About

Liliana M. Garces is the Ken McIntyre Professor for Excellence in School Leadership at The University of Texas at Austin. She holds an external appointment as Vice President of Research and Public Impact at the Alliance for Higher Education and has affiliate faculty appointments at The University of Texas School of Law and the Center for Mexican American Studies. Her scholarship broadly examines how legal and education systems shape educational opportunity and create inequality for historically marginalized student populations. Her interdisciplinary work is grounded in the understanding that legal and education systems interact dynamically through the actions of organizational actors, influencing policies and practices that can either exacerbate or reduce social inequality. Her research employs quantitative, qualitative, and legal research methods, and has been funded by prominent foundations such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and others. She has published extensively in top peer-reviewed education and law journals and is a co-editor of several books on racial equity and affirmative action in higher education. Dr. Garces has served on editorial boards for major journals and is an active member of national organizations focused on education issues. Her work has been featured in media outlets including NPR, The New York Times, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She has received numerous awards recognizing her contributions to education research and policy, including the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award, the Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the 2025 Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. Combining her expertise in law and education, she has represented the education community in legal cases before the U.S. Supreme Court concerning race-conscious policies in education.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Public administration
• Social Science
• Public relations
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• Understanding the Construction of Compliance with Anti-“DEI” Legislation

  Brown Digital Repository · 2026-04-22

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• A Call to Build Coalitions to Disrupt a Climate of Suppression

  Change The Magazine of Higher Learning · 2025-03-04 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “We’re on Our Own Out Here”: Faculty Member Responses to Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom and Scholarship on Race

  The Journal of Higher Education · 2025-02-18 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Educational Policy, Racial Equity, and the Courts

  2025-07-17 · 2 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Countering Legislative Attacks on Higher Education: Challenges, Strategies, and Future Directions

  The Journal of Higher Education · 2025-10-10 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• A Call to Counter Repressive Legalism: Addressing the Implications of SFFA v. Harvard

  Journal of college student development · 2024-05-01 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  A Call to Counter Repressive Legalism:Addressing the Implications of SFFA v. Harvard Nicole C. Ngaosi (bio) and Liliana M. Garces (bio) Opponents of race-based affirmative action in higher education have challenged the policy and practice since its inception. The sustained opposition resulted in a series of legal cases that have substantially chipped away at the practice, resulting in what is now termed "race-conscious" admissions (Garces, 2019). After nearly half a century of legal cases endorsing the consideration of race as one of many factors in the admissions process, on June 29, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill further restricted how race can be considered in admissions processes. Specifically, the Court concluded that outside of military academies, the constitution and federal law generally prohibit the consideration of race in admissions, except for the individualized review of how race is related to an applicant's lived experience. The implications of the Court's decision are significant for racially minoritized students who often have steeper, uphill climbs in their educational opportunities compared to their white peers. Yet, as saddened as many scholars and practitioners in the higher education community are to have the consideration of race in admissions further restricted, this Court ruling was a possible outcome given the sustained opposition to the practice and the U.S. Supreme Court's new conservative majority. In this commentary, we provide a brief overview of the legal evolution of affirmative action in admissions over the past four decades leading up to the Court's most recent SFFA cases. We outline some of the developments in the aftermath of this most recent decision that seek to further restrict and unnecessarily suppress the consideration of race in educational practice—a dynamic termed repressive legalism. We argue that the SFFA decision can result in further retrenchment, given the sustained attacks and ongoing pressures targeting racial equity. This sociopolitical environment requires higher education administrators and student affairs practitioners to proactively counter repressive legalism by leveraging legal strategies to reassert racial equity in institutional policies and practices. LEGAL EVOLUTION OF RACE-CONSCIOUS ADMISSIONS What is now broadly termed race-conscious admissions originated from a broader civil rights agenda—known as affirmative action—and various executive orders in the 1960s requiring nondiscrimination in employment and contracts. These executive orders sought to [End Page 331] codify equal opportunity as a means to address the effects of racial discrimination. While these executive orders did not address college enrollment demographics, many higher education institutions modeled this civil rights agenda by instituting admissions processes that guaranteed a certain number of spots to students from disadvantaged populations (Stulberg & Chen, 2013). Yet, since its inception amid the civil rights movement in the 1960s, affirmative action has been the target of reoccurring legal challenges that have diluted its original intent (Fernandez & Garces, 2023). Starting in 1978, the Court's decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) prohibited the consideration of race in admissions via racial quotas as a way to remedy racial discrimination, permitting instead the consideration of race as one of many factors in a holistic process to achieve the educational benefits of a diverse student body. Four legal cases since—Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), Fisher v. University of Texas I (2013), and Fisher v. University of Texas II (2016)—laid out the blueprint for colleges and universities to consider race as one of many factors in admissions decisions. Undeterred by the Court's 2016 ruling in Fisher II upholding the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions, Ed Blum—the litigant who recruited Abigail Fisher in Fisher I and Fisher II and subsequently founded Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA)—continued his anti-civil rights campaign with a new set of lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. When these new cases reached the Court in 2022, three Trump-appointed justices (Gorsuch in 2017, Kavanaugh in 2018, Coney-Barrett in 2020) had joined the Court. Their votes joined those of Roberts, Alito, and Thomas (all of whom...

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Legal Constraints: Understanding Barriers to Humanizing Responses in the Aftermath of Hate Speech at Private Universities

  Education Sciences · 2024-02-08 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Supreme Court rulings prevent public institutions from censoring hate speech for content—even if that content has damaging consequences for marginalized students and conflicts with other institutional objectives. This case study examines administrator responses to hate speech and impacts for racial inclusion at a private university unconstrained by First Amendment protections. The findings illustrate that, even in contexts where administrators have both the constitutional leeway to enact stricter speech policies and a deep investment in building an anti-racist community, normative understandings about freedom of expression hamper efforts for racial inclusion and humanizing responses. We propose an “inclusive freedom” approach that leverages norms of academic freedom as a path forward for postsecondary institutions to address harm in the aftermath of hate speech.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hate Speech on Campus: How Student Leaders of Color Respond

  Review of higher education/˜The œreview of higher education · 2022-03-01 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The spike of hate speech incidents on college campuses since the 2016 U.S. presidential election has compounded the racial hostility students of color face on historically White campuses. These ongoing incidents require institutions to respond purposively to address the harm students of color experience in their aftermath. Using an "inclusive freedom" framework that connects freedom of expression with goals of inclusion, we employ an embedded single-case study of 28 student leaders of color to examine how they responded to hate speech in light of insufficient institutional action. Findings illustrate how student leaders of color bolster inclusion by leveraging their freedom of expression following hate speech incidents. Through efforts that were taxing and left them feeling drained, students generated affinity spaces and fostered dialogue about the negative impacts of hate speech on campus. Their experiences illuminate how institutions can more deliberately promote principles of inclusion and freedom of expression in their responses to hate speech within legal boundaries. These intentional efforts require an antiracist approach to inclusion that attends to the systemic factors that foster hate speech in the first place and to the deleterious consequences for students of color when they encounter hate speech on campus.

  PublisherDOI

• Legal Challenges to Bias Response Teams on College Campuses

  Educational Researcher · 2022 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Over the last 3 years, the advocacy organization Speech First has filed six lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of bias response teams on the grounds that they violate free speech. Bias response teams are university-wide committees that respond to reports of racially charged incidents on college campuses to promote institutional goals of inclusion. These lawsuits are significant because they have resulted in the dismantling of these committees. In this commentary, we bring attention to this renewed wave of legal attacks on racial diversity and inclusion policies on college campuses and its implications for race-focused policy, practice, and research.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  SUNY Press eBooks · 2022-02-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Uma M. Jayakumar

  University of California, Riverside

  7 shared

• Patricia Marin

  Michigan State University

  6 shared

• Evelyn Ambríz

  4 shared

• Gary Orfield

  4 shared

• Catherine Horn

  4 shared

• Dwuana Bradley

  University of Southern California

  4 shared

• Erica Frankenberg

  Pennsylvania State University

  4 shared

• David Mickey-Pabello

  University of California, Los Angeles

  3 shared

Labs

• Educational Leadership and PolicyPI

Awards & honors

• Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award for an article of outstandi…
• Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Hig…
• Excellence in Public Policy Higher Education Award (2020)
• Top 200 university-based scholars who did the most to shape…
• Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (202…