Dropping Harvard

The Civil Rights Project is dropping Harvard to move across the country to its new home at UCLA, where it will focus its efforts on immigrant and Latino issues.

A win for California and UCLA, who picks up not only CRP co-founder Gary Orfield but also Orfield's new wife, UC-Davis professor and associate director of the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute Patricia Gandara.

A disappointment for CRP co-founder Chris Edley's hope that the CRP would become bicoastal when he dropped Harvard in 2003 to lead Berkeley's Boalt Hall. Edley said he was leaving the project knowing it would continue to flourish at Harvard and would become "bigger, better, and bicoastal" as he moved to develop a Berkeley-based center. It's clearly getting bigger in California, and better for taking on immigration issues, but sadly no longer a bicoastal endeavor. Not all bad..more reason to travel back to California.