Promoting Civil Discourse & Intellectual Dialogue Series – What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions

Promoting Civil Discourse & Intellectual Dialogue Series

What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions

Join us at Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College for a panel discussion and reception on anti-racism in leadership.

The conversation will feature What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions author Susan Sturm, CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodriguez, and Bruce Western, President of the Russell Sage Foundation, discussing how current leaders move beyond the paradoxes when leading complex organizations.

Professor Susan Sturm has written the sixth installment in CSS's Our Compelling Interests book series, What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions. In this volume, Susan explores how to navigate the contradictions built into our racialized history, relationships, and institutions. She offers strategies and stories for confronting racism within predominantly white institutions, describing how change agents can move beyond talk to build the architecture of full participation. Drawing on her decades of experience researching and working with institutions to help them become more equitable and inclusive, she identifies persistent paradoxes inherent in anti-racism work.

Panelists:

Susan Sturm is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility and the founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. Her work focuses on inequality, discrimination, remedying racial and gender bias, criminal justice reform, lawyer-leadership, and the role education can play in creating social change and a more inclusive world.

Sturm has written and spoken extensively about race, gender, legal education, and full participation in higher education and filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of the University of Texas in a case challenging its race-conscious admissions process. In 2017, she co-authored a report called Leading with Conviction, which examines how and why some people emerge from prison as community leaders. In 2015, she completed a study on diversity and inclusion among authors and editors of the Yale Law Journal, which provided insights relevant to the larger field of legal education.

At the Center for Institutional and Social Change, which she founded in 2007, Sturm leads collaborative action research projects with institutional and community leaders in the areas of education, criminal justice, and community development. She collaborates with a wide variety of higher education, government, and community-based organizations including the Massachusetts Trial Courts, the Center for Justice, the Aspen Ascend Network, Hostos Community College, and JustLeadershipUSA. She is the co-creator of Theaters of Change, a joint effort with the Center for Institutional and Social Change and the Broadway Advocacy Coalition to bring together individuals directly impacted by mass incarceration, high-level theater artists, and advocates and policymakers focused on humanizing and transforming the criminal legal system.

Bruce Western is a sociologist of poverty and inequality whose research examines the social and economic impact of criminal justice policy and incarceration. Much of this work studies the causes, scope, and consequences of the historic growth in U.S. prison populations. Western was the Principal Investigator of the Square One Project, which re-imagined the public policy response to violence under conditions of poverty and racial inequality. He is author of two prize-winning Russell Sage Foundation books, Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (2018) and Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), and is author, editor, or co-editor of nine books and monographs. He co-chaired expert panels for the National Research Council on COVID-19 in U.S. prisons (2020) and on reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system (2022-2023).

Western is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Philosophical Society. Before coming to RSF, Western was the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Columbia University (2018-2024), professor of sociology and the Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy at Harvard University (2007-2018), and professor of sociology at Princeton University (1993-2007). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar. Born in Canberra, Australia, Western received his B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Queensland and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Earl Lewis is the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of history, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Public Policy and director of the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan. From March 2013-2018, he served as President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A noted author and esteemed social historian, he is past President of the Organization of American Historians. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008) and the American Academy of Political & Social Sciences (2022), he is the recipient of twelve honorary degrees, and the National Humanities Medal (2023). Lewis has held faculty and administrative appointments at Michigan (1989-2004) and the University of California, Berkeley (1984-89). From 2004-2012, he served as Emory University’s Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies. In addition to prior service on a number of nonprofit and governmental boards, Lewis chaired the board of Regents at Concordia College-Moorhead, is a trustee and chair of the board of ETS, a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation, secretary of the board of trustees of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a director of the Capital Group.