‘A Feather in Your Cap’
In March, Texas A&M University’s flagship campus announced that it had earned federal recognition as a Hispanic-serving institution, a coveted distinction that allows it to compete for additional funds for facilities, faculty, and student services.
Within months, it disbanded its Hispanic-studies department and required a freestanding interdisciplinary program in Latino/a and Mexican American studies to find a home in a single academic department.
Critics say the changes in the structures of Hispanic and Latino studies will make them less visible to students and prospective faculty members and diminish their impact across the university. The HSI designation will ring hollow, they say, without the programs to back it up, including the Latinx center students have been working on for a few years, and the Mexican American-studies program many faculty want.
“Faculty are very demoralized,” said Nancy Plankey-Videla, who coordinates Latino/a and Mexican American studies. She’s an associate professor of sociology with a joint appointment in the School of Law. With the program changes, “I think the message was that Latinx studies wasn’t that important for the university, which was the wrong message to send.”
The freestanding Hispanic-studies department was merged into the university’s newly renamed department of global languages and cultures, a move that prompted thousands to sign a petition warning that the change could hurt student- and faculty-recruiting efforts.
María Irene Moyna, now a professor in the department of global languages and cultures, said that even when Hispanic studies had the status of a department, the number of tenured and tenure-track professors had dropped from 17 to 11 since 2017. “We lost all of our Mexican specialists, and all but one of our linguists,” she said. The university has blamed low enrollments, she added, but she thinks that’s a consequence of failing to maintain an adequate faculty.
The Latino/a and Mexican American-studies program, which offers a minor and a graduate certificate, doesn’t have the money to hire its own faculty, but lists 37 faculty members from fields including public health, history, philosophy, anthropology, and political science as contributors. Instead of relegating the program to the sidelines, as Plankey-Videla feels the university has done, it could have expanded it so that students and scholars across the university benefit.
“If you’re going to put some of these programs that directly speak to the ‘serving’ part of Hispanic-serving institutions as sort of footnotes, that sends a message that the university isn’t really invested in those programs,” said Sonia Hernandez, an associate professor of history and former coordinator of the Latino/a and Mexican American-studies program. “When you use the HSI designation as a feather in your cap, I think it’s problematic if your administrative actions are not going to reflect why you think that’s great in the first place.”
‘A Wake-Up Call’
The HSI designation from the U.S. Department of Education requires that an institution’s full-time equivalent undergraduate enrollment be at least 25 percent Hispanic-identifying students. (The terms Hispanic and Latino are often used interchangeably even though Hispanic refers to people who speak Spanish or are descended from Spanish-speaking populations, while Latino refers to people who trace their roots to Latin America.) The number of colleges meeting that threshold, and competing for certain five-year grants from the Education Department, has exploded in recent years. That’s making it especially hard, some worry, for small, poorly funded colleges that don’t have the grant writers and funding experts that Research 1 universities like Texas A&M have.
Hispanics and Latinos/Latinas make up 40 percent of Texas’ population and an even higher percentage of traditional college-age students, so for Texas A&M, it doesn’t take as much intentional outreach to achieve the 25-percent threshold as it might elsewhere.
The Hispanic-serving program was established to support Hispanic education, but the money, most of which is disbursed through Title V grants, can be used for a wide range of purposes, including laboratory equipment and faculty development, that aren’t specifically targeted to that demographic.
Texas A&M did not make anyone from the administration available to talk about the concerns some have raised about the university’s commitment to Hispanic success, despite several requests from The Chronicle. But on the Office of Diversity’s website, it said the university had established a committee “to amplify and optimize the institution’s designation as an HSI.” The committee will focus on improving academic success and sense of belonging for students from underserved and economically disadvantaged communities, it said.
Denise Meda Calderon, a doctoral student in philosophy, is among a group of students who have been working for a few years on a proposal for a Latinx center that would serve as a cultural and research hub for students and scholars. The pandemic struck just as they were preparing to introduce the proposal, but now Meda Calderon is optimistic that with the HSI designation, the money will be available to make it a reality.
One prominent supporter is Felipe Hinojosa, a professor of history who’s part of the program in Latino/a and Mexican American studies. He was recently named assistant provost for HSI initiatives. He said becoming an HSI should be a start for some overdue changes, like creating the Latinx cultural center and a center for Mexican American studies. The university, he said, should also prioritize hiring more Hispanic faculty members, who currently make up just 7 percent of the faculty.
“If anything, it was a call to action, a wake-up call to our faculty and administration that it’s time to get to work,” he said. “As time passes, more and more people will bring up this designation and ask, ‘What are you doing?’ I want to be able to step up and show them.” —Katherine Mangan
