The Last Negroes at Harvard

Richard Kahlenberg  is a Professorial Lecturer of Public Policy and Administration at George Washington University. In 1997 he wrote the book titled The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (Basic Books, May 16, 1997) On March 29, 2023 the  New York Times published an  article about Richard Kahlenberg titled The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action.

Ashoka Mody is an Indian-born economist and a visiting professor in international economic policy and lecturer in public and international affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.  Mody contends that successive post-independence leaders, starting with its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, failed to confront India's true economic problems, seeking easy solutions in...

Cesi Davidson is a playwright and therapeutic speech specialist. She is curator of Short Plays to Nourish the Mind & Soul

Dr. Shelley Viola Murphy is an educator, author and professional genealogist. She is a  Descendant Project Researcher at University of Virginia Charlottesville. One of her current projects is to find the descendants of the enslaved laborers who built the University of Virginia. 

Jonathan Eig is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including Ali: A Life, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season.  His latest book is King: A Life  This is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files.  

 Howard French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for the Caribbean and Central America, West and Central Africa, Tokyo, and Shanghai.  His book re-frames the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment idea...

Eddie Cole  is Associate Professor of Higher Education and History at UCLA, and author of the award-winning book, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom . Some of America’s most pressing civil rights issues―desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech―have been closely intertwined with higher education...

Tommie Shelby  is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University.  His newest book is titled The Idea of Prison Abolition  

Bruce Fein… is a lawyer who specializes in constitutional and international law. He was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and research director for Republicans on the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran. On February 10, 2023, he wrote an article for Consortium News titled The Calamity of America's "Divine Mission" In 2010, he wrote a book titled Americ...

Korey Garibaldi is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His courses focus on histories of citizenship, imperialism, cultural and economic thought, and the African diaspora.

Judith Herman is   a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program at Cambridge Hospital. Herman has spent the majority of her career addressing issues arising from posttraumatic stress and in particular, incest .  She talks about her new book.

Tamara Nopper is a sociologist, writer, and editor. She is the editor of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice … a book of Mariame Kaba’s writings and interviews 

Joanna Schwartz  is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure and a variety of courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. She is one of the country's leading experts on police misconduct litigation. She has written a new book titled Shielded: How the Police Become Untouchable (Viking, February 14, 2023)

Gerald Goodwin is an adjunct professor of history at Le Moyne College and adjunct professor of political science at Onondaga Community College–SUNY. When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environment of the home front. War is often viewed as a cruc...

Brett Forrest is a national-security reporter for The Wall Street Journal , where his investigative work often focuses on the former Soviet Union. He has covered the war in Ukraine and was the first reporter into the Kiev suburb of Bucha following Russia’s military withdrawal… where he broke news of alleged atrocities. Brett has two new books:  The Big Fix: The Hunt For the Match-Fixers Bringing D...

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. Her book illustrates how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. Black people's relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcity—as well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialo...

Matthew Delmont is a Professor of History at Dartmouth. He is also in the Harvard College Class of 2000 (Lowell House). His new book is filled with compelling narratives that outline with nuance, rigor, and complexity how Black Americans fought for this country abroad while simultaneously fighting for their rights here in the​ United States.

Tim Spofford tells the story of the towering intellectual and emotional partnership between two Black scholars who highlighted the psychological effects of racial segregation. The Clarks' story is one of courage, love, and an unfailing belief that Black children deserved better than what society was prepared to give them, and their unrelenting activism played a critical role in the landmark Brown...

Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His new book (with co-author Lee C. Bollinger) is a timely defense of affirmative action policies that offers a more nuanced understanding of how centuries of invidious racism, discrimination, and segregation in the United States led to and justifies such policies from both a moral and constitutio...

Clara E. Mattei is an Assistant Professor at the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research (NYC). Her new book explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives. Those motives are the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.

Arleen Tuchman is a Professor of History at Vanderbilt University specializing in the cultural history of medicine. Her book traces the radical shift over the course of a century in beliefs about which populations were most likely to develop diabetes, from Jews in the early twentieth century to Native Americans, African Americans, and Hispanics today.

Julia Minson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is a decision scientist with research interests in conflict, negotiations and decision making. Her primary line of research involves the “psychology of disagreement” – How do people engage with opinions, judgments and decisions that are different from their own?

Victor Pickard, a Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, talks about his new book and the “news and information deserts” throughout the nation.

Macklin Smith and Aurko Joshi discovered their mutual love of rap music at the University of Michigan, where Macklin Smith taught a popular course in rap poetry… and Aurko Joshi was a student.

Our Harvard’63 classmate Adam Hochschild talks about his new book