Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, where he writes about education, equal opportunity, and civil rights. Before participating in a panel on making higher education more inclusive, he talked about his newspaper habit, his hatred of hypocrisy, and why he’d like to be a professor in his next life in the Zócalo green room.
If you had an extra hour in the day, what would you do with it?
This is a boring answer, but I’d probably read more. I’m obsessed with reading the newspaper. I have big stacks.
What newspapers do you subscribe to?
I read the Washington Post at breakfast, read The New York Times online, and then I read the Wall Street Journal at lunch. See: I don’t have much of a social life.
What do you love to hate?
Related to our topic today, I hate the folks who appear to be taking the high road and in fact are treating people poorly. I mean people who are very proud of making an institution racially diverse but then lock out poor kids of all races. That kind of hypocrisy bothers me.
How do you like your steak?
Medium.
What’s your favorite Harvard Law School book—besides your own, Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School?
I liked One L by Scott Turow. Mine was very different: He talked about the first year of law school, which is grueling, and I talked about the second and third years, when so many of us wanted to go into public interest law and ended up at big corporate firms.
What’s the last great book you read?
A number of years ago I read J. Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground. That’s the last great book I read. It’s about the Boston busing for school desegregation and the conflict between working-class whites and working-class blacks, two groups that should be allies but were kind of fighting over the crumbs.
What was your worst subject in school?
Calculus.
What do you wake up to?
I usually wake up to my wife saying, “It’s time to get up.”
What profession would you practice in your next life?
Oh I think I’d like to be a professor, get a Ph.D., really dive into a particular topic.
What’s the ugliest tie you own?
I have one that has scales that are meant to represent the law that I no longer wear.
