In his Daily Forty-Niner opinion piece on Monday, Oct. 16, Cal State Long Beach President F. King Alexander shared with us the good news that Cal State Long Beach, as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), had been awarded a grant worth over $2.5 million to serve the Latino student population.
This recognition is overdue considering that California has the largest Latino population in the nation and Latinos make up about 8,600 of the students at CSULB. It has been eligible for these particular funds for several years.
However, it’s ironic that even though CSULB has the HSI designation and has been granted specific funds to serve Latinos, who as a whole, have not been pleased with the process that led to acquiring the grant nor the opportunity to provide direct decision-making that will affect Latino students.
The most critical position about this lack of inclusion has been expressed in a letter to the president by the Chicano/Latino Studies (CHLS) department faculty on Oct. 24 wherein they express their vote of no confidence on the development and implementation of the HSI Grant and raised several questions and concerns that the President has not replied to in over a month.
Why would the president not respond to a letter signed by 12 professors that have raised these concerns and asked for his direct intervention, when the CHLS department was promised to have a central role in the design and implementation of the HSI Grant?
Due to the concerns raised in this letter, it appears that the university administration has increased the advisory Steering Committee from 15 to 39 members that will finally meet for the first time today, but without knowledge of the serious allegations reflected in the CHLS faculty letter, wherein it states that “the CHLS department cannot in good conscience participate in processes that lack transparency, fail to meaningfully include Latinas/os, and that operate in a dismissive and autocratic fashion. We do not use these words lightly.
Despite assurances by former provost Gary Reichard and various members of the current administration that the CHLS department would be a full partner in this grant, it has become apparent that neither the design of the HSI Grant nor its ongoing implementation process have substantially included or engaged our department, or other key Latino/a groups on campus.”
It is counterintuitive to what Alexander expresses in his editorial that the “…HSI Grant will seek to be inclusive and will not embrace exclusionary practices that may be deemed impractical for a public higher education institution such as ours.”
The tragedy is that exclusion has occurred and the president should respond to the CHLS faculty concerns and intervene for the interest of the students.
Jaime Lopez is a Master of Public Administration graduate student.
