mission statement (of which she read part) doesn't support her view -- she said the YLS statement is "coy." (Our statement turns out to be flat and common-sense.) She focuses on a statistic (I may have the numbers wrong) that three-quarters of the students at the selective US universities are from the top one-quarter of the households by income, but she ignores social & economic mobility. Still, she's interesting and provocative.
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