Behind a Latina Donor's Big Gift for Critical Race Studies at UCLA
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UCLA LAw, where the Critical Race Studies program is housed. Ken Wolter/shutterstock
As has long been the case, university campuses are front and center in today’s culture wars. Philanthropic donors have played and are playing a prominent role in many of those battles, with ongoing skirmishes over institutions’ positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict being only the most recent example.
Race, as ever, is central to the debates that have engulfed colleges, and racial justice funders have drawn at least some lines in the sand. For instance, take the Nikole Hannah-Jones saga. After the UNC Board of Trustees declined to approve the journalism department’s recommendation to grant Hannah-Jones tenure in 2021, the 1619 Project architect eventually took her talents to Howard University with Ta Nehisi-Coates, backed by nearly $20 million in funding from the Knight, MacArthur and Ford foundations, and an anonymous donor.
It was a messy episode, but a good reminder that philanthropy often amounts to a battle of ideas. And in a country that’s becoming increasingly polarized, subjects like the 1619 Project’s interpretation of American history and the field of critical race theory will continue to draw support from racial justice funders even as other grantmakers shy away — or oppose them outright.
This all comes to mind with a recent $1 million gift to UCLA School of Law last week to bolster the school’s Critical Race Studies program. Though not large in the grand scheme of higher ed mega-giving, the gift is one of the biggest commitments to date specifically earmarked for critical race studies, and stands out in a field of giving where major donors tend to stick to far safer bets, like, say, naming rights on medical school or dormitory.
The donor behind the gift is Alicia Miñana de Lovelace, a UCLA Law alumna and Los Angeles-area attorney who supports a number of institutions in Southern California and beyond. IP recently connected with Miñana de Lovelace to find out more about what inspired the gift, how UCLA stayed on her radar for all of these years, and what she thinks philanthropy can do during a time when CRT has been under sustained attack from conservative culture warriors.
A focus on legal scholarship and Latino representation
Launched in 2000, the Critical Race Studies program at UCLA Law describes itself as the “first law school program in the United States dedicated to critical race theory in legal scholarship and related disciplines.” A cornerstone of the program involves training law students not only to analyze how the law and legal institutions create racial hierarchies but also how to dismantle them.
Graduate programs like UCLA Law were essentially the only place critical race theory showed up for the past four decades, until the backlash against 2020’s nationwide racial justice uprising made CRT a buzzword for the right. Notably, CRT took on a prominent place in the culture wars engulfing K-12 education, which is well outside CRT’s traditional graduate school wheelhouse — and prompted conservative funders to back K-12-focused anti-CRT campaigns, with progressive funders coming in to resist them.
This gift, however, remains squarely focused on graduate education. Miñana de Lovelace’s $1 million commitment, the largest UCLA’s program has ever received, will be used to boost the program, while promoting Latino scholars and scholarship. It will create Laura E. Gómez Teaching Fellowship on Latinx People and the Law, honoring a longtime professor who is set to retire after three decades at UCLA. From her early days on the school’s advisory board to joining the board of directors, and now in her role as chair of the UCLA Foundation board, Miñana de Lovelace long worked closely alongside Gomez at UCLA.
As for the gift, Miñana de Lovelace doesn’t mince words. “Right now, we don’t have any Latino professors at the law school, I think, with the departure of Laura. For UCLA being placed in L.A. with a majority [Latino] population, that’s why it’s critical,” she said. The gift, she hopes, will help credentialed Latino scholars gain positions at UCLA or other top law schools. She anticipates her gift will provide funding for about 15 years.
“I’m hoping we can educate the broader population with these concepts”
Alicia Miñana de Lovelace graduated from UCLA Law in 1987 and became involved with the La Raza Law Students Association in the mid-1990s. Born and raised in Puerto Rico and of Cuban ancestry, she calls her experience at UCLA “lovely.” She immediately plugged into the social justice community there. “Students there really care about community. I really thought that the law school experience was revealing to me. Activism at UCLA was reflected in everything they did and the professors had a culture of caring and really opening the eyes of young people,” she said.
Miñana de Lovelace said she believes that justice-minded individuals armed with an understanding of the law have the capability to tackle some of the most intractable problems facing government and society today. In those early days with La Raza Law in the 1990s, she funded scholarships to law students looking to advocate for the Latino community.
That was when she also started to work with Gomez, a Stanford- and Harvard-educated sociologist who became a professor at UCLA in the early 1990s. The two connected on empowering Latinos at UCLA Law. Gomez took the time to pick up the phone, stay in touch and share her latest books. “She always kept in touch with me. No matter if she thought there would be future support here, she was a person who knew I could influence things in some way at the law school because I was one of the Latinos involved there,” Miñana de Lovelace said of Gomez.
Miñana de Lovelace was also influential in standing up the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA Law School, which she created with a $5 million gift alongside her husband Rob Lovelace, vice chairman and president of Capital Group Companies. She is particularly proud of the work the center has done fighting for undocumented students. She is also proud of the immigrant story of her family, who have also supported places like Learning Rights Law Center, Human Rights Watch and Nature Conservancy, specifically its work in the Caribbean.
UCLA’s Critical Race Studies program well predates the conservative furor over the topic. But in the present climate, it’s impossible to avoid the political charge the term has taken on. Between 2021 and 2022, 563 measures against critical race theory were introduced across the country and 241 of them have been adopted, according to a UCLA Law report published last year. But Miñana de Lovelace doesn’t see that as a reason to pull back — much the opposite. “I see that such concepts are being attacked when they shouldn’t because they really help communities at large and help this nation be more inclusive,” she said. “I’m hoping we can educate the broader population with these concepts.”
Looking ahead, she hopes the law school’s fellows will also help in the work of pushing back against right-wing attacks on the curriculum, even as they reach tenure and deanships at top law schools. “We need representation from that Latino community in a big way,” she said.
