The Future of Affirmative Action with Richard Kahlenberg, Jason Riley, Nicholas Lemann, and Justin Driver

Join this distinguished panel of authors, scholars, and journalists including Richard Kahlenberg, Jason Riley, Nicholas Lemann, and Justin Driver as they discuss three possible futures for affirmative action in college admissions: trying to preserve as much racial affirmative action as is legally possible, as Driver suggests; eliminating affirmative action altogether, as Riley suggests; or forging a middle path which provides a leg up to low-income and working-class students of all races, as Kahlenberg argues.

This event will take place in person at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on the 7th Floor.

For decades America’s colleges and universities have been working to increase racial diversity. But they have been using the wrong approach, Richard Kahlenberg persuasively shows in his highly personal and deeply researched book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges. Kahlenberg makes the definitive case that class disadvantage, rather than race, should be the determining factor for how a broader array of people “get in.”

While elite universities claim to be on the side of social justice, the dirty secret of higher education is that the perennial focus on racial diversity has provided cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy and shuts out talented working-class students. By fixing the class bias in college admissions we can begin to rectify America’s skyrocketing economic inequality and class antagonism, giving more people a better place at the table as they move through life and more opportunity to “swim in the river of power.”

Kahlenberg has long worked with prominent civil rights leaders on housing and school integration. But his recognition of class inequality in American higher education led to his making a controversial decision to go over to the “other side” and provide research and testimony in cases that helped lead to the controversial Supreme Court decision of 2023 that ended racial preferences. That conservative ruling could, Kahlenberg shows, paradoxically have a progressive policy outcome by cutting a new path for economic and racial diversity alike – and greater fairness.

* * *

Justin Driver offers a second perspective in his book, The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education. For decades, affirmative action reshaped not just American higher education but the broader society, opening doors that had been closed for centuries and transforming who entered the pathways to power. But the Supreme Court in 2023 killed affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a decision hailed by the right as a triumph of conservative colorblindness and decried by the left as requiring the end of racial equity. Both sides, Yale Law School professor Justin Driver contends, are wrong.

Perversely, even when viewed through a conservative lens, the Court’s decision ushers in a less desirable admissions regime. The post-SFFA model places a new premium on students of color voicing their racial trauma in elaborate application essays, entrenching the very racial victimization and essentialism that conservatives purport to loathe. The Trump Administration’s assault on higher education has been fueled by distorted readings of SFFA, further clouding the opinion’s already opaque meaning. But SFFA, properly understood, leaves universities significant legal room to combat Trump’s anti-D.E.I. onslaught by adopting innovative policies that foster diversity—including preferences for descendants of slavery, members of tribes, and applicants from blighted communities.

Far from a mere eulogy, The Fall of Affirmative Action provides a blueprint for the future—a rallying cry for citizens to forge new paths to inclusion and push back against the notion that racial equity is doomed. The death of affirmative action, Driver insists, need not mean the death of opportunity.

* * *

Jason Riley offers yet another view in The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don't Need Racial Preferences to Succeed. After the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the use of race in college admissions was unconstitutional, many predicted that the black middle class was doomed. One byproduct of a half century of affirmative action is that it has given people the impression that blacks can’t advance without special treatment. In his book, Jason L. Riley details the neglected history of black achievement without government intervention. Using empirical data, Riley shows how black families lifted themselves out of poverty prior to the racial preference policies of the 1960s and 1970s.

Black incomes, homeownership, and educational attainment were all on the rise in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and began to stagnate only after affirmative action became the law of the land, tainting black achievement with suspicions of unfair advantage. Countering thinkers who blame white supremacy and systemic racism for today’s racial gaps, Riley offers a more optimistic story of black success without racial favoritism.

Distinguished journalist Nicholas Lemann will moderate the discussion.

To join the event in person | Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Richard D. Kahlenberg is Director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and teaches at George Washington University. He has been called “arguably the nation’s chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions” and “the intellectual father of the economic integration movement” in K-12 education. He is the author or editor of 19 books, including Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America's Colleges (PublicAffairs Books, 2025); Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See (PublicAffairs Books, 2023); Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2007); and Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School (Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992). Kahlenberg’s articles have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, the New Republic, and elsewhere. He has appeared on ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, PBS, and NPR. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where he has written about politics, economics, education, immigration and social inequality for more than 25 years. He’s also a frequent public speaker and provides commentary for television and radio news outlets. Riley is the author of six books. In 2008 he published Let Them In, which argues for more legal immigration. His second book, Please Stop Helping Us, is about government efforts to help the black underclass and was published in 2014. In 2017 he published False Black Power?, an assessment of why black political success has not translated into more economic advancement. In 2021 he published Maverick, a biography of the iconic economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell, and narrated the documentary film, Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World. In 2022 he published The Black Boom, an analysis of black economic progress prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. His most recent book, The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed, was published in 2025. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Riley earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has also worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. He lives in suburban New York City.

Nicholas Lemann was born and raised in New Orleans. He began his journalism career there as a 17-year-old staff writer for an alternate weekly paper called the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated from Harvard College, where he was president of The Harvard Crimson, in 1976, magna cum laude in American History and Literature. He has worked as a reporter and editor at The Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, The Washington Post, The Atlantic (where he was national correspondent from 1983 to 1999) and The New Yorker (where he has been a staff writer for twenty-five years), and contributed to many other publications. From 2003 to 2013 he was dean of Columbia Journalism School, leading a period of significant growth and change for the school, and since then he has been a professor there. At Columbia he has also helped launch Columbia Global Reports, a publishing venture that he continues to lead, Columbia World Projects, and the Knight Columbia First Amendment Institute. He is currently one of three co-chairs of the university’s antisemitism task force. His books include The Promised Land (1991), The Big Test (1999), Redemption (2006), Transaction Man (2019), and, most recently, Higher Admissions (2024). He is a member of several honorary societies, including the American Philosophical Society, the New York Institute for the Humanities, the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he serves as co-chair of the academy’s Commission on Reimagining Our Economy.

Justin Driver is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the field of constitutional law and is the author of The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education (forthcoming, September 2025). An elected member of the American Law Institute and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, President Biden appointed Driver to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. A recipient of the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, Driver has a distinguished publication record in the nation’s leading law reviews. He has also written extensively for general audiences, including pieces in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. His first book — The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind — was selected as a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year and an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times Book Review. The Schoolhouse Gate also received the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law and was a finalist for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award. Before joining the Yale faculty, Driver taught at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, and the Westville Correctional Facility of Indiana. He is a graduate of Brown, Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), Duke (where he received certification to teach public school), and Harvard Law School (where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review). After graduating from Harvard, Driver served as a law clerk at U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Books by our Speakers

• Borrow: NYPL Catalog


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• This event will also include signing and sales of the book by our Library Shop.

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ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

In-Person

• Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

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The 7 Stories Up Series at SNFL is made possible by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).