When asked how he became involved in education and the study of educational equality, Bud Mehan—a Sociology professor and director of the Center for Research, Educational Equity and Teaching Excellence (CREATE)—is able to summarize his experience quite succinctly: “Right from the beginning of my career I’ve been concerned about education in general, but equity in particular, and how it is affected by human interaction. Over time, my focus has shifted from trying to describe inequity in education to trying to make educational equity happen.” He starts laughing and continues, “Now having said that, I’ve made it sound awfully neat, but it was really much messier than that.”

Indeed. Studying educational equality and making it happen is not a simple process. At CREATE, Mehan, his staff and colleagues focus their efforts on trying to address a major challenge facing universities like UC San Diego: the need to increase the number of underserved, low-income youths who are eligible for admittance to college.

“CREATE is a research enterprise,” says Mehan. “It’s a center that deals with educational equity issues. Right now, we’re trying to demonstrate the conditions under which it’s possible to achieve an equitable educational environment, especially for underrepresented minority youth. It’s a different focus than I had before and the work is exciting.”

And what did Mehan focus on before becoming involved in CREATE?

After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara, Mehan started out his teaching career as an assistant professor in the Sociology department at Indiana University. It wasn’t long before Aaron Cicourel, his former thesis advisor at UC Santa Barbara, came calling and asked Mehan if he wanted to become involved in a new Teacher Education Program that Cicourel and other faculty members were starting at UCSD.

The combination of coming to a “lush” intellectual environment at UCSD and the opportunity to create something new proved to be an irresistible lure for Mehan. The fact that it gave him the chance to return to Southern California didn’t hurt either. “The weather here is certainly much better than in Indiana,” he jokes.

Mehan joined the Department of Sociology faculty in 1972 and served as the director of the Teacher Education Program (now called Education Studies) for several years. Initially, he focused his research on the subject of educational inequality, an area he had become interested in as a graduate student.

“The research I was doing at the time was innovative,” he says. “I was using videotape as a research tool, and we would videotape psychological testers, teachers or counselors interacting with students. We would then analyze the exchanges to see if interaction would change depending on who the student was, his or her ethnic background or gender. In this way, we would document educational inequality.”

But over time, Mehan became a little disenchanted with the research because he didn’t find it fulfilling enough.

‘I thought I could, or our field could, make a bigger, more inclusive contribution to education,” he says. “I wanted to work towards educational equity and trying to make it happen.”

Mehan’s newfound interest in achieving educational equity eventually led to his involvement with the establishment of The Preuss School, the middle and high school affiliated with UC San Diego that provides an intensive college prep education for motivated low-income students who will become the first in their families to graduate from college.

“Preuss was intended to be a remedy, a model for educating students from underrepresented minority backgrounds and preparing them for college,” says Mehan. “But in order for a model to work and be judged successful, it needs to be studied. That’s where CREATE comes in.”

CREATE was established to assess Preuss’ success and apply the principles learned through research and observation to other local schools with underserved students. Mehan has served as director of CREATE since 1999, and says it’s the opportunity to do the kind of innovative work underway at the organization that keeps him here and teaching at UCSD.

“CREATE is like an educational field station with the opportunity to build models of academic success,” says Mehan. “Do other schools we collaborate with always take our advice or adopt all the ideas developed at Preuss? No, but that’s their choice. From a research standpoint whatever they do is still fine by me because I want to track it all and see what happens. It’s hard to top that experience anyplace else.”