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New Home and Issues for Civil Rights Project

One of the nation’s most prominent research efforts focused on race and society, the Civil Rights Project, is moving from Harvard University to the University of California, Los Angeles, the universities said yesterday. The project’s director and co-founder, Gary Orfield, will join the U.C.L.A. faculty.

U.C.L.A. hailed the project’s move to Los Angeles, with a planned expansion of its work on immigration and other issues of concern to California’s huge Hispanic population, as an academic triumph.

The loss to Harvard follows a period in which the university has seen the attrition of prestigious minority faculty, including Christopher Edley Jr., a law professor who co-founded the Civil Rights Project in 1996. Professor Edley left Harvard in 2004 to become dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

The project has commissioned some 400 reports and produced a dozen books on topics including affirmative action, school segregation and the academic achievement gap. The Supreme Court cited its work in the 2003 decision upholding affirmative action in college admissions.

Professor Orfield said an important factor in the decision to move was his recent marriage to Patricia C. Gándara, a professor at University of California, Davis, who has specialized in issues relating to Latinos and education. At U.C.L.A., Professor Gándara will be a co-director of the project, which will be called the Civil Rights Project/El Proyecto de CRP.

“Los Angeles is at the epicenter of the nation’s racial transformation,” Professor Orfield said, calling that another motivation for the move. Another was that U.C.L.A., with which he said he began negotiating this spring, had offered more generous support for the project than Harvard had, he said.

“U.C.L.A. gave us a wonderful offer and an assurance of university support for the project, which we didn’t have here at Harvard,” Professor Orfield said.

Harvard officials lamented Professor Orfield’s departure but said some faculty attrition was inevitable at any institution. They said the university would continue to support related research, such as a multidisciplinary initiative examining the achievement gap in education.

John Longbrake, a Harvard University spokesman, said: “Professor Orfield will be missed. Harvard has been very supportive of the work and mission of the Civil Rights Project, and will continue to be supportive of other efforts in these areas at the university.”

Still, both Professor Orfield and Professor Edley, a former Clinton administration official, said they had been obliged to devote much of their professional time to fund-raising at Harvard. Professor Orfield said the project’s annual budget exceeded $1 million, and raising the money had been “very, very exhausting.”

Professor Edley, reached at Berkeley yesterday, said that Harvard had been “at best, indifferent” to the project’s mission.

“The best that can be said was that they left us alone, and didn’t charge us more than market rates to rent office space,” Professor Edley said. “They didn’t provide any direct material assistance or even access to Harvard donors — although once we had a track record, they were happy to brag about us.”

U.C.L.A. has agreed to provide start-up financing, some research assistants, and university office space at no cost to the project, said Aimée Dorr, dean of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, which will house the project.

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