Jason Riley, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Theodore Hershberg, Public Policy and History and the Director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, meet at this Smith Soc event to discuss the impact of education reform and other policies on African American communities.

About the Speakers

Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and a commentator for Fox News. After joining the Journal in 1994, he was named a senior editorial writer in 2000 and a member of the editorial board in 2005. Riley writes opinion pieces on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. A frequent public speaker, he is a longtime commentator for Fox News.

Riley is the author of Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders (2008), which argues for a more free-market-oriented U.S. immigration policy; and Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (2014), which discusses the track record of government efforts to help the black underclass. He has also worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. Riley holds a B.A. in English from SUNY-Buffalo.

Theodore Hershberg is Professor of Public Policy and History and Director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1967. He served as Assistant to the Mayor (Philadelphia) for Strategic Planning and Policy Development during a leave from Penn (1984-85).

He was Acting Dean of Penn's School of Public and Urban Policy and holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American history from Stanford University and studied sociology at Columbia University as a Social Science Research Council Fellow. In his long career at Penn, Prof. Hershberg has had three major research interests: educational reform, regional cooperation, and urban-industrial transformation.