University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Lani Guinier, whose nomination by President Clinton for the nation's top civil-rights post was derailed following allegations by conservative members of Congress and the media that she had a radical agenda and favored quotas, will deliver the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation Lecture on Thursday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Cornell's Statler Hall Auditorium.

Titled "Why We Need a National Conversation on Race," the lecture is free and open to the public. Tickets, which are required for the lecture, will be available beginning April 1 at Willard Straight Ticket Office, Sage Graduate Center and the Information and Referral Center in Day Hall.

Guinier (pronounced gwa-NEAR), a graduate of Radcliffe College and Yale Law School who has served on the University of Pennsylvania faculty since 1988, is the daughter of a Jewish mother and a black father, who was himself a pioneering civil rights leader. In articles for the Washington Post and New York Times magazines, Guinier has said she was always acutely aware of the nation's racial and ethnic divisions, but that her parents taught her, early on, the ways in which race "both matters and doesn't matter in a person's life."

Her many civil rights--related posts have included serving as special assistant to the chief of the Civil Rights Division from 1977 to 1981 and as assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1981 to 1988. When Clinton, a former Yale classmate who attended Guinier's wedding in 1986, nominated her to head the Justice Department's civil rights division in 1993 under Janet Reno '60, conservative congressmen and commentators quickly interpreted her law review articles as reflecting a "breathtakingly radical," even "unconstitutional" position and labeled her a "quota queen." Her rapid withdrawal from the nomination without a hearing (she calls it her "dis- appointment") sparked considerable controversy. Since then, when not teaching at Penn, she has made frequent public appearances on college campuses and in the news media and has written a book, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy.

Guinier's Olin Lecture is being sponsored by the Graduate School and the Olin Fellows. The Olin Fellowship program was established by the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation in 1986 as part of a $30 million, 20-year commitment to support graduate education. Each year since, from four to eight outstanding first-year graduate students have been named Olin Fellows at Cornell, and one distinguished guest has been brought to campus to give the Olin Lecture. Last year, that guest was primatologist Jane Goodall.