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Diversity chief among chancellor’s priorities
By Elizabeth Lake Taking a look at any one of the community colleges in the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD), a person will more than likely be able to observe many types of students interacting with one another. These students may be young or mature, re-entry students. Chances are they come from many different backgrounds culturally and racially. Regardless of where students come from or how they were raised, they are working together at the community college to achieve their common goal of receiving an education. While this has been true throughout the history of community colleges, the diversity within their student bodies has never been greater, and it continues to become more so. This is a fact that has led MCCCD to pursue hiring a more diverse faculty and to introduce numerous initiatives to work towards meeting the educational needs of these students. When Chancellor Fred Gaskin was hired to lead MCCCD in 2000, one of the major reasons he was chosen for the job was because of his efforts in diversity in the past, says Governing Board Member Linda Rosenthal. Before joining the MCCCD team Gaskin was president and superintendent at Cerritos College, serving one of the most diverse student bodies in California. Rosenthal says that Gaskin’s concern for diversity and his sensitivity to the needs of all students, along with his wide administrative experience and outreach to businesses made him stand out as the right fit in regards to what MCCCD was attempting to do. Rosenthal, who has been on the board for 23 years, points out that the need for diversity had been realized and acted upon before the chancellor’s initiatives began. These diversity efforts began several years ago with Strategic Conversation and a steering team, she says. The steering team was a group focused on diversity, which attempted to take a closer look at policies, procedures, processes and curriculum. They introduced the Infusing Diversity Into The Curriculum program that is now directed by Dr. Bonnie A. Gray of Scottsdale Community College. “We always had diversity as a goal, but it was an overarching goal,” says Rosenthal, who now sits on the Diversity Task Force, designed to look at how to better enhance diversity. “Then [upon Gaskin’s hiring] it became a stand-alone goal.” Now, two years into Gaskin’s job as chancellor comes the impact of his work with diversity issues. Among many initiatives, the chancellor has pioneered teacher education plans, such as Inspire Teach, at Estrella Community College, where the District promotes and uses the community colleges to attract students from a variety of backgrounds to become educators. Gaskin has attempted to assure a comfortable campus climate for people of all backgrounds and cultures and has tried to gear all areas of MCCCD employment toward a consciousness of diversity. Two programs now running are the ACE and ACE + (Achieving a College Education) programs. ACE, located at South Mountain Community College, and ACE +, stationed at Glendale Community College, are programs that are taken into the high schools to encourage students to stay in school. Donna Schober serves as the executive assistant to the chancellor. She says the ACE and ACE+ programs are important because “if we can work with the K12 district to make sure minorities do not drop out, this will stimulate the economy tremendously when they are able to stay in school and get a college education.” Schober says with the changing demographics of the Valley, it is important to be connected to the community. She says the District needs to find out who the students are and who the students will be in the years to come in order to make these kinds of programs work. Perhaps the major diversity initiative Gaskin has led is that of the Faculty In Progress Program (FIPP). This program’s main purpose is to serve the student body by bringing in a more diverse, yet still highly qualified faculty to take the vacant spots, as full-time faculty are eligible for retirement within the next few years. Gaskin says this program needs to be a priority because “diversification of the faculty and staff is a critical issue. It is imperative that we have the faculty and staff look like the students,” he says. The program consists of 11 individuals, one from each community college and one who is sponsored by Gaskin himself. According to Gaskin, “It allows individuals the opportunities to become full-time faculty” and takes a look at the individuals and the needs of their colleges. The FIPP intern is mentored by full-time faculty and must be ethnic, says Gaskin, in order to enable minority adjuncts to be more competitive in applying for full-time work within the system. Currently, the program includes Native American, Hispanic, African-American, and Asian interns. Sylvia Ong is the current FIPP intern on campus at PVCC. She had been teaching as an adjunct faculty for the Business and CIS division since 1995 when fellow division members approached her in the summer of 2001 and asked if she would apply for the nine-month internship. “Since my ultimate career goal is to become a full-time instructor (residential faculty) and this program was designed to help people do so, I decided to apply,” Ong says. “Fortunately, I was chosen.” She says her mentors, Judi Anderson and Jeanne Franco, have always been helpful and have taken much time out of their own schedules to provide her with whatever assistance she has needed. “The beauty of this program is that it fosters self-directed learning because in collaboration with their mentors, interns develop learning objectives to acquire and improve their teaching skills,” Ong says. Gaskin emphasizes the fact that this program is not in any way designed to advantage one group of people over another, specifically ethnic faculty over Anglo-Saxon faculty, saying that the idea of the FIPP is to “look at diversity as one of the qualifications, not the only one.” Gaskin’s assistant, Donna Schober says, “Ethnicity is only one quality. [We also look at] educational attainment, how they [applicants] interact with others, their personalities.” She says that there is no guarantee for these people—they have to go through the same processes as everyone else in the hiring pool. Jack Sexton, chairman of the Communications and Humanities Division at PVCC, says of the hiring process in his division , “I have not been given any direct instructions to hire minorities; rather, the emphasis is upon diversity, which encompasses more than just an ethnic focus.” He says the major change in his hiring process this year has been his placing ads in minority journals to encourage a more diverse hiring pool. He says the specific criteria for each available job must be met by anyone applying for the position. Gaskin believes this will impact both the college community and the individual because it will enhance the opportunities of everyone involved to be able to “interact with individuals other than our own race and kind.” Schober says the colleges have all responded positively to the FIPP, each one with an intern. Applicants are currently in the process of applying for FIPP internships for the 2002-2003 academic year. Ong sees her part of this pioneering experience as being exciting and definitely worthwhile. She encourages those who want to one day be residential faculty to apply for the 2002-2003 year. “If you get as much out of this program as I have, you won’t regret it,” she says. This program has confirmed for Ong the fact that she wants to teach full-time at the community college level, so she is applying for an open position when her internship is over. Many changes have taken place within MCCCD over the last two years, and Rosenthal says the colleges have “more diversity” to look forward to over the years, as they move toward being more comfortable with the subject of diversity. “There is no doubt in my mind that diversity has, is and always will continue to be an important part of our college system,” she says. The 11 FIPP participants are sharing their learning experiences on April 5, 2002 from 2-4 p.m. at the District office and invite all those who wish to attend. |
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updated: March 28, 2002 |
