The Tanner Lectures with James Forman Jr.: Lecture Two

This is the second of two Tanner Lectures. For information on the first Tanner Lecture, click .

Decisions by the United States Supreme Court and the Trump administration have compelled universities to revise their admissions policies. These lectures ask whether higher education can still function as an engine of social mobility in today’s political and legal climate—and, if so, what kinds of admissions policies might help fulfill that promise.

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

James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law. He attended public schools in Detroit and New York City before graduating from the Atlanta Public Schools. After attending Brown University and Yale Law School, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.

During his time as a public defender, Professor Forman became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. In 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had been arrested. In the decades since its founding, Maya Angelou School has expanded to run multiple schools inside D.C.’s youth and adult prisons—its success was chronicled in the 2023 short documentary film “Welcome to School.” The Maya Angelou leadership team dreams of a world in which no person is behind bars; in the meantime, they believe that everyone — including those incarcerated — deserve a high-quality education.

Professor Forman’s scholarship focuses on schools, police, and prisons. He is particularly interested in the race and class dimensions of those institutions. Professor Forman’s first book, , was on many top 10 lists, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017, and was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His second book, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, was published in 2024 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Co-edited by Forman, Premal Dharia and Mario Hawilo, the anthology focuses on how to undo the damage and depredations of the carceral state.

Alexandra Natapoff is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is an award-winning legal scholar and criminal justice expert. She writes about criminal courts, public defense, plea bargaining, wrongful convictions, and race and inequality in the criminal system. Her book Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books) reveals the powerful influence that misdemeanors exert over the U.S. criminal system. Her book Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (NYU Press), won the ABA Silver Gavel Award Honorable Mention for Books: her original work on criminal informants has made her an international expert.

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