Christopher Edley, Jr. was as passionate about teaching as he was about being on the ramparts for civil rights. Many of us remember him as a professor at Harvard where he co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights Project with Gary Orfield in 1996. In 2016, he served as President of the Opportunity Institute, which he co-founded with Ann O’Leary.
Born on January 13, 1953, in Boston, Edley Jr. followed the illustrious path paved by his father, who was the distinguished leader of the United Negro College Fund and helped the organization raise more than $550 million during his 18 years at the helm. Edley’s father died in 2003 at the age of 75. Edley, Jr., began his career at Swarthmore College and continued it at Harvard Law School, where he later taught. He was in the class at Harvard a year before the late Charles Ogletree.
For more than four decades, beginning with his association with former President Jimmy Carter, Edley Jr. was vitally involved in five presidential campaigns as an economic policy adviser and budget official. He was chair of the Obama-Biden transition team. In 2011, he was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as co-chair of the National Commission on Equity and Excellence in Education, the veritable bailiwick of his expertise and scholarship.
Along with leading the various institutes he co-founded and administrative duties he was responsible for, including as Dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law from 2004 to 2013, Edley Jr. was often summoned as a lecturer, which took him away from his productive writing career. “Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action and American Values” (1998) and “Administrative Law: Rethinking Judicial Control of Bureaucracy” (1990) are two of his published books.
In the former publication, Edley recounted a session he had at the Central Intelligence Agency. “Some months ago,” he began, “I was invited to participate in a discussion with a group of minority employees of the Central Intelligence Agency meeting at a covert military facility. I spent about an hour lecturing and then pressed them to present and defend their own views on affirmative action. I paused to make, lightheartedly, a serious point. ‘You know, you folks aren’t very good at this. I wouldn’t want any of you representing my side of this issue in a cocktail party conversation.’
“Even people intensely concerned about affirmative action, I said—whether for or against—rarely work hard to understand the arguments on both sides and to figure out how to persuade others,” Edley continued. “Instead, we usually talk about this difficult subject only with like-minded people and avoid the subject with others. I likened it to being at church and spending all your energy in choir practice when what is needed is practice at evangelical missionary work. I’m not very religious, but I know that choir performances alone do not make converts or create ecumenical understanding.”
This balanced approach to an issue typified Edley’s strategy for dealing with controversial issues. A comment on the book’s cover said it all: “In this cogent, persuasive book for general readers and serious voters, Christopher Edley makes his eloquent, powerful case: affirmative action laws, he believes, are essential to the cause of social justice in this country; he understands their flaws and drawbacks, for both of which he suggests precise and sensible remedies. Engaging the reader in assessing the evidence, in understanding the moral importance of thinking clearly about race, he shows us what is at stake—in the positions we urge our elected officials to take, and in the arguments we use to persuade one another about fairness, justice, and progress.”
Edley was married to Maria Echaveste, former deputy chief of staff for former President Bill Clinton. He died from complications of surgery in Stanford, California, on May 10, 2024, at the age of 71.
Chris Edley was my domestic policy advisor when I ran for President. He was one of the smartest, most thoughtful people I’ve ever known. This is a terrible loss for the country and for everyone who know him.