Civil union: The intellectual and literal marriage of two professors

Some 20 years ago, when Gary Orfield was a professor of political science and education at the University of Chicago, he traveled to Sacramento to testify before a legislative body. After the exercise was over, Orfield realized he was running late for his flight back home and began looking frantically for a cab.

As luck — and fate — would have it, a female academic acquaintance offered to drive him to the airport. "Gary, I've never missed a plane in my life," she shouted. "Get in my car!"

Orfield recalls reaching the airport "terrifyingly early." And although he jokingly dismisses the suggestion that it was a "life-transforming experience," the ride did set in motion a series of encounters he would have with the speed-racing driver who would become his partner in scholarship and in marriage, Patricia Gándara '69, Ph.D. '79.

In subsequent years, their paths crossed when Gándara was a visiting scholar at Harvard's Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, co-founded by Orfield in 1996. They married in 2006 and a year later, the duo moved with the project to UCLA. It has been housed at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies since 2007.

Although there's no dearth of scholarly couples in academia, it's unusual to see a husband-wife team that leads a notable institution with the kind of missionary zeal that Orfield and Gándara bring to their job. They often marvel at how similar their cultural tastes and values are — despite their different backgrounds. As Orfield puts it: "When you think about it, a Chicana from Los Angeles and a Norwegian American from Minneapolis would have a very different culture." Yet the duo shares a deep intellectual — and cultural — affinity. They have devoted the better part of their lives — and almost all their activist scholarship — to one of the most important social causes of our time: narrowing America's racial and educational inequalities.

Orfield first got involved in heady political issues in the 1960s, as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, where he successfully led a campaign to oppose an increase in student fees. He also plunged into the civil rights movement, whose forceful images are still fresh in his mind. During a 1978 visit to Los Angeles, he was struck by the plight of the city's large Latino underclass. "I realized that a huge demographic and cultural transformation in American society was under way, and I didn't understand it," he recalls.

So in the summer of 1980, Orfield lived in Cuernavaca, determined to learn Spanish in the Mexican city where the renowned Austrian philosopher, priest and social critic Ivan Illich once lived. "I figured you can't really understand the United States without understanding its interaction with Mexico," he explained one recent afternoon in his and Gándara's cozy, book-lined condo in Westwood.

That insight came naturally for Gándara, who has firsthand experience of what it's like to grow up Latino in America. Coming from a Mexican family in Long Beach, she saw her brother drop out of high school because his English skills were weak, a family challenge that had a lasting impact on the young academic. "He had a very good education in Mexico, but when he came here it was totally discounted," she recalls. "He was viewed as just a Mexican." Later, Gándara joined the César Chávez movement and was one of its many activists who were jailed for their work.

Read more about Gándara and Orfield in the original UCLA Magazine article.