Melvin Oliver

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Professor Melvin Oliver is a gifted and unusually effective undergraduate teacher, an innovative graduate instructor and mentor and a highly sought-after teacher of sociological concepts and public policy analysis to the general public. For 16 years, Professor Oliver's unique gift to the department has been the way in which he has changed the lives of his students. He has engaged the most highly charged academic and public policy issues and left his students with the knowledge, tools and critical thinking necessary not only to “understand” the world but to also “change” it. Through the introduction of field studies components in his class, Oliver has given his students the link between knowledge and action.

An innovator in teaching, Oliver has been at the forefront of many major undergraduate teaching initiatives pursued at the university. Together with a colleague, he created the only venue for an ethnic studies course ever taught at UCLA: “Racial Minorities in the United States.” The course is a team-taught endeavor which includes participants from sociology, anthropology, history, social work, law and the humanities.

Using funds from the Ford Foundation, Oliver has enriched both undergraduate and graduate studies related to urban inequality. The Undergraduate Research and Training Program in Urban Poverty and Public Policy, created by Oliver and a colleague from the geography department, is a year-long initiative which trains talented undergraduates in the theory and empirical analysis of issues in the underclass poverty debate. The faculty and graduate student workshop on urban poverty and public policy provides a unique setting for interaction between graduate students and nationally recognized faculty.

To the wider community, Professor Oliver has increasingly taken the role of commentator, educator and analyst of current issues. For instance, with his colleagues in the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, he played a significant role in interpreting and communicating the meaning and significant of the Los Angeles civil disorders of April 29, 1992.