Thurgood Marshall lecture
Edley's vision for society
BY Ajay Singh
UCLA Today Staff
In his public lectures, Christopher Edley Jr. often makes it a
point to say that race is a much harder issue to tackle than rocket
science. The dean of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law
then points to the fact that while space technology has made staggering
leaps over the past half-century, numerous schools across the United
States still maintain a deplorable state of de facto segregation:
Blacks, whites and Latinos often don’t go to the same schools.
To say that Edley, 52, is a passionate proponent of racial equality
and equal opportunity in education would be an understatement. He’s
known for being zealously obsessive about the issues. So it was
no surprise that those matters dominated his eloquent, hour-long
speech given as the 2005 honoree at the 16th Thurgood Marshall Lecture
and Dinner, held in a packed banquet hall at a Bel-Air hotel on
April 21.
The annual lecture honors the legacy of U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Marshall and benefits the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African
American Studies.
Edley, co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, is the first
African-American dean of a top-ranked U.S. law school. That he has
also served as the adviser to former President Bill Clinton on race
and affirmative action makes his message enormously influential
and inspiring.
In his opening remarks, Chancellor Albert Carnesale called Edley
“a first-class thinker, a first-class doer and a first-class
person,” the latest in a string of illustrious Thurgood Marshall
lecturers. Like Marshall, Edley is committed to reshaping the nation
by building what he called “a political and moral consensus”
on the urgent issue of racial and ethnic equality and justice.
The single-most important challenge in that direction, said Edley,
was ensuring high-quality K-12 education, a formidable job considering
that “a minority school is 16 times more likely to be poverty-stricken”
than a white- majority school. To erase such a glaring inequity,
Edley said, it’s important to design intervention strategies
that both augment anti-discrimination policies and transform local
politics.
University scholars, Edley emphasized, have a major role to play
in “providing intellectual capital to fuel that movement.”
He urged scholars to be more probing of broader, research-based
social issues of the kind that led faculty from the Harvard Civil
Rights Project to recently collaborate with UCLA faculty on a highly
influential and prescriptive report on school dropouts in California.
The trick, said Edley, is to “pick the right topics, do
the research and propagate and disseminate it so that it’s
useful.” Only then, he added, could universities make a genuine
and long-lasting difference in society, shaping its values and politics.
Unfortunately, he noted, investment in educational research nationwide
is less than 1% of what is spent overall on education. That makes
spending on educational research a “civil rights issue,”
and the failure to confront it would condemn future generations
to the whims of politicians who would have no choice but to base
their decisions on “ideology, mysticism and fashion.”
Pointing to studies in human cognition, Edley said unconscious racism
affects just about everyone. The vital task for academia, then,
is to launch multidisciplinary studies of those experiences that
“hold the transformative possibility that connects people”
and prevents social divisions.
“It’s a researchable question,” Edley said, concluding
with this take-home message: “If we don’t answer it,
who will?”
In Memoriam
Tributes were paid at the Thurgood Marshall Lecture and Dinner
to Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., one of the nation’s most famous
trial attorneys and a UCLA alum, who died last March. Cochran was
the 2003 Thurgood Marshall honoree. Chancellor Albert Carnesale
called him a tireless advocate of civil and human rights as well
as a tireless supporter of UCLA, where Cochran established a scholarship
in his name that has so far benefited 37 scholars. “Johnnie
was a good friend to UCLA, and his philanthropy echoes across our
campus,” the chancellor said. “While we are diminished
by his death, we are inspired by his life.”
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