Civil Rights Project To Relocate West

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard will move to University of California at Los Angeles, as Graduate School of Education Professor of Education and Social Policy and project co-founder Gary Orfield heads west this spring.

Orfield, who helped launch the 10-year-old center that has since produced substantial research on inequality, will rejoin project co-founder Christopher Edley Jr., dean of Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

Though Orfield said his experiences at Harvard have been largely positive, he cited a larger number of faculty members studying civil rights issues, more financial resources for the Civil Rights Project, and a more diverse faculty as some of the advantages of moving to UCLA.

Orfield called UCLA a “more conducive atmosphere to studying civil rights” because more UCLA faculty members are involved in civil rights research, while there are “very few senior faculty members at Harvard who have real experience in civil rights litigation and research.”

He also noted that there is “very little capacity at Harvard to study Latino rights issues. There needs to be more of this work in the social sciences.”

Orfield said that UCLA has already offered significant financial resources for the Civil Rights Project, which has relied on funding from outside sources for the past 11 years.

A diverse faculty can also contribute to the study of diversity, Orfield said. While he noted that race did not necessarily determine a faculty member’s interest in studying civil rights, “people who come from an African American, Latino, or Native American background have distinctive perspective and raise issues that other faculty don’t as well.”

According to the UCLA Diversity Statistics monograph for 2005-2006, 6.9 percent of UCLA female faculty members are minorities, while 14.9 percent of male faculty members are minorities. The monograph counts African American, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American faculty members as minorities.

In academic year 2006, 13 percent of social science ladder faculty, 16 percent of natural science faculty, and 10 percent of humanities faculty within Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences were minorities, according to a June report from the Office of the Provost. The report defined Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, non-Hispanic, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaskan Native as minorities.

Though Orfield will be taking the Civil Rights Project with him across the country, he said he still sees potential for the study of civil rights at Harvard.

He praised the work of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and of Assistant Professor of Education James Sangil Kim, who has worked with him at the Civil Rights Project. Students who want to study civil rights issues, Orfield said, “should make their desire known.”