A College’s First Chief Diversity Officer Sees Cultural Differences as Assets

Saint Mary’s College of California

Difference as an Asset

As the inaugural chief diversity officer at Saint Mary’s College of California, Tomas Gomez-Arias draws on what he has learned as a professor of marketing and global business.

As he did his research, he says, he saw how multinational companies “work in different environments and regions with work forces with different languages, different religions, different races, different cultures, in a very substantial way.”

Cultural differences should be seen as assets that can make an organization more dynamic, innovative, and productive, he concluded, instead of as a “problem” that has to be solved.

His strategy in his new job involves “really looking at our mission and identity and how differences actually contribute to making us a better place in terms of performance and in terms of inclusion and people being happy in the organization.”

Some people at Saint Mary’s have found inclusion elusive. In 2013, a faculty member of Asian Indian origin sued the university, saying it had discriminated against him by denying him a promotion to full professor and through other actions. Last month a state appellate court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit. News coverage of the case brought to light complaints by several former faculty members and administrators who said that the university was unsupportive of minorities.

In 2007 the university’s accreditor took it to task for appearing to tolerate acts of incivility toward female and minority faculty members. The agency has noted progress since then and, in a report last year, commended the institution’s improvement in several measures of inclusiveness, though it cited “a few residual pockets in the community where people feel discriminated against.”

Mr. Gomez-Arias says he hopes to improve faculty diversity through recruitment, and to use mentoring to make sure new recruits stay.

As part of his new role, Mr. Gomez-Arias — who continues to teach two courses but may drop down to one next semester — serves as program-management lead of the College Committee on Inclusive Excellence, which he has been a member of since it began in 2008.

He says the university is trying to formalize financial and other support for affinity groups on the campus, including ones for black faculty and staff members and for female faculty members. Under a proposal, each group would have a sponsor in the administration who would offer guidance and advocacy.

“There’s always a risk when you talk about formalizing and institutionalizing things,” Mr. Gomez-Arias says. “You always have worries that you are losing some of the vitality of those groups, so we are trying to be careful with that.” — Jamaal Abdul-Alim

Art and Justice

Nomi Talisman

In their 32-minute animated film, Last Day of Freedom, Dee Hibbert-Jones, an associate professor of art and new media at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the co-director, Nomi Talisman, show what happened after Bill Babbitt made a fateful decision.

His story, and the way the filmmakers presented it, struck such a strong chord with audiences and critics that the project won several documentary-film awards in 2015 and was a nominee for the 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

Mr. Babbitt helped the police arrest his brother, Manuel Pina (Manny) Babbitt, who had returned from duty as a U.S. Marine in the Vietnam War deeply traumatized and with shrapnel in his skull. In 1980, five years after he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he killed an elderly woman.

A few moments into the film, Bill Babbitt says that as a younger man he had supported the death penalty, “and then one day it came knocking on my door.” In 1999 the State of California executed his brother. “I felt that justice would prevail. And it did not,” Bill Babbitt says in the film.

Ms. Hibbert-Jones and Ms. Talisman build their account on the narrative of Bill Babbitt, depicting him with spare animation. They rendered, at times literally, at times metaphorically, Mr. Babbitt’s account of his brother’s life, illness, deranged actions, and fate.

Primarily a creator of sculpture and digital and public art, Ms. Hibbert-Jones turned to drawing — her first artistic love while growing up in England — for the documentary. She and Ms. Talisman made more than 30,000 drawings using both rotoscoping — tracing footage of Mr. Babbitt’s testimony frame by frame — and hand-drawn images.

Using animation allowed them to accord some privacy to the Babbitt family and to avoid re-enactments, says Ms. Hibbert-Jones. It also permitted them to “create a sense of intimacy and also a sense of distance, so you can identify with everybody in a very different way than you would otherwise.” — Peter Monaghan

Waking Up to Baseball

Brian Stethem, California Lutheran U.

Not long after sunrise, twice a week, two dozen students make their way across California Lutheran University’s campus to arrive at Alumni Hall, Room 128. By 7:45 a.m., they are settled at long tables to hear Chris Kimball tell the story of America through baseball.

Mr. Kimball, a historian, is not just a professor. He is also the university’s president. When the history department needed an honors course for its spring catalog, students and faculty members encouraged Mr. Kimball, who had taught a similar class years earlier at Augsburg College, to pinch-hit. The early start time is to accommodate his schedule.

“Baseball is a fascinating way to look at larger issues in the U.S., from labor to race relations to imperialism,” he says. “And, particularly for undergraduates, it can be a more engaging way to tackle some of those larger issues.”

The role of the ballpark, for example, has changed with social conditions. Amid rising racial tensions, concerns over crime, and suburbanization, attendance at games declined in Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic cities in the mid-20th century.

Baseball is also a window on America’s place in global politics. In the 1930s, as the United States and Japan crept toward war, a group of American All-Stars, including Babe Ruth, visited the island nation to compete against Japanese players. Politicians from both countries hoped the tour would promote reconciliation.

In his day job at California Lutheran, Mr. Kimball sees his biggest challenge as encouraging young people — and their parents — to invest in a liberal-arts education. In an era of high tuition and student debt, baseball might seem like a frivolous subject to some. But Mr. Kimball, a Massachusetts native and a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, views it differently: “What we learn in liberal arts is that different forms of knowledge are connected in different ways.”

Baseball also provides valuable life lessons. The Red Sox went 86 years between World Series championships, Mr. Kimball reminds his students. “Keep the faith,” he says. “Good things will eventually happen.” — Caroline Preston

A Farewell to Texas

Frederick R. (Fritz) Steiner, the University of Texas at Austin’s longtime architecture dean, is leaving the state for another deanship. He cites what he sees as Texas’ lack of support for public higher education, as exemplified by the state’s controversial campus-carry law, as a key factor in his decision.

Mr. Steiner will become dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design on July 1. He has three postgraduate degrees from Penn.

The campus-carry law, which will take effect in August at all public four-year colleges in Texas, will allow license-holders to carry concealed weapons into most campus buildings. While the new law was only one factor in his decision, Mr. Steiner says, without its passage he would have never considered another job. “It was campus-carry that opened the possibility of other options.” — Rio Fernandes

Obituary: A Healer for Hawaiians

Richard Kekuni Blaisdell, a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine who worked to improve health care for Native Hawaiians, died on February 12. He was 90 years old.

Dr. Blaisdell earned a medical degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1948 and was an assistant professor there for several years before returning to his native Hawaii to be involved in the University of Hawaii-Manoa’s new school of medical sciences, progenitor of the Burns school. In 1966 he became founding chair of the department of medicine at Manoa. He was on the faculty from 1966 until his retirement, in 2010.

Reports that he helped prepare in the 1980s described the high incidence of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and infant mortality among Native Hawaiians, and advocated the integration of traditional medicine with Western medicine for that group. The change was incorporated into legislation passed by Congress in 1988 to support improvements in health care for Native Hawaiians.

Dr. Blaisdell was also known as an advocate of Native Hawaiian sovereignty. — Ruth Hammond

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