Appointment of Jerry Kang as Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

UCLA Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost

To the Campus Community:

Chancellor Block and I are pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Jerry Kang as UCLA’s inaugural Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, effective July 1, 2015. In this capacity, Vice Chancellor Kang will serve as the senior campus official responsible for promoting equity and fundamental fairness at UCLA, leading and coordinating efforts to create a diverse, inclusive and welcoming environment for all students, staff, faculty, alumni and community partners. The vice chancellor’s broad areas of focus include high-level coordination of campuswide equity and diversity initiatives; strategic planning; evidence-based policy analysis and development; training, education and research; community relations; compliance; campus climate; and communication.

A member of the UCLA law faculty since 1995, Professor Kang is professor of law, professor of Asian American studies (by courtesy), associate provost and the inaugural holder of the Korea Times–Hankook Ilbo Endowed Chair in Korean American Studies and Law. He was a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School (2003-04), and has taught at the Georgetown University Law Center (2004-05) and Seoul National University School of Law (summer 2010). He also served as a Straus Fellow and the David M. Friedman Fellow at New York University’s Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice (2013-14).

A renowned scholar, Professor Kang has published influential research in numerous fields. On race, he is a leading scholar on implicit bias and the law, with more than a dozen articles on the subject published in leading journals and cited in numerous judicial opinions. He has also written widely about Asian American communities, including on the topics of hate crimes, affirmative action, and the Japanese American internment and its lessons for a post 9-11 world. He is a co-author of a book on the internment, Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment. Professor Kang also writes in the field of communications law on topics ranging from information privacy to virtual communities to net neutrality. He is the author of Communications Law and Policy: Cases and Materials, a leading casebook in the field.

As a longstanding member of our community, Professor Kang already has provided valuable service to the university, such as chairing the Information Technology Planning Board from 2011 to 2013 and serving on numerous ad hoc committees. He helped found the nationally acclaimed critical race studies concentration at the law school and served as its founding co-director. He has advised multiple affinity organizations and journals, and has served on numerous diversity task forces. At the university level, he has continuously served on the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s faculty advisory committee, and as associate provost, he recently trained numerous department faculties and campus leaders on implicit bias.

Beyond the university, Professor Kang has sought aggressively to translate academic understandings into practical interventions and problem-solving. He contributes to various community and research-based advocacy efforts, such as the American Bar Foundation’s research group on legal diversity, the Poverty & Race Research Action Council’s social science advisory board, the Perception Institute and the Council of Korean Americans. He has also contributed to litigation strategies, for example by co-authoring an amicus brief on behalf of leading stereotype threat scholars in the recent Supreme Court affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas. For such contributions, Professor Kang has been recognized with the Korean Community Lawyers Association outstanding community leader of the year award (2014), the Korean American Bar Association Southern California leadership award (2013) and the California State Assembly’s Asian Pacific Islander heritage award for excellence in law (2010), and he was elected to the American Law Institute in 2006. In addition, he has become a highly sought-after speaker for law firms, bar associations, judges and corporations. Within the academy, he was elected Professor of the Year by the School of Law Class of 1998, and he received the law school’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2007 and UCLA’s Eby Award for the Art of Teaching in 2010.

As Vice Chancellor Kang will engage with multiple audiences on topics fraught with intellectual and emotional challenges, we will benefit from his demonstrated talent for communicating clearly, with rigor and empathy. Professor Kang proudly notes that he is an immigrant, a first-generation college graduate and a first-generation professional. He emigrated from South Korea at the age of 6 and grew up in Skokie, Illinois. He received an A.B. magna cum laude in physics from Harvard University and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Before starting his teaching career, he clerked for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and then worked on telecommunications policy for the Department of Commerce.

I want to thank the search/advisory committee for assembling an outstanding pool of candidates and for its role in recruiting Professor Kang. The committee was chaired by Carole Goldberg, vice chancellor for academic personnel. Other members were: Devon Carbado, The Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law; Mitchell Chang, professor of education and Asian American studies; Cindy Cordova, past president of UCLA Staff Assembly and assistant to the vice dean for faculty, David Geffen School of Medicine; Patrick Dowling, chair, department of family medicine and Kaiser Benefit Foundation Endowed Professor of Community Medicine; Miguel Garcia-Garibay, professor and chair, department of chemistry and biochemistry; Alicia Gaspar de Alba, professor of Chicana/o studies, English and gender studies, and chair, LGBT Studies Program; Gilbert Gee, professor of community health sciences; Darnell Hunt, professor of sociology and director, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies; Jazz Kiang, undergraduate student; Janina Montero, vice chancellor, student affairs; Ivy Onyeador, graduate student; Asma Sayeed, associate professor of Islamic studies; R. Bradley Sears, executive director, the Williams Institute and Roberta A. Conroy Scholar of Law and Policy; and Victoria Sork, dean, division of life sciences.

Chancellor Block and I recognize that this position is of paramount importance and significance to our campus community, and we look forward to partnering with you and with Vice Chancellor Kang to achieve our shared goals. Please join me in congratulating Jerry and welcoming him into this new role.

Sincerely,

Scott L. Waugh
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost