San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
NEW LEADER HOPES TO ENERGIZE COMMUNITY COLLEGES
A letter showed up in Carlos Cortez’s mailbox when he was a senior in high school bearing a message whose sting lingers nearly 30 years later.
Georgetown University wrote to say that while Cortez had been accepted for admission, he’d have to take a class to improve his ability to speak English.
The school appears to have assumed that he might need some polishing because his father had moved to the U.S. mainland from Puerto Rico. He didn’t. Cortez was born in Connecticut. English is his first language. He’d been accepted at 10 colleges.
He pushed back, telling Georgetown his admission “absolutely was not conditional.” The university relented.
The lesson for Cortez was that you shouldn’t pre-judge people or assume they can’t do something. That belief recently helped him get a job he cov
eted. On July 1, Cortez will become chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, which serves a population that is larger than that of 10 American states.
He will replace Constance Carroll, a revered leader who spent nearly 20 years guiding an ethnically and racially diverse district in which many students come from low-income households.
SDCCD officials say Cortez embodies the “everybody’s welcome, everybody’s wanted” ethos that’s long been the foundation of the state’s community college system.
At 46, he’s also seen as the person best qualified to deal with the deep problems facing SDCCD’S three for-credit colleges — Mesa, Miramar and San Diego City — and the free, non-credit San Diego College of Continuing Education.
Many University of California and California State University campuses are struggling to accommodate everyone who wants to get in. But community colleges — which are plagued by funding issues — have been losing students for years.
The coronavirus made things worse. Since the pandemic began, from fall 2019 through fall 2020, SDCCD’S enrollment plunged by more than 13,500, or roughly 21 percent.
Cortez has been working in the least glamorous area of academia, serving as president of continuing ed, where he is known as a joyous speed-talker with a distinctive faux hawk haircut and a record of getting things done.
He has expanded classes that train people to become welders, plumbers, chefs and nurses aides. He’s bolstered the child care and food programs some students need to stay in school. He did away with a ban on advertising courses in languages other than English, hoping to draw a more diverse student body.
He’s working to cut the cost of textbooks. And he is a relentless promoter. On a recent morning, Cortez button-holed three welding students and said, “Did you know we have an apprenticeship program? Gimme your email; I’ll tell you about it.”
The exchange occurred at the Educational Cultural Complex, the headquarters of continuing ed. It’s in southeast San Diego, home to many low-income Hispanic, Asian and Black residents.
Cortez, a history professor, has dazzled the region by working to restore ECC’S standing as a major social and cultural center for people “south of the 8,” especially for Black residents.
During its golden era in the 1970s and ’80s, ECC’S theater featured such actors, artists and activists as Whoopi Goldberg, James Avery, Stevie Wonder, Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson and Maya Angelou.
“Before COVID hit, (ECC) was really jumping and popping,” said Ellen Nash, chair of the San Diego chapter of the Black American Political Association of California.
“All of a sudden people were calling me and saying, ‘How do I put on an event there?’ I said, ‘Call Carlos Cortez, he’ll help you out.’”
The events will resume when the pandemic fades, and they will be tailored for diverse audiences.
“Carlos is a gay Puerto Rican man who wants people to have the sort of life and opportunities that he’s had,” said Rabbi Laurie Coskey, chief executive officer of the fundraising foundation that serves continuing ed.
“And what a life it is. A life driven by social justice.”
Upwardly mobile
Cortez is upfront about who he is and what he believes, saying: “I’m an activist. I’m a policy wonk. I’m a nerd. I worked for Bernie Sanders’ campaign 20 years ago. I’ve been a Bernie-crat. I’m a proud, progressive socialist.”
He was born and raised in Meriden, Conn., a heavily Catholic, Democratic, bluecollar stronghold about two hours northeast of New York City. His father, Carlos, and his mother, Laura, both worked in a factory and belonged to a union.
Politics was a familiar topic in their home. The younger Carlos recalls taping a “Carter for President” sign to the family TV when he was 5 years old, and soon decided he personally wanted to become president. By the time he got to middle school, he was helping turn out the vote in local campaigns.
Moving on to college wasn’t merely a possibility. It was expected of Cortez and his two sisters. All of them went.
He chose Georgetown because of its standing in politics and government. Culture shock soon followed. Cortez, who came from modest means, found himself surrounded by wealthy students, many from prominent families. He also was struck by the lack of diversity, noting that none of his tenured professors were people of color.
It was during these undergraduate years that Cortez came to fully recognize that he is gay. A key moment came in 1995, when he spent the summer in Berkeley, on a break from studies.
“That’s where I found myself,” Cortez said. “I lived in a co-op with 300 hippies ... (It) was a house where sexuality and identity — everything — was fluid.”
He recalls feeling like an ugly duckling who had found his home and didn’t want to leave. His parents didn’t think that was a good idea and waved him back to Georgetown.
“As an Hispanic woman I knew how important it was to get an education,” his mother, Laura, told the Union-tribune.
By then, Cortez’s interests were shifting away from elective politics to social justice, policy and a budding interest in becoming a history teacher.
He focused particularly hard on studying Africanamerican feminist political history while earning a bachelor’s degree at Georgetown, a master’s at New York University, and a doctorate at the University of Southern California.
Between his time at NYU and USC, he spent a couple of years teaching U.S. history to eighth-graders at a public school in New York’s Washington Heights.
He recalls the experience with a sense of shock: “The school was unbelievably dilapidated. Paint falling off the walls. There weren’t enough desks for students. Several desks were broken. I mean literally broken, like chairs and tops weren’t connected. The chalkboard was hanging off the wall ...
“My first two years, the principal never once came to my class. The assistant principal used every racial epithet you could imagine in a school that was primarily African-american and Latino.”
It didn’t drive him out of education. He later spent years as a teacher and administrator in Los Angeles, then began his ascent in higher education. Cortez served as director of the education extension service at UCLA, then went on to become acting vice president of instruction at Berkeley City College.
Marìa Nieto Senour, a SDCCD trustee, was floored by how people talked about Cortez when she visited BCC while the district was considering hiring him.
“People were so laudatory, and two people cried,” Senour said. “They actually wept at the idea of losing him. They just felt like he had been so important and so transformative and so lovable.”
The visit helped clinch SDCCD’S decision to make him president of continuing ed in 2015.
It was a sweetly ironic moment for Cortez.
“I (first) came to San Diego when I was 19 for a big party,” he recalled. “When we got off the plane I remember saying, ‘I’m going to move here when I’m old, like when I’m 40.’ And I moved here when I was 40.”
Challenges ahead
As chancellor, Cortez will be expected to produce success stories like the one represented by Mohamed Musse, an immigrant from Kenya.
After some early struggles in education, Musse found his way to San Diego City College, where things just clicked. He studied psychology, earned an associate degree, then transferred to San Diego State University, where he will receive a bachelor’s degree in May.
“You’re not just a number at City College. They know your name,” Musse said. “It’s like a family. My counselors really helped me out.”
Preparing students to transfer to universities is one of the fundamental missions of the state’s community colleges.
It’s been that way since 1960, when it was made part of California’s Master Plan for Higher Education.
But things have not been going well. Fewer than 20 percent of students who enroll in a community college with plans to transfer achieve that goal within four years, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Analysts say community colleges also aren’t doing as well as they should in guiding students through certificate programs that lead to higher-paying jobs and help business and industry in the process.
The root problem is financial. Analysts say the two-year colleges simply don’t get enough money to robustly carry out their most ambitious missions.
The colleges are caught in a Catch-22. They charge some of the lowest fees in higher education, which appeals to students. But they can’t charge significantly more money because many of their students can’t afford to pay the freight. And the state won’t fully cover the gap.
This is not as much of an issue at the UC and CSU schools, whose students, in one way or another — often by running up burdensome debt — find ways to deal with tuition hikes.
Cortez doesn’t have a detailed battle plan yet; that will be worked out with the faculty. He is considering greatly expanding the district’s efforts to raise private donations, something that has not been done on a regular and effective basis.
The prospect for success exists. The district raised more than $100,000 in 2018 when it threw a gala featuring actress Annette Bening, who attended Mesa College.
“We should be asking people who we’ve helped to help us,” Cortez says.
He’s settling in for the long-run. Cortez and his husband, cosmetician Edward Turner, recently bought a home in University Heights. They also added another bulldog to their household and now have three: Beyonce, Amsterdam and Grace.
Cortez recognizes the challenges ahead. When asked if he had a “big gulp” moment when he was named chancellor, he said, “Yes, and then every day after that.”