Kenji Hakuta

Kenji Hakuta is the Lee J. Jacks Professor of Education emeritus at Stanford University. An experimental psycholinguist by training, he is best known for his work in the areas of bilingualism and the acquisition of English in immigrant students. He is the author of numerous research papers and books, including Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism and In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second Language Acquisition. He chaired a National Academy of Sciences report Improving Schooling for Language Minority Children, and co-edited a book on affirmative action in higher education,Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education. Hakuta is also active in education policy. He has testified to Congress and other public bodies on a variety of topics, including language policy, the education of language minority students, affirmative action in higher education, and improvement of quality in educational research. He has served as an expert witness in education litigation involving minority students. Hakuta received his BA Magna Cum Laude in Psychology and Social Relations, and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, both from Harvard University. He served on the faculty at Stanford from 1989-2017, except for three years (2003-2006) when he helped start the University of California at Merced as its Founding Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. His prior academic appointments have been at Yale University (Psychology), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (Education). He was a Fellow at the Center Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Linguistics and Language Sciences), and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.