President’s lecture features Lani Guinier

President’s lecture features Lani Guinier
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Harvard law professor
Lani Guinier will present Rice University’s annual
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture Jan. 22 as part
of the 2002-03 President’s Lecture Series. The lecture,
titled “The Miner’s Canary,” is free and
open to the public and will be held at 8 p.m. in the Grand
Hall of Rice Memorial Center.

In 1998, Guinier
became the first black woman to be appointed to a tenured
professorship at Harvard Law School. During the 1980s, she
was head of the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund and served in the U.S. Department of Justice
Civil Rights Division during the Carter administration as
special assistant to then assistant attorney general Drew
S. Days.

While a member
of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School,
Guinier investigated the experiences of women in law school,
leading to the publication of a book she co-authored, “Becoming
Gentlemen: Women, Law School and Institutional Change.”
Guinier and her co-authors discovered that women were not
graduating with top honors, although women and men came
to the school with virtually identical credentials. The
author of many articles and op-ed pieces on democratic theory,
political representation, educational equity and issues
of race and gender, Guinier has argued that colleges should
practice “confirmative action,” meaning that all
students should be evaluated and educated to confirm the
democratic mission of higher learning.

A graduate of
Radcliffe College of Harvard University and Yale Law School,
Guinier has received numerous awards, including the Champion
of Democracy Award from the National Women’s Political
Caucus and the Rosa Parks Award from the American Association
for Affirmative Action.

Sponsored by
the Office of the President, the President’s Lecture
Series is open to the public as well as the Rice community.
The series is a distinguished element of Rice’s academic
community and presents speakers who foster understanding
in a variety of topics in science, the humanities, social
science, architecture, music and public policy.

No tickets will
be needed for admission to the lecture. Seating will begin
at 7 p.m. For more information call (713) 348-5585, e-mail
<ricepls@rice.edu>
or visit the Web at <www.rice.edu/pls>.