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Published on 7/5/2016.

As the month of June, and Dr. Mark Winter’s tenure as our Interim Vice President of Instruction and Student Development came to a close, I spent some time reflecting on the several conversations Mark and I had over the past year. The one topic that particularly sticks in my mind was diversity in higher education and our personal experiences serving in various baccalaureate and community colleges.

One of the things we talked about was the recent student protests at the University of Missouri that led to the resignation of the Chancellor of the Missouri system. This action propelled the lack of cultural diversity and institutional racism in higher education to a nationwide media topic. We haven’t experienced the student protests that have spurred college administrations from across the country to examine how their organizational cultures perpetuate systemic and institutional racism. That said we should not assume that we are doing our best to address issues of diversity and inclusion because of the absence of student protests at College of the Redwoods.

With the arrival of the Chancellor’s Office Student Success and Student Equity initiatives we’ve been compelled to engage in district-wide discussions to enhance student success and increase the percentage of minority and underrepresented students in the classroom. However, up to this point the benefits of diversity and inclusion in the hiring of faculty, administrative, and staff has not, in my opinion, received the same focused attention.

Over the past few years, we’ve set student success as a key goal of our annual planning. To further our efforts, we should turn to the student development research which suggests that having faculty and staff who are diverse, who know how to work with diverse students, and who infuse diversity into teaching, learning and service will contribute to student success. I would go further and say that colleges that incorporate cultural diversity and inclusion in their institutional cultures are better able to serve students and communities. Our students come not only from various races and ethnicities but also from different economic, geographic, and religious backgrounds. There is also diversity of our students in terms of age, disabilities, and sexual orientation. I think everyone would agree that important in the success of all students is the college’s ability to attract and retain faculty and staff who are capable of engaging with our diverse student bodies and empowering them to succeed in reaching their goals.

In recent years, the Eureka campus had fewer than 70 percent Caucasian students, whereas Humboldt County had almost 80 percent Caucasian residents. Caucasians at CR are especially offset by an increasing Hispanic student body, which is approaching 20 percent.

I think in our hiring practices, we have relied too much on simply complying with Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action laws rather than implementing strategies that will move us forward in deliberate ways. Our Board of Trustees has taken the lead in making diversity and inclusion a prominent goal for the District. On June 4, 2016 the Board adopted a new mission statement that includes the sentence “The College continually assesses student learning and institutional performance and practices to embrace diversity, to encourage a healthy community environment and to improve upon the programs and services we offer, all to promote student learning.” Today, the Trustees also included an objective in the Board’s and my 2016-17 goals to implement strategies that promote diversity and inclusion in hiring. This is a strong and significant step for our college.

With the Board’s leadership and support, the administration is committed to facilitating conversations centered on how the entire district community can engage in activities that support a diverse community and promote inclusion in all aspects of our governance and operations. To that end, over the next year, the administration is going to focus on four interest areas of emphasis:

• Ensure that diversity priorities and initiatives are articulated so that the college community understands their importance in learning, interacting, and conducting business day in and day out;
• Work with Human Resources to assess its practices and protocols in actively and strategically recruit, develop, and retain a diverse workforce;
• Engage with the larger external community in helping to create a diverse environment on campus; and
• Work with the Academic Senate and the Professional Development Committee to integrate diversity and inclusion into all aspects of the college life, including governance, professional development, and the curriculum.

A first but significant, step in meeting the Board’s goal and addressing the above interest areas of emphasis was our Professional Development Committee’s engagement with Dr. Darrick Smith last April. Dr. Smith led a district-wide discussion on Retention, Persistence and Completion and Increasing Equity in Community Colleges. Last week, Renee Saucedo, our new Director of Student Equity and Success, continued the movement forward by inviting fourteen faculty, staff, and administrators to participate in the “Our North Coast” project. The project is a community wide initiative to encourage a community-wide understanding of how CR can:

• Involve groups of people who have been excluded from opportunities due to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and/or social or economic status;
• Become more inclusive toward marginalized groups, who currently experience exclusion when it comes to access; and
• Understand the information and methods used to create a society where we can all actively and fully participate, regardless of status.

The CR cohort will move through a series of trainings, spanning 18 months, with groups from other organizations in our service area. The series will be led by the Government Alliance on Race and Equity and the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Our participation in this exciting and worthwhile project will help us implement tools for assessing our inclusion, review our policies and practices, develop strategies to advance equity, implement a framework for measuring progress towards equity goals, and help us meet the Board’s goal of supporting the administration’s efforts to implement strategies that promote diversity and inclusion in hiring.

The first training will take place on September 19 and 20, in Humboldt County. The cohort will meet quarterly for a full day over 18 months (six sessions). Each quarterly session will require homework to be carried out before the next one. A rough approximation would be 48 hours of meetings (over 18 months), 12 hours for check-in calls (over 18 months), and 8-10 hours per month for assessment, development and implementation of equity plans.

Our faculty, administrative, and staff positions are competitive. Our hiring processes tend to create a set of culture-bound values and hiring criteria that perpetuate the status quo while trying to meet particular professional qualifications. I don’t mean to suggest that the minority candidates who apply for our positions shouldn’t meet job qualifications. I do think, however, we don’t adequately see a candidate’s sex or ethnicity as having added value to the college’s culture and our students’ success.

I know that sometimes people are reluctant to have conversations that focus cultural diversity—admittedly they’re hard and uncomfortable conversations to have. However, I believe that our conversations will ultimately make a difference to our students, our society, and our college.