A New Vision of Power

Law School Professor Lani Guinier to offer up a vision of power through a democratic lens in her Tanner Lectures

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Lani Guinier wants us to think about power, how it functions in society, and how it might function differently.

"Most of the time, when we think of someone as powerful, we think of them as having power over others," she said. "I want to push us to think about the notion of power with, of power as a generative force that doesn't necessarily require winning and losing, but involves people working together as collective actors in a common cause."

Guinier, who joined the Law School faculty as a full professor this past July, will discuss these ideas when she delivers the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at 5 p.m., Wedneday and Thursday, Nov. 4 and 5, in Sanders Theatre. The title of her presentation is "Rethinking Power." The lectures are free and open to the public.

Guinier said that the idea for the lecture series grows out of earlier work she has done on voting rights and affirmative action as well as her experiences teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Paramount among the ideas she plans to discuss are the tension between hierarchy and democracy and the extent to which that tension has gone unexamined.

"If we're really going to be democratic, if we really mean that the people are going to be in a position to participate and make decisions over matters that affect their lives, then I think it's very hard to drape that concept over a hierarchy in which a few people have all the power."

Redistricting is one important way in which power hierarchies are maintained under the American political system, Guinier believes. Incumbents are able to redefine voting districts so as to maximize the proportion of their own party members or sympathetic constituents, thus increasing the odds that future elections will keep them in office. In many cases, the incumbent's hold on the office is so strong that elections become a mere ritual, increasing voter cynicism.

"We hold an election that's supposed to be democratic, but, in fact, the real election has already taken place. Why are congressional turnouts so low? You have about a third of the people voting during congressional elections. I would argue it's in part because they understand that the game has been -- I don't want to say rigged -- but the outcome has already been determined in most cases."

Guinier is critical of efforts to solve the problem simply by "infiltrating the hierarchy in a cosmetic way," that is, by promoting women and minorities as office holders.

"I'm not saying that's completely useless," she said. "I'm just saying it doesn't get you as far as you think."

The downside of such an approach is that successful minority candidates end up manipulating districts in order to consolidate their power just as their predecessors did, she said. The result is that elections continue to be ritualized exercises that simply confirm the existing hierarchy and further dampen voter enthusiasm for participating in the democratic process, she added.

"I really worry that if we don't think harder about the meaning of democracy we will see a withdrawal or retreat from the idea of democracy itself. We have this scandal going on in Washington, and the American people are saying, we're not interested. We don't want to know any more about this. We want to see Washington engaged in solving real problems, but we have no confidence that they're capable of that, so we're going to turn off to politics."

Such a retreat could have disastrous consequences, Guinier believes, because politics is the only forum we have in which the democratic process can be played out. If we abandon politics, we may be abandoning any possibility of governing ourselves democratically.

Guinier does not plan to present specific remedies for these problems in her lectures, but she will offer examples of how the principle of power with has helped people to deal with issues in a creative, democratic fashion.

The citizenship schools set up by civil rights worker Septima Clark in Mississippi in the 1960s, for example, taught blacks the skills they needed to pass voting literacy tests. But the most powerful benefit of those schools, according to the testimony of many of their alumni, was not just the right to vote but the opportunity to meet with others and discuss the public policy issues that affected their lives.

Another example that Guinier plans to discuss is a groundbreaking experiment by math teacher Uri Treisman who helped black students in his classes to spectacularly improve their calculus grades simply by encouraging them to work together. Guinier believes that Treisman's notion of group-based problem solving has important implications in the classroom and beyond.

"I think power is a force, but I don't think it has to be a force for control. I would say power is the capacity to act. And if you can get someone else to act too, that's power, but it may be that you can work with other people and everyone can act to realize a collective mission."

Guinier will begin teaching at Harvard in the winter term with a course on Law and the Political Process. In the spring term she will teach a seminar called Public Lawyering.

In the future she hopes to teach a seminar on race and gender that she and colleague Susan Sturm introduced at the University of Pennsylvania, and which she plans to discuss in the Tanner Lectures as another example of "power with." The course was initiated by students who took an active and enthusiastic role in its development.

Out of that seminar emerged a philosophy of learning to which Guinier still subscribes, that "students who are motivated to solve a problem that they themselves have defined often become not only more active learners, but more passionate learners."

Guinier received the B.A. in 1971 from Radcliffe College and the J.D. in 1974 from Yale Law School. From 1977 to 1981, she was special assistant to the assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and was assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York City from 1981 to 1988. She joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty as associate professor in 1988 and received tenure in 1992. In 1993 she was nominated by President Clinton as U.S. attorney general.

She is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (1994), and Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (1998).

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a nonprofit corporation administered at the University of Utah. It is funded by an endowment and other gifts received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner.

At the request of a founding trustee of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, these lectures are dedicated to the memory of Clarence Irving Lewis '06, PhD '10, who served on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1920 to 1953.

Administered by the Office of the President and the Program in Ethics and the Professions, the series is designed to advance scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human values, embracing the entire range of moral, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual values, both individual and social.