Ifill was asked about her hopes for the future of democracy, and she responded by invoking the immediate past. For the 2020 election, she said, “we decided to be relentless.” The result was not only the highest turnout in a presidential election ever but also a record turnout for the special election determining Georgia’s two Senate seats. “Of all the people who showed up for the presidential election in Georgia, 97 percent showed up for the special election,” she said, resulting in the first Black senator and the second Jewish senator ever to represent the state.
“We created a world that they felt was getting away from them,” she said. “The mobilization did bring more people into the tent.”
In the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, tragedy, Ifill called for more action. “Take a day of rest and hug your kids. Then start to think about what our points of intervention are.”
Citing her personal mantra of “leave no power on the table,” Ifill lamented, “We have left so much power on the table.” Not only do concerned citizens have to vote in presidential elections, she encouraged the assembly to vote in every election. “Don’t say, ‘I live in a blue state so it doesn’t matter.’ People react to turnout.”
Run for city council or school board, she told the crowd, and inform yourself and vote in the down-ballot races as well as the big ones. “The sheriff is the one who is going to decide who gets evicted,” she pointed out. “We have to get serious about power.”
Presented Friday by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Radcliffe Medal is awarded to an individual who “embodies our commitment to excellence, inclusion, and social impact.” Introducing Ifill as “a public intellectual of the highest order,” Emmy award-winning MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called her “a leader, a fighter, an organizer, a builder of institutions — most importantly, a builder of Black institutions.”
The day opened with a panel on “Higher Education Access and the American Workforce,” moderated by Raj Chetty, William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics. Kicking off with a discussion of inequity in higher education, Donna Shalala, Trustee Professor of Political Science and Health Policy at the University of Miami, said one key is to cultivate culturally sensitive thinking in the recruitment and retention of students.
The former U.S. secretary of health and human services noted that traditional methods were often “too cookie-cutter” and instead pointed to a program from her time as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin that recruited Native American counselors to help retain Native American students. At Bunker Hill Community College, peer counselors — often “students who are Black or brown” — perform the same function, said Pam Eddinger, the college’s president.
Calling himself “the skunk at the picnic,” Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, dismissed the efficacy of such initiatives. Since the 1980s, higher education “increasingly promotes the maintenance of an American elite,” he said in his virtual appearance on the panel. He advocated instead for a focus on transparency that allows students and their families to identify the most remunerative trades and professions. “What you take determines what you make,” he said, calling employment “the only source of upward mobility in this country.”
Other panelists pushed back on this focus on specific jobs and wages. As founder and CEO of the National Education Equity Lab, Leslie Cornfeld ’81, J.D. ’85, pitched a more involved role for higher education, describing NEEL programs that bring early college experiences to schools where historically students have not seen higher education as an option. “We know universities can fly in and get the best athletes,” she said. “We want them to fly in and identify the best scholars as well.”
Eddinger added another objection to Carnevale’s proposal: “If we were to follow that model you would get lots of allied health care workers and lots of IT workers. But God forbid you need teachers.”
Making an impassioned plea for those assembled to “tackle the basic root causes” of inequity, Eddinger concluded: “We have refused to recognize that the people who teach our children, who care for our children, are as worthy as engineers. It is the responsibility of public intellectuals to lift up essential jobs so they are paid more than $15 an hour.”