Regarding Black History Month, and the “campus values that treasure diversity, tolerance, respect, civility, and support and opportunity for all,” I think it’s worth noting that, despite CSULB touting the diversity of the campus, the school appears on its face to be under-serving the local African American community. Over 9 percent of LA county’s population identifies as black, but the percentage of undergraduates who are black has declined by about 25 percent in the last 5 years— from five percent in 2010 to 3.8 percent today. In addition, only 4.5 percent of its graduate students are black.
The diversity of Cal State Long Beach’s faculty and staff is worse. The 2010 accreditation report for CSULB found “that this diversity [of its undergraduate population] was not reflected in the faculty, staff, and administration.”
CSULB adopted a “diversity plan” in response to accreditor’s criticism, but as CSULB acknowledged in 2015, “CSULB is a minority-majority institution (about 70 percent of students are non-Caucasian)—but minorities comprise only 37 percent of tenure/tenure track faculty. Minority faculty are underrepresented across all ethnic groups (for instance, African-Americans comprise 4.5 percent of students and 3.2 percent of faculty; Native Americans 0.8 percent and 0.48 percent respectively), but the misalignment between students and faculty is particularly acute with Latinos and Latinas, who make up 30 percent of the student body but only 8 percent of tenure/tenure track faculty.” In fact, 39 percent of CSULB’s undergraduates are Latino/a, making the discrepancy between faculty diversity and student diversity worse than reported. In addition, the CSULB letter to its accreditor did not mention any progress made in the hiring of non-white staff or upper-level administrators in the past 5 years, though perhaps this was an accidental omission.
As part of Black History month, it would be great for the administration to publicly discuss its plan to remedy these issues.
Sincerely,
Trevor Griffey,
Fall 2015 part-time lecturer, CSULB
