The Civil Rights Project will move next year from Harvard University to the University of California, Los Angeles, where it will have access to a more diverse faculty and take on more issues, including those affecting Hispanics.
Renamed the Civil Rights Project/El Proyecto de CRP, it will be led by current director and co-founder Dr. Gary Orfield and professor Dr. Patricia Gándara from UC-Davis. Both are joining the UCLA faculty.
The project will add a stronger focus on issues of critical importance to the Western and Southwestern United States, including immigration and language discrimination, says Dr. Aimée Dorr, dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.
“Each [professor] brings exceptional expertise and vision to work on some of the most important problems of our time … the project will be a vibrant addition to the campus,” she says.
Orfield could not be reached for comment. However, in an interview with The Harvard Crimson, he said that UCLA had a “more conducive atmosphere to studying civil rights.” 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 added.
While race did not necessarily determine a faculty member’s interest in studying civil rights, Orfield said “people who come from an African-American, Latino or Native American background have distinctive perspectives and raise issues that other faculty don’t as well.”
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.”
