Dean Jeffrey Milem appointed to the UC Provost’s Advisory Council on Educational Equity

Michael Brown, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, has appointed Dean and Professor Jeffrey Milem of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School as a member of the UC Provost’s Advisory Council on Educational Equity for calendar year 2020.

The democratization of education is, first and foremost, a matter of justice and fairness: substantive, substantial, and sustained progress is needed to ensure that higher education institutions like the University of California educate the entire spectrum of California's populace, with particular attention given to students from those groups that will make up the majority of the future population.

A key role of the Council is to advise and guide the University on strategies to convene state policy leaders, practitioners and researchers across the education spectrum to develop an action agenda for further democratizing our colleges and universities, our workforce and our civic engagement. The result of the Council’s collective effort will be a statewide educational equity summit that showcases the best scholarship and policies on a wide range of topics that address the educational and non-educational factors that impact equity and opportunity.

“I am pleased to invite you to share your expertise and provide thought leadership,” Brown—who is also a Professor in the Gevirtz School’s Department of Counseling, Clinical and School Psychology—wrote in his letter requesting Dean Milem’s participation to the Council.

Prior to coming to UCSB, Milem was the Ernest W. McFarland Distinguished Professor in Leadership for Educational Policy and Reform in the College of Education at the University of Arizona. He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and has been awarded the American College Personnel Association’s Contributions to Higher Education award. Professor Milem’s research focuses on the ways in which colleges and universities can be organized to enhance equity, access, and success for all students; the racial context within higher education; and the relationship between how colleges and universities organize themselves and student outcomes and faculty role performance. As a widely recognized expert in the area of racial dynamics in higher education, Milem has been commissioned to do research by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Harvard Civil Rights Project, the American Council on Education, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the American Educational Research Association’s Panel on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education.

With his colleagues Mitchell Chang and Anthony Antonio, he co-authored Making Diversity Work on Campus: A Research Based Perspective, published by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which translates research demonstrating the educational benefits of diversity to develop a “roadmap” for college leaders of the conditions that must be in place if they are to maximize the opportunities for teaching and learning that racial diversity provides. Milem contributed to two of the three books that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cited in her majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger as being influential in helping to document the university’s claim regarding the educational benefits of diversity. He also worked closely on amicus briefs for both iterations of the Fisher v. Texas case.