Events & Calendars "Call to Action: Leveraging the Power of Diversity to Achieve Academic Excellence": Talk by Robert Teranishi

Robert Teranishi will discuss "Call to Action: Leveraging the Power of Diversity to Achieve Academic Excellence."

Teranishi is a professor of social science and comparative education; the Morgan and Helen Chu Endowed Chair in Asian American Studies; and co-director for the Institute for Immigration, Globalization, and Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a senior fellow with the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy at New York University and principal investigator for the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education. His research examines the causes and consequences of the stratification of college opportunities, with a particular interest on the impact of higher education practice and policy on the mobility of marginalized and vulnerable communities.

Teranishi’s research has been influential to federal, state and institution policy related to college access and completion. He has testified before Congress on the Higher Education Reauthorization Act, the College Cost Reduction and Affordability Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. His research has been referenced in U.S. Supreme Court cases on desegregation and affirmative action. In 2011, he was appointed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission. In 2015, he was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as a member of the board for the Institute for Education Sciences. He has also served as a strategic planning and restructuring consultant for the Ford Foundation.

Teranishi has received the Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award and the Daniel E. Griffiths Award for his scholarly contributions at NYU. He has also received awards from the National Institute for the Study of Transfers, the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals and the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Teranishi was formally a National Institute for Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in sociology and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in Higher Education and Organizational Change.