Purvis Named Truman Scholar
Student’s dream is to attend Harvard, open a feminist law center.
Dara Purvis, now a senior majoring in theater and political science with a 4.0 GPA, is the latest USC College student to be named a Truman Scholar. The scholarships, named for former U.S. President Harry S. Truman, recognize public service as well as academic achievement. The 77 winners nationwide each received $30,000 for graduate studies.
Purvis is a founding member of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance at USC, which has sponsored campus appearances by speakers such as Mavis Leno and Katherine Spillar. She is chairperson of the Academic Culture Initiative Student Advisory Board, and active in USC College Democrats and the Women’s Student Assembly.
“My parents raised my sisters and me to be very socially conscious,” she says. “They raised us to be aware of the problems in the world, and that we have a real obligation to try to make things better for other people.”
Purvis’ father teaches constitutional law at a college near Fresno, and her mother began practicing law three years ago after returning to school for her degree. Purvis grew up in Fresno, where she was a member of her public high school’s award-winning Academic Decathlon Team.
She expects to use the Truman Scholarship for Harvard Law School, her first choice because of its strength in public-interest law. Eventually, Purvis says, she would like to found a feminist law clinic that would harness the resources of a law school’s students and faculty to pursue legal and policy goals through the courts in areas such as abortion rights, health-care discrimination and the gender-wage gap.
Purvis is president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance. “Hopefully, we’ll take over the campus,” she says with a wry smile. Although she finds that some of her fellow students are hostile toward the women’s movement and that even many supporters shy away from the word “feminist,” the organization has grown steadily and accomplished a great deal, she says. She wants the organization to continue working with other student groups on campus to “build more of an activist community at USC.”
Purvis was also a columnist for the Daily Trojan during the past school year, writing regularly on such topics as media bias and the importance of unfettered speech post-Sept. 11. She has taken up fencing with the USC Fencing Club, and she works several hours a week as an SAT tutor at two South Central Los Angeles public high schools.
If it sounds like Purvis is an overachieving drone, think again. For a freshman project, she designed a witty Web page about herself, her family and her friends, complete with stick drawings to illustrate their personalities. A 1999 Fresno Bee article about her high school Academic Decathlon Team lead with a description of Purvis as a “zany spirit into free expression … fun and brainy.”
At that point, Purvis hoped to be an actress. Now, although she still enjoys theater, she says, “There is something about politics and the law that really pulls me.”
Purvis has taken several political science classes from associate professor Howard Gillman, who suspended the usual syllabus for his Law, Politics and Public Policy class in 2000 to track the legal and political maneuverings surrounding the Bush-Gore contest. (Gillman wrote a book about the election as well.) She considers Gillman and Mark Kann, political science professor and director of the Academic Culture Initiative, as her mentors at USC.
“Dara brings a sense of urgency to her studies,” Gillman says. “She understands that a serious engagement with vital political, legal and ethical issues is central to who she is as a person.”
