November 29, 2006

UCLA Draws Civil Rights Project to Pull Up Roots at Harvard and Move to California

Gary A. Orfield, the co-founder and director of Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project, is moving to the University of California at Los Angeles, and he’s taking the project with him, according to today’s Boston Globe.

The center, which Mr. Orfield founded 10 years ago with Christopher Edley Jr., focuses on civil-rights research and works with universities, advocacy groups, policy makers, and journalists. It has emerged as a leading force in debates over education reform, influencing national discussions through dozens of conferences and hundreds of studies and reports on topics including desegregation, student diversity, school discipline, and special education. Mr. Orfield has also written about those issues for The Chronicle Review.

In California, Mr. Orfield will rejoin Mr. Edley, who left Harvard three years ago to become dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

“I have been offered an extraordinary opportunity to continue and expand the work of the Civil Rights Project, at UCLA, in a setting of great interest for the future of race relations and civil rights,” Mr. Orfield wrote in an e-mail message to colleagues last week, according to the Globe.

The Globe also reported that Mr. Orfield recently married Patricia Gándara, an education-policy scholar at the University of California at Davis who has worked with the Civil Rights Project. She will accompany him to UCLA as a co-director of the project.

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