Cal State San Bernardino Provost Shari McMahan will host a reception on Thursday, Feb. 27, to honor Brian Levin, criminal justice professor and director of the university’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism who is a recipient of the 2020 CSU Wang Family Excellence Award.
 
The reception will be held from 4-6 p.m. at the Faculty Center for Excellence, room PL-4005 in the John M. Pfau Library. To RSVP for the reception, email provost@csusb.edu.
 
“We are very proud and delighted of Professor Levin being honored with the Wang Family Excellence Award for his exceptional work in the classroom and his outstanding service to our country in tracking extremists and hate crimes,” said Provost McMahan. “Brian exemplifies Cal State San Bernardino’s mission to provide valuable and dedicated instruction to our students and in serving our community for the greater good.”
 
The Wang Family Excellence Award from the California State University is given annually to the university system’s outstanding faculty members and one outstanding staff member who, through extraordinary commitment and dedication, have distinguished themselves by exemplary contributions and achievements. Levin was honored in the Outstanding Faculty Scholarship category.
 
Awardees, who were honored by the CSU trustees on Jan. 28, were selected by a committee comprised of representatives from the Board of Trustees, the chair of the Academic Senate, a previous faculty recipient of the Wang Award and CSU executive staff. Each recipient receives a $20,000 award with the honor; Levin said he plans to direct all of the funds to the work of the center, and a smaller amount to other charities.
   
Levin is the fifth CSUSB faculty member to receive a Wang Family Excellence Award, joining Diane Halpern (psychology, 1999), Robert Blackey (history, 2003), Alan L. Smith (geology, 2006) and Stuart Sumida (biology, 2008).
 
For more than three decades, Levin has been doing more than just keeping an eye on people who inflict some of the worst harm humans wreak on each other. He takes his original and collaborative trend analysis to Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Department of Justice, and also to community stakeholders, because he believes a civil democracy’s market place of ideas should be informed by facts at all levels.
 
From that perspective, Levin has with repeated accuracy identified trends not only to help law enforcement and policy makers fight hate crimes and other extremist acts, but also to inform the public through independent and timely data. Along the way, he has earned the reputation for being one of the most knowledgeable and accessible scholars of extremism and remedies to it. He is often called upon by governmental and academic bodies and journalists around the world for his insight and analysis.
 
In Sept. 2019, Levin was one of four counter-terrorism experts who called for Congressional lawmakers to focus on the growing threat of white supremacists with the same vigor as they do with foreign terrorist organizations. Levin testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 10 – one day before the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and the nation’s capital – to discuss the center’s latest findings on extremist threats to the U.S.
 
Before entering academia in 1996, Levin served as associate director-legal affairs for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch/Militia Task Force in Montgomery, Ala., and as a corporate litigator for the law firm of Irell & Manella. He was also a New York City police officer in Harlem and Washington Heights during the 1980s, and received citations for academics and excellent police duty.
 
For more information, contact the CSUSB Office of Strategic Communication at (909) 537-5007 and visit the Inside CSUSB news site.