Diversity
of CSULB faculty examined
By Kristen Wooley
On-line Forty-Niner
As
one of the most diverse campuses in the
state, Cal State Long Beach is a melting
pot of a student body. Now it is time to
look at the faculty.
Although
efforts do not go overlooked that CSULB
is trying to hire more women and ethnically
diverse faculty members, those efforts may
still be scrutinized when looking at the
numbers.
The
California State University system Office
of the Chancellor statistics look at appointments
in regards to the number of tenure track
hiring for fall 2002. In Long Beach, there
were 66 appointments, in which 44 percent
were white males, 12 percent were minority
males, 8 percent were minority females and
24 percent were white females. The numbers
for other CSU system schools had similar
in ratios.
“It’s
hard to look at a statistic and decipher
what it is telling you,” said James Manseau
Sauceda, director of Multicultural Center
and communications professor. “I don’t think
that just because I am a Latino male, that
should give me any advantages over someone
else. I do believe it is important to have
diversity in faculty to enlighten and ignite
a subject area, but that isn’t the entirety
of it.”
Manseau
Sauceda went on to say that he believes
the campus has gone to great lengths to
promote diversity on campus and that the
key is not necessarily to focus on the individual
professor’s ethnic background, but whether
a professor’s curriculum is diverse.
In
his experience, starting as a student at
CSULB and now being a faculty member, many
programs have been implemented to tackle
diversity requirements. For example, he
said, the communications department has
updated its textbooks to explore diverse
ways of communicating.
In
regards to the tenure track statistics,
Manseau Sauceda commented that it is not
a matter of racial biases, but that the
standards for hiring tenure track professors
are very traditional.
“As
a Latino I might be overlooked, not because
of my race, but because my research concentration
might be different from what that department
is looking for,” Manseau Sauceda said. “A
lot of multicultural faculty have a lot
of experience with community involvement
and sometimes the department is looking
for a more traditional scholastic research.
It’s just a matter of breaking the mold,
and it’s happening.”
As
a psychology major, April Jensen admits
to having had a majority of white male professors
and only a couple of female professors in
the two years she has been on this campus.
She said she believes that a lack of minority
representation might give a minority student
an altered perspective on his or her own
abilities.
“I
think that stereotypes start to arise, but
it’s not that certain people can’t handle
the job. The problem starts with giving
everyone an equal opportunity to receive
the education it takes to get into these
fields,” Jensen said. “If someone is coming
from a lower socioeconomic status, it is
going to make it harder to go to college,
get the degree and to advance successfully.”
Some
factors do stand in the way as far as hiring
when it comes to university policy and changes
that have been made by the state.
“The
university does have a protocol to follow
in hiring, but with the implementation of
Proposition 209, it makes it harder to track
and monitor the recruitment pool for diversity,”
said Kathleen Cohn, assistant vice president
of Academic Personnel and Assessment.
Proposition
209, and its proposed measures states that,
“This measure would eliminate state and
local government affirmative action programs
in the areas of public employment, public
education, and public contracting to the
extent these programs involve ‘preferential
treatment’ based on race, sex, color, ethnicity,
or national origin.”
“Exposing
students to a wide variety of knowledgeable
people is the key,” said Clyde Crego, director
of Faculty and Staff Assistance Programming.
“Ethnicities have cultural knowledge that
with its absence, teaching is not as enriching
as it could be.”
Cohn
said that the efforts have not ceased to
remain on the track of hiring a diverse
faculty, it is just proving more of an obstacle
to get a qualified pool of recruitments
that is diverse.
“One
of the minimal requirements for hiring is
a Ph.D. as well as common qualifications
in working with a diverse campus,” Cohn
said. “We need to begin getting more women
and minorities into graduate programs.”
But
the problem is harder than that to fix,
she admits, and getting the applicants into
the pool of new-hire candidates initially
is not an easy task.
“It
is more likely to see certain people gravitate
toward certain fields,” Cohn said. “For
example, you see a lot of men applying for
the engineering department and more men
in the liberal arts field. There is individual
networking going on within each discipline
that reflects on the campus as a whole.”
The
push needs to be, Crego suggested, at the
root where education begins and start the
coaching to succeed there. He also says
that the state should be pushing more to
make that financially possible for women
and minorities.
The
university in general, Cohn said, has a
good success rate with diversity support
on campus and that there has been no pattern
of un-represented minorities leaving. There
has also been a high rate of the university
awarding tenure and again, no pattern of
under-represented faculty.
“The
earlier in the pipeline we can get to women
and minorities and get them into the programs
they need to been in, the better,” Cohn
said. “This is a positive outlook because
in five years, there will be more role models,
it will start moving, and it will get better
as we go along.”
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