Richard Kahlenberg

Richard D. Kahlenberg is Director of Housing Policy and of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a professorial lecturer at George Washington University's Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he has been called "arguably the nation's chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions" and "the intellectual father of the economic integration movement" in K–12 schooling.

Kahlenberg served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the cases in which the Supreme Court held race-conscious admissions unconstitutional in 2023, testifying that selective colleges could achieve diversity through socioeconomic preferences and the elimination of legacy and other advantages for the wealthy. He is the author or editor of eighteen books, including Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America's Colleges (2025), Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See (2023), The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (1996), and Tough Liberal, a biography of Albert Shanker.

From 1998 to 2022 he was a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He has also been a nonresident scholar at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy, a visiting associate professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, and a legislative assistant to Senator Charles S. Robb. He serves on the advisory boards of the Pell Institute and the Albert Shanker Institute and received the William A. Kaplin Award for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy Scholarship. His writing appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Republic.