Professor Walter R. Allen, a renowned educator and researcher on comparative race and ethnic relations, higher education and desegregation, has been named the new Allan Murray Cartter Chair in Higher Education at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Allen follows professor Alexander Astin, who held the chair from 1994 to 2004.

Allen came to UCLA in 1989 after 10 years at the University of Michigan's department of sociology and the Center for Afro-American and African Studies. He also has held teaching appointments at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Howard University; Duke University; the University of Zimbabwe; and Wayne State University. He is currently a professor of sociology; his research and teaching focus on family patterns, socialization and personality development, race, ethnicity and inequality, health inequality, and higher education. In addition to teaching, he has worked as a consultant to courts, communities, foundations and government.  He will join the school's faculty as a professor of education in July.

"I am delighted that we have been able to attract professor Allen to our faculty and the Cartter Chair," said Aimée Dorr, dean of the school. "He is an eminent sociologist whose work on higher education access and equity has contributed to scholarship, practice and policy. Our students will benefit enormously from his knowledge and experience."

Currently, Allen is director of Choices: Access, Equity and Diversity in California Higher Education, a longitudinal study of the secondary and postsecondary educational opportunities and experiences of African American and Latino students in California. His research has been the subject of extensive media coverage in print, on radio and on television and published in more than 80 books and journals.

He is the recipient of the DuBois-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association, the Harriet and Charles Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award from UCLA, the Distinguished Career Award from the Association of Black Sociologists, the Association for Higher Education Special Merit Award and the Research Excellence Award from the American Educational Research Association. He was selected to give the DeWitt Wallace Readers' Digest Distinguished Lecture at the 2005 meetings of the American Educational Research Association.

Distinguished scholar and higher education leader Allan Murray Cartter began his UCLA professorship in 1973. After his untimely death in 1976, family, friends and colleagues created an endowed chair in his honor. Allen follows Burton Clark and Astin as the third scholar to hold the Allan Murray Cartter Chair in Higher Education.

One of 11 professional schools at UCLA, the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies consists of two academic departments, the department of education and the department of information studies. The Graduate School of Education was founded in 1939 and was UCLA's first professional school. The Graduate School of Library Service was founded in 1958. The two schools merged in 1994, forming the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. UCLA is the only major research university in the country that combines departments of education and information studies. In 2004 U.S. News & World Report ranked the education program third in the nation and first among public universities. The school shares its findings with practicing educators and information professionals through classes, seminars and workshops offered at UCLA and in the community, and through reports, studies and articles featured in publications nationwide.

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