A law school dean, an education school professor, and a longtime university president who have collectively advanced diversity in higher education will be honored by Diverse on Monday at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education.
The three academics—Gary Orfield and Christopher Edley Jr., co-founders of The Civil Rights Project at Harvard, now housed at UCLA, and Dr. Robert A. Corrigan, longtime president at San Francisco State University—all have been selected to receive Diverse magazine’s Dr. John Hope Franklin Award. The award is bestowed annually to recognize individuals and organizations for excellence in higher education.
This year’s awardees embody the principles of the award’s namesake, said Maya Matthews Minter, Vice President of Editorial and Production at Diverse.
“The awardees, just as Dr. Franklin demonstrated during his lifetime, represent the very essence of excellence and integrity in academic leadership and service,” Minter said.
As Harvard professors in 1996, in the wake of Hopwood v. Texas, an appellate court case that ruled that race could not be used as a factor in college admissions, both Orfield and Edley co-founded the Civil Rights Project at Harvard.
“Their vision was to have a research think tank that provided research to policy makers focused on race and ethnicity,” said Edley’s wife, Maria Echaveste, a lecturer at UC Berkeley.
She said the Civil Rights Project, known as CRP, was “hugely important” to the whole debate about the importance of affirmative action in higher education.
