AUSTIN, Texas—New ways of increasing minority access to higher education in the wake of the Hopwood v. Texas decision will be considered by a panel of Texas legislators and educators during a public conference Jan. 28 at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin.
The conference, which is free and open to the public, will focus on the findings and recommendations of a report issued recently by the Texas Commission on a Representative Student Body. The commission, appointed by the Texas Higher Education Coalition, spent more than a year studying the effect of the Hopwood decision on minority student enrollment at Texas colleges and universities. The report makes recommendations to the legislature and to higher education officials on ways to increase minority enrollment within the parameters of Hopwood.
Former Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby, who chaired the commission, will open the conference at 8:30 a.m. in the Bass Lecture Hall. Parking is available at the LBJ Library parking lot on Red River Street.
Panelists will include Texas State Senators Teel Bivins and Royce West; State Rep. Irma Rangel and former Rep. Wilhelmina Delco; Sharon Robinson, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the Educational Testing Service in Princeton; Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University; Terry Sullivan, vice president and dean of Graduate Studies at UT Austin; Michael Sharlot, dean of UT Austin’s School of Law; and Edwin Dorn, dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
The conference is sponsored by the Texas Commission on a Representative Student Body, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the UT Austin College of Education and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation.
Registration and a continental breakfast begin at 7:30 a.m. For registration information, call the LBJ School of Public Affairs Office of Conferences and Training at (512) 471-0820 or register via the World Wide Web at www.utexas.edu/lbj/profdev/candt/access/ index.html. For other information, contact Anneliese Geis at (512)471-7349 or via email a.geis@mail.utexas.edu.
