Saul Geiser is a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley and taught there before joining UC’s Office of the President in 1981. Geiser served as director of admissions research for the UC system after Californians voted to end affirmative action in 1996, and he helped redesign UC admissions policy. His work has focused on issues of equity and validity in college admissions, with the aim of identifying admissions criteria that have less adverse impact on low-income and...
Volodymyr Goshylyk, Ph.D., is the Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, and the President of the Berkeley-based nonprofit “Ukraine Matters” (ukraine-matters.org). Formerly the Associate Professor of the English Philology Department at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University (Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine), Volodymyr is the Director of the Ukrainian Non-Governmental Organization “Sustainable Development Landmarks” (sdl.org.ua), and the convenor of three International Smart Conferences on Sustainable Development: SEVIC (sevic.org), SDL (sdlconference.org), and...
Dr. Margaret Heisel has been a leader in higher education for more than three decades. She is currently Senior Research Associate in the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley. Prior to her work at UC Berkeley, Dr. Heisel served as the Founding Director of the Center for Capacity Building in Study Abroad—a joint project of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and NAFSA-Association of International Educators in Washington, DC. This work involved developing programs for promoting the preparation of U.S. students for success in the...
Senior Research Associate, Vice Chancellor for Budget & Finance and CFO Emeritus, Former Associate Director, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley
James A. Hyatt is a Senior Research Associate and Principal Investigator at the Center for Studies in Higher Education. He has extensive experience both as a senior level executive at a number of the nation’s major research universities, including UC Berkeley, the University of Maryland, College Park, University of Arizona, and Virginia Tech, and as a principal investigator on externally funded research projects in the areas of higher education financial management, financial reporting, pension reform and campus safety and security. From 2008-2010 Mr. Hyatt served as the President of the...
Amal Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the California State University, Sacramento. His teaching and research explore the evolving relationships between public higher education and its institutional, political, and social contexts through rigorous interdisciplinary engagement between organizational theory, public policy, and history. Current interests include policy intermediaries, educational innovation and entrepreneurship, and equity in the American professoriate. His work has been published in Higher Education, CSHE’s Research and Occasional Paper...
From 2006 to the present, Karen Merritt has been a Visiting Scholar and Associate of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley.
Merritt is the co-editor (with Jane Lawrence) of From Rangeland to Research University: The Birth of the University of California, Merced, a chronicle of the founding of UC’s tenth campus published by Jossey-Bass in 2007. She is currently working on a book about the role of the University of California and the Sierra Club in the founding of the National Park Service.
Merritt received her B.A. in English literature...
Brian Murphy, Ph.D., served De Anza College as its president for fourteen years, a tenure distinguished by a commitment to equity, student civic and political engagement, and academic excellence. Murphy taught political theory and Urban Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara University, and San Francisco State University, where he directed the San Francisco Urban Institute. He served as the principle legislative consultant for the California State Legislature’s 1980s review of California’s Master Plan for Higher Education and the Legislature’s redrafting of...
Senior Research Associate, Center for Studies in Higher Education. Co-author (with Margaret Cheney) of A Brief History of the University of California (University of California Press, 2004) and editor of The Pursuit of Knowledge: Speeches and Papers of Richard C. Atkinson (University of California Press, 2007). Her most recent book is Entrepreneurial President: Richard Atkinson and the University of California, 1995-2003 (University of California Press, 2012), a study of the Atkinson presidency and the principal issues facing the University of California during...
