UCLA captures academic plum

Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project, perhaps the nation’s most prominent academic research center on issues of civil rights and racial inequality, will relocate to UCLA after the first of the year.

With the move, scheduled to be announced today, the project will expand its historic focus to include a greater emphasis on topics of crucial interest to the West and Southwest, including immigration and language discrimination. To underline those new interests, it will issue reports in Spanish as well as English and be renamed the Civil Rights Project/El Proyecto de CRP when it takes up its new home at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in January.

Many called the project’s westward shift a coup for UCLA, which has not always succeeded in its efforts to steal stars from the Ivy League.

“Harvard’s loss really is California’s gain,” said Christopher Edley Jr., who helped found the project during his tenure as a Harvard law professor and was lured west himself in 2003. He is dean of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school. At UCLA, Gary Orfield, the project’s current director and its co-founder, will be joined as co-director by Patricia Gandara, a UC Davis education professor since 1990 and frequent collaborator in Civil Rights Project research. The pair, who were married in the last year, also were attracted by the idea of being able to work at the same institution and live on the same coast, Orfield said.

The two also were offered a package that included start-up funding, research assistants, office space and full professor appointments for both in the education school, said Aimee Dorr, the school’s dean. Orfield and Gandara will teach undergraduate and graduate courses and mentor students, Dorr said.

“We wanted them very, very much and think the work they do is just very compatible with the work we do,” she said.

Since its founding a decade ago, the Civil Rights Project has been a prominent voice on issues related to affirmative action, school segregation, dropouts and the No Child Left Behind Act. Its affirmative-action research was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2003 decision affirming limited consideration of race in university admissions.

Orfield and Gandara said the project will continue those efforts, but expand to take in research areas especially relevant to a state often called ground zero in the nation’s shift to a multiethnic society.

Gandara said she also hopes the center’s presence may help attract talented students of all races to UCLA.

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rebecca.trounson@latimes.com