Estela Mara BensimonSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

CUE has worked with thousands of college professionals—from presidents to faculty to academic counselors since its founding, helping them take steps in their daily work to reverse the impact of the historical and structural disadvantages that prevent many students of color from excelling in higher education.

The innovative Equity Scorecard process takes a strengths-based approach starting from the premise that faculty and administrators are committed to doing “the good.” CUE builds upon this premise by developing tools and processes that empower these professionals as “researchers” into their own practices, with the ultimate goal of not just marginal changes in policy or practice, but shifts on those campuses towards cultures of inclusion and broad ownership over racial equity.

Professor Bensimon’s critical action research agenda has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Teagle Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The James Irvine Foundation. Dr.

Bensimon has published extensively about equity, organizational learning, practitioner inquiry and change; and her articles have appeared in journals such as the Review of Higher Education, Journal of Higher Education, Liberal Education, and Harvard Educational Review.

Her books include Critical Approaches to the Study of Higher Education (co-edited with Ana Martinez-Aleman and Brian Pusser) which was selected by the American Education Research Association, as the 2016 Outstanding Publication. Division of Postsecondary Education; Engaging the Race Question: Accountability and Equity in US Higher Education (with Alicia C.

Dowd), Confronting Equity Issues on Campus: Implementing the Equity Scorecard in Theory and Practice (co-edited with Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux). Dr. Bensimon has held the highest leadership positions in the Association for the Study of Higher Education (President, 2005-2006) and in the American Education Research Association, Division on Post secondary Education (Vice-President, 1992-1994).

She has served on the boards of the American Association for Higher Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She was the Chair of AERA’s Social Justice and Action Committee. The University of Wisconsin in 2010 awarded Dr. Bensimon with a 2010 Outstanding Women of Color in Education Award.

In 2011, she was inducted as an AERA Fellow in recognition of excellence in research and received ASHE’s Council on Ethnic Participation Founders Service Award. She also received the Association for the Study of Higher Education Research Achievement Award in 2013.

She is a recipient of the USC Mellon Mentoring Award for faculty and Distinguished Service Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education. In 2015, she received the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) Outstanding Latina Faculty Award for Research & Teaching.

She was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2017 and she was presented with the 2017 Social Justice in Education Award by the American Education Research Association. From 1996 to 2000, Dr. Bensimon was associate dean of the USC Rossier School of Education and was a Fulbright Scholar to Mexico in 2002.

From Teachers College, Columbia University, she earned her doctorate in higher education.