Word: guiniers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After the thrashing she took on editorial pages last year as a multicultural extremist and a "quota queen," it seems that Lani Guinier '71 is coming back with a vengeance. In addition to her long-held tenured professorship at Penn law school, she's been hot on the lecture circuit, she's published her first book and her ideas are now given serious consideration as potential solutions to current voting rights problems. "Call it Lani Guinier's Revenge," says The New York Times. What's more, she's been invited to speak at Harvard as this year's Class...
...first impression of Guinier completely wrong? Guinier and her supporters certainly say so. Quotes were taken out of context, her ideas were hacked into soundbites, and everything was made twenty times worse by the media frenzy. Well, this only begs the real question, what should we make of Lani Guinier...
Judging from her recent writings and speeches, I think that Guinier is a provocative yet sensible reformer who is basically on the right track. Her ideas hold out some startlingly refreshing implications, some of which are actually bad news for the multicultural radicals that she was first identified with...
...Guinier's ideas for reform are cogent and persuasive. The centerpiece of her thought is cumulative voting, which is a system of proportional representation. There is a strong case for this alternative over our familiar winner-take-all system. As independent empirical studies have shown, proportional representation tends to produce more representative legislative bodies, minimize wasted votes, bring an end to gerrymandering, discourage negative campaigning, encourage issue-oriented campaigns and produce higher voter turnout rates. And this system is already common in Europe...
...this is what Guinier wants implemented, why all the fuss? Because Guinier has chosen to apply her ideas to the sensitive problem of race. Guinier promotes cumulative voting as an alternative to racial gerrymandering in areas where racial-bloc voting (usually by whites) produces majority tyranny (usually over blacks). If Guinier had argued for cumulative voting as a better voting system as a way of improving the political representation of women, or even as a way of giving oppressed members of the gun-enthusiast and smoking minorities a greater political voice, Guinier would probably have been spared the degree...