Furman Center Kicks Off Integration Research Initiative with a Tour and Talks

This fall, NYU’s Furman Center launched the Integration Research Initiative (IRI), a new project focused on racial and economic inequality and integration. Its goal is to develop a body of research addressing issues of inequality in neighborhoods and schools. Through this initiative, and in partnership with the NYU School of Law’s Staus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice, the Furman Center is hosting an interdisciplinary group of distinguished scholars from around the world to focus their scholarship and intellectual energies on economic inequality and integration.

To launch the IRI, the Furman Center convened a number of scholarly and policy-based discussions and events during the fall semester.

• On Tuesday, November 19th, Sherrilyn Ifill, the President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), moderated a discussion at the inaugural event of the Integration Research Initiative’s Policy and Practice Series. Sherrilyn discussed the LDF’s continuing advocacy and litigation fighting for full racial equality in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. 
   
• In a Straus Public Lecture, Straus Fellow Desmond King discussed the “darker” history of the United State’s policy on eugenics up to the latter half of the 20th century. “Eugenics resonated so loudly because it granted legitimacy through nothing less than science itself to people’s fears and prejudice,” said King. “It had the endorsement of the Supreme Court. And these fears didn’t just vanish overnight.” King is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford. Read more >>
   
• In November, a group of Straus Fellows visited the Weeksville Heritage Center in Crown Heights, a museum dedicated to the history of this pre-Civil War community of free black property holders. As a political and cultural base for African Americans in New York City during the 19th Century, the museum provides valuable insight into the African American community of Weeksville, Brooklyn.
   
• In the second lecture of the IRI Policy and Practice Series, Dr. Hardin Coleman led a discussion on the recent overhaul to the Home-Based School Choice Plan for the Boston public school system. He engaged Straus fellows in a lively discussion combining “ground truths” with academic discourse on school choice and the promise of integration. Dr. Coleman is serves as a member of the External Advisory Council on School Assignment for Boston and has served as Dean in the School of Education at Boston University since 2008.

Learn more about the Integration Research Initiative and the 2013-2014 Straus Fellows.