HOW WE HOLD COLLEGES, UNIVERSITIES ACCOUNTABLE
The San Diego Chicano/Latino Concilio on Higher Education, better known as the San Diego Concilio, is a coalition of faculty, staff and students. We have advocated for access and success among Chicanos/Latinos in our local colleges and universities for over 30 years.
In early 2021, after establishing a dialogue with all of the colleges and universities in San Diego County, we began to document the current status of local Chicanos/ Latinos in these institutions. We requested a variety of data — public, not confidential, information — from each of the three public universities and eight community colleges in San Diego. Our request reflected six areas related to access and success for Chicano/Latino students: (1) institutional mission and leadership, (2) student enrollment, (3) student success, (4) faculty composition, (5) institutional support for Chicano/Latino Studies, and (6) campus law enforcement budget and strategies. Our objective is to inform our community about the state of local Chicano participation in higher education and hold our local institutions accountable.
We hoped that these public institutions would recognize and acknowledge their accountability to the local Chicano/Latino community by providing the requested data. Instead, only one institution, San Diego State University, made what we consider a substantive effort to respond to our request. Another public university, UC San Diego — which has historically failed to equitably reflect our Chicano/Latino community in its enrollment, faculty, curriculum and leadership — refused to submit any response. The third public university, Cal State San Marcos, responded to most of our request. The eight community colleges submitted incomplete information. None of them provided information on Chicano Studies or law enforcement strategies and budget while only some provided data on Chicano/Latino faculty.
This failure by most of our local colleges and universities to respond to a request for public information indicates that many of them are not monitoring the conditions that contribute to our Chicano/Latino students’ success. This is despite an unfortunate history of racism against Chicanos/ Latinos that results in institutional exclusion, neglect and hindering conditions that contribute to their underachievement in higher education.
The irony is that all but one of these public colleges and universities — UC San Diego — has achieved Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) status, meaning that their student enrollment is at least 25 percent Chicano/Latino. Latina scholar Gina Garcia emphatically states that achieving this status signals an urgent priority for those institutions to construct campus conditions that maximize Chicano/Latino student success. But how can our public higher education institutions provide such supportive conditions when they fail to monitor the degree to which they respond to our students’ needs?
Despite the sadly incomplete responses we received, we reached some conclusions about the status of local Chicanos/Latinos in higher education. Except for UC San Diego, it appears that Chicano/Latino undergraduate enrollment at local public colleges and universities reflects our representation in the county’s population.
SDSU and CSUSM submitted data indicating that equitable service to Chicanos/Latinos is embedded in their institutional missions. However, except for Cuyamaca Community College, our local institutions have not hired a representative level of Chicano/Latino leadership such as chancellors, presidents, vice chancellors or vice presidents.
All of these institutions except for UC San Diego described programs to maximize Chicano/Latino students’ success, but there is no evidence of their effective coordination and adequate funding. Moreover, we do not have evidence that our public colleges and universities provide a well-funded Chicano/Latino Studies department, or hire an equitable representation of Chicano/Latino faculty across academic disciplines. Likewise, at a time when law enforcement practices are of national concern, critical data on law enforcement practices and their impact on Latinos is missing.
Chicanos/Latinos are not a recent immigrant group or a numerically marginal community. We represent over 30 percent of San Diego County, nearly 40 percent of California and over 55 percent of the state’s K-12 students. Our community’s educational standing is critical for ourselves and the entire state’s social and economic future.
This summer, our Concilio is disseminating reports on each of these six critical dimensions that indicate the status of local Chicanos/Latinos in higher education. We unequivocally call upon these institutions now to improve their accountability to our community by constructing more supportive conditions for our students. We also call on state legislators who help determine the degree of public funding for these institutions — and especially members of the Latino Legislative Caucus — to hold them accountable as well.
Ochoa,