Rising Inequalities: A Conversation on College Access, Diversity, and Social Mobility in the U.S.

The 2020-21 Wesson Lecture on Problems of Democracy

Harvard Sociologist Anthony Jack, author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students, and Paul Tough, author of The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, delivered the 2020-21 Wesson Lecture in Problems of Democracy. UNC professor Jennifer Morton, author of Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility, moderated the discussion.

Anthony Abraham Jack is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He holds the Shutzer Assistant Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students, which was awarded the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, CEP Mildred Garcia Award for Exemplary Scholarship, and the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize and also named a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award and a NPR Book’s Best Book of 2019. His scholarship appears in the Common Reader, Du Bois Review, Sociological Forum, and Sociology of Education and has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, American Sociological Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan named him an Emerging Diversity Scholar. He received his B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion (cum laude) at Amherst College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University.

Paul Tough is the author, most recently, of The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. His three previous books include How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, which was translated into 27 languages and spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover and paperback best-seller lists. Paul is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine; his writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, GQ, and Esquire, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. He is a speaker on topics including education, parenting, equity, and student success. He has worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s Magazine and as a reporter and producer for the public-radio program “This American Life.” He was the founding editor of Open Letters, an online magazine.