Starting college is a big step toward adulthood. For some students the college experience offers exposure to a richer world, not only academically but socially too. Taking students from a community largely curated by their families into a society of diverse personalities, cultures, and ethnicities often shapes perspectives in a broader way. Sometimes though, depending on the school, the college experience can be a little homogenous.
Diversity and inclusivity on campus have been widely debated topics for decades.
In 2003 the Supreme Court ruled in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that the school did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, which provides all citizens equal protection of the law, in its consideration of race in admissions practices. The lawsuit was brought about when a Caucasian student was denied admission and sued the school.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., stated in a release that the Supreme Court endorsed the benefits of student body diversity in college, some of those benefits including “enhanced classroom dialogue and the lessening of racial isolation and stereotypes.”
In that ruling the Supreme Court gave deference to its previous 2003 ruling in Gutter v. Bollinger, in which the court upheld the “use of race as one of many ‘plus factors’ in an admission program that considered the overall contribution of a candidate.”
Local colleges are no stranger to discussions about the importance of diversity.
The Central Coast is an area that as a whole has a diverse population, but break those demographics down and the picture changes. While Northern Santa Barbara County has a widely diverse population, Southern San Luis Obispo County has limited ethnic diversity. This makeup, for a variety of reasons, spills over to the higher education institutions offered in either region. Cal Poly, the Central Coast’s closest four-year state university, has suffered from a lack of diversity in both its student body and faculty. This lack of diversity has been the subject of numerous protests on campus throughout the years.
On the other hand, Allan Hancock College, the community college serving northern Santa Barbara County, shows a much more diverse population, actively promotes and supports a diverse campus, and is a certified Hispanic Serving Institution.
So what gives?
Cultivating diversity
It might be easy to explain Hancock’s diverse campus with the fact that its main campus sits in Santa Maria, a city with an approximate 70 percent Hispanic population. However, another reason is that the school participates in a number of initiatives that support diversity and inclusion, according to Nohemy Ornelas, associate superintendent/vice president of student services for college. Many activities are outlined in Hancock’s student equity plan and address issues like student population, gender, disability, and low socio-economic backgrounds.
Many of Hancock’s campus programs include financial assistance for certain disadvantaged populations, support for foster youth, and support for first generation college students.
Ornelas said the college has also implemented programs like its Bridges to Success, a collaboration between college and high school counselors that helps address student barriers to college, along with diversity and equity components. Along with that, a new concurrent enrollment program puts college classes right on local high school campuses for free, allowing high school students to get a jump-start on college without having the added work of getting financial aid and transportation to the college campus.
“Our goal there is really to begin to create a college-going culture on their campus,” Ornelas said.
One of the main activities that supports student success and inclusion is the school’s mentorship program, which pairs freshman with a mentor for their first year of college.
Because Hancock is a certified Hispanic Serving Institution, the school has the opportunity to apply for additional grants to help fund more programing to support that demographic.
Students themselves have also led the way in terms of making sure their peers are comfortable on campus. With 40 student clubs on campus, students can often find a place for peer support.
Organizations like the AB540 Club help undocumented students navigate the barriers that sometimes keep them from finishing college, and a veterans’ club on campus addresses the needs of students who’ve served in the armed forces. Often staff coordinate with these student groups to identify and make sure the college is addressing their needs as well, Ornelas said. For instance, Hancock worked with the LGBTQ club to address the issue of providing gender-neutral bathrooms.
“Students are feeling more connected to the campus but also faculty and staff are more prepared to address the issues that come up,” Ornelas said. Some of those issues include students not being able to afford books, students who are homeless, or even gender discussions regarding the correct pronoun use.
Hancock’s demographic is unique among Central Coast schools. It has a student population that’s 59 percent Hispanic and 20 percent white, along with tiny populations of other ethnicities. While the student body may reflect the city, surprisingly the faculty at Hancock doesn’t reflect the student population, being 75 percent white and only 16 percent Hispanic.
For Hancock students—and students from similar communities with large ethnic populations—transferring to nearby Cal Poly SLO can be something of a culture shock. With a population that’s largely white in both student population and faculty, diversity has been an issue with which the school has struggled.
Adding inclusivity to higher learning
This year Cal Poly is kicking off its Inclusion Starts With Me campaign, a drive practically essential following a 2015-2016 school year that featured multiple hate-inspired crimes on campus and a full-blown student social movement calling out the university for failing to cultivate a safe and welcoming environment for underrepresented students.
Tensions boiled over last November, when anonymous students scribbled Islamophobic and transphobic remarks onto a “free speech wall” erected by the Cal Poly College Republicans club on Dexter Lawn.
A group of students started SLO Solidarity in response, joining movements at Yale University and the University of Missouri in bringing awareness to the experiences of underrepresented college students. The new group also put pressure on the Cal Poly administration to address campus climate issues through a list of 41 demands.
A month later, in December, one of SLO Solidarity’s leaders, a member of the LGBT community, received a death threat from a Cal Poly student in a Facebook message.
“The day of the rope is coming soon, and you people will be the first to go,” the threat read, from a fake account. “If you don’t like how it is in this town, you can go somewhere else. We have a nice thing going here, and if you f**k with that you’re going to have some angry young white man on your hands.”
The student behind the threat was arrested after an investigation.
Then, in February, a student’s dorm room was vandalized by a peer. His chair was snapped in two and the statements, “I love n**gers” and “I’m a fag,” were written on his door. The perpetrator was charged with a vandalism misdemeanor in March.
The crimes were ugly and public, and according to those in the SLO Solidarity movement, they illuminated a hostile and bigoted undercurrent on campus. They also weren’t the only recent instances of racism on display at Cal Poly. The school has had a history of similar incidents.
For the 2016-2017 school year—and beyond—Cal Poly says it’s doubling down on its efforts to cultivate a campus culture that will be safer for underrepresented students.
Jean DeCosta, the interim director of the Cal Poly Office of University Diversity and Inclusivity, and a former dean of students at Cal Poly, is overseeing a 174-pronged Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan designed to enhance campus climate.
“It’s clear that we have to address this issue,” she said. “I’m looking, and my office is looking, at to what degree are we addressing it effectively and holding people accountable to that.”
Yet despite the new plans and efforts, one fact is unchanged: Cal Poly remains the least ethnically diverse four-year public university in California.
‘Subtle racism’
While Hancock has cultivated a community of inclusivity, Cal Poly’s struggle to do the same has a lot to do with its much smaller ethnic population.
Last year, Cal Poly enrolled 11,985 white students, making up 57 percent of the student body. It enrolled 166 African-American students, or less than 1 percent of the student body; 3,262 Hispanic or Latino students attended, as well as 2,527 Asian-American students, and 1,437 multi-racial students.
Totaled up, Cal Poly has more Caucasian students than any four-year public university in California. Even though 15 CSU and University of California (UC) campuses have larger student bodies, none have as many white students as Cal Poly.
That reality in itself can bring discomfort for underrepresented community members. A university-wide climate survey administered in 2014 shed light on some of the problems.
“From the survey, we know that when students come here, about 25 percent of them say they think about leaving Cal Poly at some point,” DeCosta said. “And the primary reason [cited by 63 percent of respondents], is they don’t feel like they’re included. They don’t feel like they have a place to belong.”
The Office of University Diversity and Inclusivity is evaluating what factors, other than the diversity numbers, contribute to that perception.
Junior Matt Klepfer, a leader of SLO Solidarity and co-founder of the 2-year-old Cal Poly Queer Student Union, believes that Cal Poly has a reputation around the state that perpetuates a certain culture.
“There’s a reputation of Cal Poly being a white school,” Klepfer said. “And students come here because they know they’re going to be protected, isolated, and comfortable. That’s the type of student that the city appeals to.”
Klepfer said that the campus culture is also built into Cal Poly’s identity as a polytechnic university.
“Part of it is the fact that Cal Poly is about agriculture, STEM, and business, so students come here and they don’t want to engage themselves in conversations around social justice, around race, around inequities, so they don’t,” he said. “That’s why SLO is ‘the happiest place in America,’ because nobody’s talking about social justice.”
And the problem isn’t just one felt by students.
Almost three-fourths of Cal Poly’s tenure-track faculty members, 82 percent of the part-time lecturers, and 66 percent of staff members, are also white. The campus climate survey revealed that 56 percent of Cal Poly faculty and 53 percent of staff seriously considered leaving Cal Poly in the past year.
Many African-American staff members actually did leave. In the last 18 months, 13 black staff members—or about 40 percent of Cal Poly’s black staff—left the school for other jobs.
Unique Shaw-Smith, a Cal Poly sociology professor, chair of the Black Faculty and Staff Association and one of the 10 tenure-tracked African-American faculty members at Cal Poly, spoke with Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong over the summer about some of the reasons they left.
“We talked about our own personal experience and why we thought people were leaving, … trying to brainstorm what we can do to improve retention [of underrepresented faculty members],” Shaw-Smith told the Sun. “I can’t say that anything came out of it except him being a sounding board.”
Shaw-Smith said she knows many of the staff were driven away by the environment on campus and the larger SLO area and that discussing those concerns with the administration often feels frustrating and unproductive.
“It always goes back to, ‘Oh we need more people. We’re going to recruit more people,’” Shaw-Smith said. “But that’s not necessarily a solution, because you can’t keep the people you have.”
Rosyln M. Caldwell, another one of Cal Poly’s 10 tenure-tracked African-American faculty members and the director of the Cal Poly Bakari Mentoring Program, recently filed a lawsuit against Cal Poly, alleging racial discrimination and harassment. Caldwell did not respond to requests for comment from the Sun.
Big-picture solutions
One of the factors that makes Hancock accessible to a wider diversity of students is cost. Hancock’s Ornelas told the Sun the school offers a wide range of options for financial assistance to students from disadvantaged or low socio-economic backgrounds.
On the other hand, Cal Poly asks for the highest tuition price in the CSU system: $9,075 per year for in-state residents, which is almost $2,000 higher than second-place Sonoma State at $7,388.
But tuition is just one of the costs involved.
“The cost of housing, cost of books, cost of tuition—all of that is quite a sum,” DeCosta said. “Many students can’t afford it.”
DeCosta says one solution lies in simply raising more money in order to provide more scholarships to low-income or first-generation prospective students. Cal Poly admits a more diverse set of applicants, DeCosta said, but some students aren’t able to receive the financial support necessary to attend.
But money won’t solve everything. As the climate survey and the incidents of last year showed, Cal Poly must also become a place where students from all backgrounds can feel welcomed, comfortable, and a part of the fabric of the community. The Office of University Diversity and Inclusivity hopes to address that through its Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan.
A handful of action items include adding an anonymous online reporting system for victims of discrimination or harassment, collaborating with Associated Students Inc. to see how to boost underrepresented student involvement in student government, increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups to connect with each other, creating a new staff position in Cal Poly cross-cultural centers, increasing recruitment efforts for staff and faculty of color, and introducing new diversity-related curriculum.
“There’s the ability to afford [Cal Poly], but then once you come here, there’s the comfort of staying here,” DeCosta said. “As a leading school in the country, we need to be able to keep our outstanding students once they arrive.”
Shaw-Smith believes the same can be said about retaining Cal Poly staff and faculty, pointing back to the 13 African-American staff members who recently left.
“It’s going to take more time and energy,” Shaw-Smith said, adding that there needs to be a top-down approach in order for all staff to feel like Cal Poly is somewhere they want to work.
DeCosta contends that the administration is already committed to that vision.
Shaw-Smith and DeCosta agreed that for retaining staff and faculty, the issues concerning the Cal Poly work environment go beyond the confines of campus.
“People don’t just work at Cal Poly; they live in SLO County,” DeCosta said. “To say that Cal Poly is everything when you go home at 5 o’clock is not true. The community has to be equally as welcoming, equally as strong in its commitment to diversity and inclusion.”
SLO County is even less diverse than Cal Poly. The 2010 census reported that 83 percent of SLO County inhabitants are white. On top of that, it isn’t uncommon to see Confederate flags on cars or private property throughout the county.
DeCosta said it’s a problem the larger community needs to deal address.
Meanwhile, Hancock continues to work on reaching the goals outlined in its 2015-2018 student equity plan. The plan focuses on five student success indicators: access, course completion, ESL and basic skills completion, degree and certificate completion, and transfer rates. That last goal targets improving transfer rates for all students but in particular economically disadvantaged, Hispanic, and veteran students, as well as foster youth and students with disabilities. Many of those students will have their eye on transferring to Cal Poly.
New Times Staff Writer Peter Johnson, from our sister paper to the north, can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com. Editor Shelly Cone can be reached at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 22-29, 2016.
