Advancing the Mission of Higher Education in a Polarized Environment

Liliana M. Garces is the W.K. Kellogg Professor in Community College Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. She also holds courtesy appointments at the University of Texas School of Law and the Center for Mexican American Studies. She teaches courses on higher education law, equity and diversity in higher education, and race, law, and education. Her scholarship broadly examines how legal and education systems shape educational opportunity and create inequality for historically marginalized student populations. Her interdisciplinary work is grounded in the conceptual understanding that legal and education systems interact dynamically through the actions of organizational actors that initiate lawsuits, influence legal decision-making, and interpret and implement legal rulings within educational contexts. These actions shape education policies and practices to exacerbate or reduce social inequality. Drawing from frameworks in socio-legal studies, sociology, education, law, and political science, she employs quantitative, qualitative, and legal research methods to investigate this dynamic. Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute.

Dr. Garces's scholarship has been published in a variety of top peer-reviewed education journals, including Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, American Journal of Education, Journal of Higher Education, Educational Policy, Teachers College Record, Peabody Journal of Education, The Review of Higher Education, and Urban Review, as well as law journals, policy reports, and books. She is co-editor of Racial Equity on College Campuses: Connecting Research and Practice (SUNY Press, 2022), School Integration Matters: Research-Based Strategies to Advance Racial Equity (Teachers College Press, 2016), and Affirmative Action and Racial Equity: Considering the Fisher Case to Forge the Path Ahead (Routledge, 2015). She is on the editorial boards for Educational Researcher, Sociology of Education, and American Educational Research Journal. She is an active member of national organizations focused on education issues.

Over the years, Dr. Garces's work has been featured in National Public Radio, The New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed., and other media outlets, and at various invited briefings at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Her research has been recognized by the American Education Research Association with the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award for an article of outstanding importance to education research in 2013 and by the Association for the Study of Higher Education with the 2015 Early Career Award and with the 2020 Excellence in Public Policy Higher Education Award.

Combining her expertise in law and education, Dr. Garces has represented the education community in the filing of legal briefs in U.S. Supreme Court cases that have played consequential roles in interpreting law around race-conscious policies in education. She served as counsel of record and co-wrote, with leading scholars in the field, amicus briefs joined by hundreds of social scientists in the following cases: Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (2007) (553 signatories); Fisher v. University of Texas I (2013) (444 signatories); Fisher v. University of Texas II (2016) (823 signatories); and Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014) (filed by The Civil Rights Project/Projecto Derechos Civiles at the University of California, Los Angeles). Most recently, she served as counsel and co-authored an amicus brief filed by 1,241 social scientists in support of Harvard’s defense of its race-conscious admissions policies in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Prior appointments before the University of Texas at Austin include: Associate Professor at The Pennsylvania State University, where she co-directed and co-founded the Center for Education and Civil Rights; Assistant Professor at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development; and Post-Doctorate Fellow at the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Prior to becoming faculty, she worked as a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the Legal Aid Society in DC, and as a judicial law clerk in federal district court. Dr. Garces holds a doctorate in education from Harvard University, a juris doctor from the University of Southern California School of Law, and a bachelor of arts from Brown University.

Dr. Elizabeth Niehaus is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her current research focuses on how we can create and improve educational environments to facilitate student learning and development in higher education, with a particular emphasis on the intersections of issues of free speech, academic freedom, and campus climate. Dr. Niehaus’s other research interests include study abroad, international education, graduate student and faculty professional development, and service-learning programs. At the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, Dr. Niehaus teaches courses on diversity issues in higher education, college student development, research methods, and free speech and campus climate.

Dr. Niehaus earned her Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Virginia, her Master’s degree in American Culture Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, and her PhD in College Student Personnel Administration from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has published her research in a wide variety of scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets, including the Journal of College Student Development, The Journal of Higher Education, the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, and Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. She has received a number of grants to further her research on alternative breaks, short-term study abroad, and tertiary student engagement and development in Trinidad and Tobago, served as a 2020-2021 Fellow with the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and was a recipient of the 2017 Excellence in International Research and Service to the International Community Awards from ACPA: College Student Educators International.

Cecilia Orphan, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Higher Education at the University of Denver and Director of Partnerships for the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges. Dr. Orphan’s research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Ascendium Education Group, and the Joyce Foundation. She has been quoted by CBS, The Chronicle for Higher Education, InsideHigherEd, Open Campus, and Newsy, among other media outlets. From 2006-2011, she directed the American Democracy Project, a national civic engagement initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Dr. Orphan's research agenda is informed by her experiences as a working class, first-generation college student who received maximum Pell grants to attend college. She is personally familiar with the transformative nature of access institutions having attended Linn Benton Community College and Portland State University, a regional public university in Oregon. Simply put, attending these institutions changed the trajectory of her life and she believes in the power of access institutions to promote racial and economic justice and democracy. Dr. Orphan holds a Ph.D. in higher education from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Portland State University.

Brian Soucek is a graduate of Boston College (B.A., Philosophy and Economics); Columbia University (Ph.D., Philosophy), where he was awarded the Core Preceptor Prize for his teaching; and Yale Law School (J.D.), where he was Comments Editor for the Yale Law Journal, a Coker Fellow in Procedure and won the Munson Prize for his work in the school’s immigration clinic. Prior to law school, Soucek taught for three years in the Humanities Collegiate Division and Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, where he was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Co-Chair of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. After law school, he clerked for the late Mark R. Kravitz, United States District Judge for the District of Connecticut, and the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Professor Soucek’s work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Sixth and Seventh Circuits, referenced and excerpted in leading casebooks in Immigration Law, Civil Procedure, and Sexual Orientation Law, discussed by the Wall Street Journal, and honored with the Dukeminier Award from UCLA’s Williams Institute for the year’s best article on sexual orientation and gender identity law. Professor’s Soucek’s published work spans from constitutional and statutory anti discrimination law to refugee/asylum law to research at the intersection of law and aesthetics. Since coming to UC Davis School of Law in Fall 2013, Professor Soucek has taught Constitutional Law II: Equal Protection and the First Amendment; Civil Procedure; Antidiscrimination Law; Asylum and Refugee Law; Art Law; and an undergraduate First Year Seminar on Free Expression.

Professor Soucek has recently served as Chair of the University of California’s system-wide Committee on Academic Freedom, been a Fellow with UC’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and led the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Law and the Humanities. He is currently a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Emerson is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project where he focuses on First Amendment free speech protections. From 2019-2020, he was also host of At Liberty, the ACLU’s weekly podcast.

Prior to joining the ACLU in 2018, he was a legal advisor for Africa at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL). In that role, he provided technical legal assistance to civil society leaders, government officials, law students, and other stakeholders from across Africa to improve the legal framework protecting the freedom of association, assembly, and expression on the regional and national levels. From 2012-13, he served as assistant general counsel to the New York City Council, where he worked to increase transparency for council members’ discretionary spending, and contributed to the council’s friend-of-the-court brief against the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program. In 2011, Emerson was a senior policy fellow in the office of a Member of Parliament in Ghana. Emerson previously conducted research and wrote about U.S. foreign policy for The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and worked for the National Democratic Institute’s Central and West Africa Team.

Emerson holds a J.D. from the New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern scholar for public interest law, and a Master of Public Affairs degree from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He earned his undergraduate degree in political science at Stanford.