“Illuminating…. A well-researched, potent, timely investigation of yet another element of systemic racism.”

-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Adam Harris is a brilliant storyteller. He has used his unique literary gifts to synthesize two centuries of history in order to construct an historical account of higher-education that reads like a novel. The State Must Provide is a book that both taught me so much and also kept me on the edge of my seat. It is an invaluable text from a supremely talented writer.”

-- Clint Smith, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller How the Word is Passed

Adam Harris is an award-winning journalist. He is a senior fellow at New America and the author of The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right, a narrative history of racial inequality higher education, published by Ecco.  Before joining New America, he covered higher education and national politics for six years on staff at The Atlantic, where he is now a contributing writer. He was previously a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, focusing on federal education policy and historically black colleges, and the social editor at ProPublica. He served as the 2022-2023 writer-in-residence at North Carolina A&T University, and in 2021, he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. His writing has appeared in BBC, Bleacher Report, and EBONY Magazine.

Adam is currently working on his second book, Is This America?, a history of the South’s role in politics and how the region shapes us as a nation—but not always in the ways we assume it does, which will be published by Pantheon.