Colleges try to get out in front of their growing populations of Latino students
List: Programs to Attract Hispanic Professors
Article: Academe’s Hispanic FutureBy ROBIN WILSON
Daniel Ramírez was still a graduate student doing research in southern Mexico when an e-mail message arrived from the chairman of religious studies at Arizona State University: Are you interested in a faculty job?
Although Mr. Ramírez was more than a year away from earning his Ph.D. in religion and Latin American cultural studies at Duke University and wasn’t even on the job market, he flew to Tempe for an interview last fall. After just 45 minutes, the dean of liberal arts and sciences at Arizona State delivered a two-word message to the chairman: “Hire him.”
A month later, when the department found another promising young Latino graduate student, the dean, David A. Young, approved an offer for him, too. Mr. Ramírez and Miguel Astor Aguilera, who joined the faculty this fall, are among 21 new Hispanic professors whom Arizona State has brought on in the past two years. In all, 109 -- or 7 percent -- of the university’s tenured and tenure-track professors are Hispanic. By comparison, just 40 of the university’s professors are African-American.
“This is about being aggressive and being willing to make decisions quickly,” says Mr. Young. “You see someone and say, ‘This person’s going to be successful, and we could lose him if we don’t act now.’ This is particularly true when we are trying to recruit exceptionally talented minority faculty.”
While Hispanics have surpassed African-Americans as the nation’s largest minority group, their numbers are still scant in academe. Hispanic professors represented less than 3 percent of full-time faculty members in 2001-2.
“It’s heartbreaking to see how little progress we’ve made,” says Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston who is a Mexican-American. “While there are successes, you would have expected much, much more 25 years ago.”
The numbers are small for several reasons. For one thing, few Hispanics make it through the academic pipeline. Only 1,116 Hispanic scholars earned Ph.D.'s in 2001, most in education and the social sciences. Some observers, arguing that discrimination is to blame for the relatively low numbers of all minorities in higher education, say that universities’ attempts at remedies have focused primarily on hiring black faculty members.
Whatever the case, Arizona State and a handful of other institutions -- the University of Houston, Rice University, and Northampton Community College, in Pennsylvania, among them -- have started special programs to attract Hispanic faculty members. Those colleges are combing through the proceedings of scholarly meetings to find papers by Hispanic academics, and keeping a finger on the pulse of prominent graduate programs to learn who the promising young scholars are. They are snapping up young scholars on their way to Ph.D.'s, and stealing established Hispanic professors away from other institutions.
“If you want this to work, you can’t sit back and wait,” says Joel D. Gereboff, chairman of religious studies at Arizona State.
‘Little Progress’
Laura I. Rendón holds an endowed chair in the College of Education at California State University at Long Beach. Her parents never made it through elementary school, and she, like other Hispanics, “had to break through all kinds of barriers” growing up Mexican-American in Laredo, Tex. Even so, she says, “the struggles of Hispanics aren’t paid attention to as much as other racial and ethnic groups, particularly African-Americans.”
Perhaps because most colleges enroll many more African-American students than Hispanic ones, “diversity” generally means “black” when it comes to hiring minority professors. That doesn’t mean there is an abundance of African-American professors, but their numbers are almost double those of Hispanics: about 32,700 African-American professors, compared with 18,500 Hispanic-Americans in the 2001-2 academic year.
Scholars who carved out academic careers against the odds in the 1970s and ‘80s, are shocked by that proportion. Legal scrutiny of affirmative action has “clipped everyone’s wings,” says Mr. Olivas, leading many universities to step back from aggressive minority recruitment. “People are saying, ‘You have to be cautious. There are lawsuits.’”
That has translated into a general trepidation over efforts to diversify, he says. “If a white superstar comes on the market, they find the money and no one says that’s illegal. But some Mexican-American needs $40,000 a year, and they somehow have to get it cleared by the pope’s wife.”
Hispanic scholars say institutions aren’t exactly banging down their doors, in spite of the efforts of a few universities -- usually those with large proportions of Hispanic students. “The public message is that when minority doctoral candidates come out, they get recruited,” says one young Chicano scholar, “but I can’t say that’s true.” The graduate, who did not want to be identified, earned his doctorate in education from Harvard University in 2000, has co-edited a book, and served on the editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review. Only this month did he have his first job interview, at a public research university in California.
Some factors complicate colleges’ efforts to hire Hispanic professors. “Identifying African-Americans is a lot easier because of the color of their skin,” says Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, an assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech.
Hispanics, however, can be black, white, and shades in between, making it difficult for some to be recognized as members of their minority group. “I’ve had blond, blue-eyed students whose parents are from Puerto Rico, and I would never know they were Hispanic,” says Mr. Pérez-Quiñones, who grew up in Puerto Rico.
“We are very, very different,” says Martha Chavez McGivney, director of the master’s program in public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are people who are Puerto Rican, Colombian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Ecuadoran, South American, and Latin American.”
While Hispanics may share the same language, they do not necessarily have the same social, economic, and cultural roots, all of which can lead to clashes, says Caroline Sotello Turner, a professor of educational leadership and policy at Arizona State. “We can be each other’s worst enemy,” she says. “Intraethnic identities get in the way of promoting Latinos as a whole.”
Ms. Turner, whose mother worked in farm-labor camps in California, says she has seen the identity wars play out on campuses. “I’ve heard on a search committee, ‘Oh, they’re Puerto Rican, not Mexican. They’re not the right Latino.’”
Quick and Flexible
A study by Ms. Turner and Daryl G. Smith, of Claremont Graduate University, to be published in January in The Journal of Higher Education, found that if universities want to diversify, they must put aside their usual hiring practices. The study, which examined nearly 700 faculty searches at three large public-research universities from 1995 to 1998, found that majorities of both African-American and Hispanic professors were hired under special circumstances. Universities either concentrated on individual minority scholars or advertised for professors who had taught diverse student populations or had done research in ethnic studies.
That’s what Arizona State had in mind two years ago, when it began its Southwest Borderlands Initiative, a program that recruits professors whose scholarly work focuses on the U.S.-Mexican border. Mr. Ramírez, for example, studies the changing religious and cultural identity of Mexicans who immigrate to the United States. By creating jobs in scholarly areas that Hispanics are more likely than others to pursue, the university expects to improve its chances of hiring them.
“We use this initiative to build a critical mass, across disciplines, and in doing so we hope we’ll create a magnet” for Hispanic scholars, says Gail Hackett, vice provost for academic personnel.
The university is particularly interested in diversifying its faculty because the number of Hispanic undergraduates there nearly doubled from 1992 to 2002. About 11 percent of its undergraduates are Hispanic. Before the initiative began, Arizona State ran a program called Action Now, with the overt goal of recruiting Hispanic and other minority scholars. But with legal challenges to affirmative action mounting, the university decided to alter its approach. “We were a bit too directed, given the changes in affirmative-action laws, so we had to get more creative,” explains Ms. Hackett.
So far, the university has spent $450,000 on seven appointments in the borderlands initiative. This year it is searching for three more scholars -- in political science, nursing, and psychology.
Arizona State administrators have learned to act quickly and be flexible, hiring two scholars instead of one when the opportunity arises, and scrapping searches that aren’t working. The political-science department looked for a junior scholar studying the U.S.-Mexican border for two years without success. This year administrators told the department to broaden the search to Latino politics in general, and to go after specific scholars rather than search nationally. The department has interviewed two candidates and hopes to offer jobs to both of them soon.
Arizona State officials also stay on the lookout for prominent Hispanic scholars who want to make a move. Finessing such hires takes time and money. It took a decade of wooing, for example, to pry Carlos Castillo-Chavez loose from Cornell University.
Mr. Castillo-Chavez, a professor of biomathematics, directs the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute, which provides research opportunities for minority undergraduate and graduate students. The institute, too, will relocate from Cornell to Arizona State, whose offer to double the institute’s financial resources clinched his decision, says Mr. Castillo-Chavez. The move will allow him to “scale up what I’m doing” by involving many more students. “I want to devote more time to see if I can really change the national landscape,” says Mr. Castillo-Chavez, who will be in Tempe by January.
The sheer number of Hispanic faculty members at Arizona State, 109, makes it an attractive place for recruits. The 33-year-old Chicano Faculty and Staff Association encourages Hispanics on Arizona State’s three campuses to “exchange ideas and experiences” and to “educate the university about Chicano concerns.” The university runs a Hispanic Research Center, which has about a dozen working groups in areas including art, biodiversity, and zoology. And in 1995, Arizona State started a department of Chicano and Chicana studies.
None of that was lost on José M. Abreu this year when he decided to leave the University of Southern California for Tempe. The associate professor of counseling psychology was so keen on Arizona State that he turned down another job offer with tenure to take the position, even though he must still make a tenure bid next year.
It was Iowa State University that made him the tenure offer. “I went to Iowa in the dead of winter, and when you get five minutes from town you’re out in the cornfields,” says Mr. Abreu, who is from Cuba. “There is very little diversity. And while I could have seen going there as a challenge, that’s very scary to me.”
Mr. Abreu admits to feeling a bit guilty. “Who’s going to be the first Hispanic to go to Iowa State and work with the counseling program there?” he asks. “Am I doing the same thing white folks do when they do white flight?”
At Arizona State, it is not unusual for Mr. Abreu to go out with a colleague to listen to salsa. Not only does he have several Hispanic colleagues, but he shares the middle name Miguel with one. They call each other tocayo, which means namesake.
“If you come from a Latin American country, that’s what you do,” he says. “I would never have a tocayo in Iowa.”
PROGRAMS TO ATTRACT HISPANIC PROFESSORS
Colleges are devising specific programs to recruit Hispanic faculty members, and here are some that seem to be working:
- The University of Houston runs the Center for Mexican-American Studies, which brings in visiting scholars to teach and do research for a year. The scholars also serve as a ready source of faculty recruits for the university, which has hired 10 of the 26 visitors since 1986, when the program began. The history department now has four Hispanic scholars; sociology has three.
- Arizona State University established the Southwest Borderlands Initiative two years ago to jump-start its effort to hire more Hispanic professors. It recruits professors whose scholarly work focuses on the U.S.-Mexican border, which is a 90-minute drive from the campus.
- At Rice University, Richard A. Tapia is credited with shepherding through more Hispanic doctoral students in mathematical sciences than anyone else in the country. Only 15 Hispanic-Americans earned Ph.D.'s in mathematics nationwide in 2001. Mr. Tapia, a professor of computational and applied mathematics, has helped about a dozen Mexican-American and Puerto Rican students earn their doctorates in the past 15 years. Several have become professors.
- The Hispanic Caucus at Northampton Community College, in Pennsylvania, helps administrators keep an eye out for promising Hispanic scholars. About 7 percent of the college’s 124 full-time faculty members are Hispanic. The caucus meets monthly for lunch, sponsors social and cultural events on the campus, and helps advise young Hispanic professors making their way through the tenure process.
-- Robin Wilson
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 50, Issue 14, Page A15