NCORE: Valuable Conference for Student Affairs?

So I flew back from San Francisco Sunday night, unpacked, and passed out.  Monday was my first day back at work after missing a solid week and DePaul is on the quarter system…so we are still in the Spring session.  Needless to say, Monday was spent in a deep, dark email hole.

Tuesday, however…different story!  So here are my broad thoughts on the conference.  Rather than review specific sessions, which are done now and, therefore, not that useful for you, I thought I’d use this post to consider NCORE’s utility for student affairs practitioners at large.

The National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, just finished its 24^th year.  This year, the conference was in San Francisco in the Moscone Convention Center downtown.  NCORE is longer than either ACPA or NASPA, lasting five days from opening ceremonies to closing keynotes.  I spent the full five days at the conference at was able to attend sessions, meet new colleagues, and listen to some powerful keynote speeches from leaders in the field.

NCORE: The Upside

-Let’s talk about race, baby.  NCORE offers student affairs practitioners the chance to engage explicitly in a conversation about race, the intersectionality of race with other socially constructed identities, and the implications of race in our work and our world.  This is crucial because all of us work with race and our critical thinking in this area has a direct bearing on whether our work is liberatory or oppressive.  Race, whiteness, and racism are under-theorized in student affairs and NCORE offers a chance to immerse oneself in a conversation that arises from specialization.  This is a whole conference dedicated to one central subject.  This specialization can expose practitioners to the breadth and depth of work being done on race.  Finally, NCORE is a safe space for people to begin the dialogue on race in general.  Sadly, the hegemonic, neoliberal discourse of color-blindness positions any race-talk as “part of the problem,” so many practitioners lack spaces in which they can safely engage in this crucial conversation.  NCORE is one of these spaces.

-NCORE offers student affairs practitioners a great opportunity to engage with both faculty and staff in higher education.  In each general session I attended, I heard diverse opinions from both faculty and staff in the audience.  This broad representation allows practitioners to gain confidence in their scholarly pursuits by directly engaging faculty whose work is centered in race and racism.  The diversity of perspectives at the conference also brought curricular and co-curricular pedagogies into an important, but often lacking, dialogue.

-Killer keynotes.  NCORE spends some serious cash on their keynotes.  Some of the biggest names in the academy, political life, and the popular media delivered extremely thought-provoking keynotes during the conference.  These keynotes, in my opinion, offer practitioners the chance to store away heady thoughts for rainy days.  Listen, take notes, talk with new colleagues you meet at the conference.  Then, when you return to your institution and are back in the regular routine of work, revisit what you heard to continue your investment in the issues.  Many of the keynotes offered new frameworks for thinking about race, power, and racism in the new millennium and for practitioners that do not have the time to keep up on the literature, these talks provide wonderful reference points to track the newest contours of the conversation.

-Different session lengths every day for different types of learning and learners.  NCORE uses a pretty unique blend of concurrent session alongside lengthier workshops and movie screenings.  So, if you prefer 75 minute sessions, these are available every day.  However, if you are looking for a two or three hour immersive experience, these are also frequently available.  For those of us that cannot attend pre-conference institutes, NCORE offers chances at immersion during the formal conference itself!  This year the conference featured sessions that were 75, 90, 120, and a 180 minutes long.  It’s a bit crazy getting a schedule set, but once you do, each day feels very different than the last.

NCORE: The Challenges

-Cost: money and time.  With all the talk of a possible “double-dip” recession (at what point do we just give up and acknowledge this as a depression?) a five day conference might be a barrier for many student affairs practitioners.  From a cost perspective, NCORE’s registration rates are much higher than either NASPA or ACPA.  But the real cost is linked to the length of the conference.  Five days means that many more hotel nights, per diems, internet connection fees, etc.  I could see this being a big barrier, particularly for new professionals that might not have access to the professional development dollars required for this type of conference.

-NCORE isn’t as well known in student affairs circles, so it might be difficult to get permission to go.  This is really problematic.  For folks who work in orientation, it probably isn’t a tough sell to attend NODA.  If you are in conduct work, ASCA might be on your list every year.  Ironically, we ALL work with race.  If you work at a highly racially diverse institution, an all White institution, or an HBCU, race matters in your work.  For us to get NCORE recognized as a viable choice, however, we are going to need to push our leaders to recognize the centrality of race in student affairs work…and not just for those of us that work in cultural centers or multicultural affairs departments.

-The “burden” of synthesis.  Since NCORE is not ACPA or NASPA, many of the sessions are not going to be as tailored to student affairs work as the conference sessions you might be used to attending.  So, the burden, or gift, of synthesis is really on us.  I found myself having conversations with colleagues after almost every session where we tried to figure out how to apply what we’d learned to our actual work in student affairs.  I think of this as not only positive, but hugely valuable.  Working the old noodle to making connections between theory and praxis is crucial to being a scholar-practitioner and NCORE will give you many opportunities to do just this.  Sessions that load you up with numerous facts and theories on the current terrain of racial inequality offer you the chance to figure out what the implications are for your work, the assumptions we all bring to the office every day, or even the future directions of our institutions.  I list this issue of critical synthesis in the challenges section of this post not because I personally see this as a challenge but because I often hear fellow practitioners say that something isn’t useful because it isn’t packaged in a way that allows them to directly apply it to their work. NCORE is going to ask you to step it up a notch and make the connections yourself.

Overall verdict: Start sucking up to your boss now and get the money for NCORE! 🙂  Just kidding.  No, seriously, I think this conference is crucial for student affairs practitioners who want to be part of the movement for racial justice.  While I can’t advocate for going to NCORE every year, take a break next year from your usual ACPA or NASPA haunts and connect with a new network of colleagues at NCORE.  I don’t think you will regret it. I also think your institution will benefit from the conversation you bring back from the conference.

College Versus “The Real World”

During my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin – Madison the University Book Store had a sale on T-shirts.  It was spring and I was looking to add a few cheap tees to my collection so I overcame my general revulsion to “college wear” and hit the bookstore with a bargain hunter’s fervor.  I vividly remember my sense of elation when I found this perfectly sized, maroon tee that had a picture of the state capital building on it.  The words, “Madison: An Alternative to Reality” were printed underneath the image of the capital and there were three cows jumping over the top of the building’s spire.  I quickly bought the shirt and wore it ragged.  I still remember how right that shirt felt to me…compared to my adolescent experience in Chicago, my first year at the University of Wisconsin felt like a trip down the rabbit hole.

Many years later, after completing my undergraduate degree and successfully starting my professional life, I looked back on my time at the UW with both fondness and confusion.  How had this “alternative to reality” so adequately prepared me for career success?  Something special had happened in my years on Bascom Hill…perhaps the UW was just as “real” as any other part of my life.

I am still surprised when I hear student affairs practitioners, faculty, and university administrators talk about the “real world” in opposition to higher education.  In student affairs work, I hear this phrasing used in many different contexts.  In conduct work, we often say to students that their poor choices would have grave consequences “in the real world.”  In supervision, we talk with student leaders about how much tougher professional expectations will be “in the real world.”  And, in conversations about our own work load, work product, or conduct as professional staff, I even hear people talk about how much better it is to work in student affairs versus “the real world.”  To give credit where it is due, in recent years, I have heard more and more practitioners point out how problematic this language is.  For those of you who have already taken notice of this deeply flawed phrase, hopefully this blog post will give you some new arguments to use when trying to convince co-workers to avoid this linguistic trap.  For those of you who haven’t considered the negative impact of this language, I hope these following points get you interested in this important set of issues.

Problems With Talking About “The Real World” When You Work In Higher Education

1.  If we continue to speak to students about their immaturity, poor choice making, entitlement, or other growth edges by saying that these things will hurt them “in the real world,” we are also tacitly stating that there is room for these attitudes and behaviors here in college or that these poor choices don’t have the same negative consequences on campus.  I’ve listened to practitioners vent and moan endlessly about the choices their students make.  We have to ask ourselves if we are creating an environment that supports these problematic actions and attitudes.  Instead of using this mythic “real world” as a boogeyman with our students, what would our practice look like if we began to hold students accountable like the adults they are?
2. Talking about a “real world” implies that we work in a “fake world.”  I don’t know about you, but I’d really like the place that I spend the majority of my waking hours to be part of reality!  When faculty or staff use the phrase “the real world” to indicate life outside of higher education or life after college, we lend enormous credit to the notion that undergraduate education is not a serious pursuit.  For student affairs practitioners, this idea undermines the educational value of the work we do and the importance of the co-curricular experience in producing socially responsible critical thinkers.  Popular media representations of college are ripe with Animal House or Old School inspired “fake world” characterizations of college.  We internalize and reproduce these narratives when we talk about internships as “real world” experience…are we implying that being an RA isn’t?  Is peer to peer diversity education work occurring in the “fake world”?  Let’s extend this analysis, how often do you hear student affairs folks talk about their own friends who work outside of higher education as working in “the real world”?  As student affairs practitioners, our fight for legitimacy in higher education is also part of a larger struggle for legitimacy in our society.  When I hear fellow practitioners refer to their corporate colleagues as working in “the real world” I can’t help but think we’re internalizing a dominant narrative about the nature of our work.
3.  This final point is an extension of the logic in my second argument.  Have you ever heard the quintessentially American phrase, “Those who can’t do, teach.”?  This idea has been around a long time and in the current national climate in educational reform, we are seeing these chickens come home to roost.  The popular press on our educational crisis continually positions teachers as the problem.  Teachers are often criticized as being lazy and privileged for having a summer vacation.  Teachers are rarely included in designing policy and/or curricular solutions to educational issues.  Teachers are cast as unreasonable and greedy and part of the cause of our fiscal crisis.  When you cut through the layers of history, discourse, and politics, it starts to look like this country loathes teachers.  And, in painful irony, anyone who really knows a teacher can tell you how hard they work, how “summer vacation” is a myth, and how truly complex and challenging good teaching is.  For those of us in higher education, it would be naïve to think that this deeply entrenched devaluation of education stops after 12^th grade.  At the same time that bachelors degrees are being required for more jobs than ever before, higher education is still constantly under fire for being impractical, navel-gazing, or even irrelevant.  The popular narrative of the college-educated twenty-something that can’t balance a checkbook or change a light bulb still persists.  When we invoke the frame of the “real world” we are stoking this fire.  By continually casting ourselves as part of a “fake world,” we support these false caricatures of collegiate life.  When I look at the students engaged in my departments’ programs, I don’t see entitled children that can quote Chaucer but can’t tie their shoes.  I see adults engaged in a crucial real world process of self-discovery,   skill-building, and critical engagement.  And I, for one, continue to come to work every day precisely because of the gritty, real world relevance of the work we do.

Can Inclusion Harm – Part Two: Case Studies

(This is the continuation of my previous post where I explored the harmful implications of one of liberalism’s central commitments: inclusion.  Please give that post a read before you dive into these case studies.)

Okay, so having established a model for understanding how inclusion functions within liberal institutions to create and maintain “centers” and “peripheries,” I thought it would be fruitful to unpack a few specific case studies of how this might play out in higher education.  This post is quite long for blog cultural norms, so if you don’t have time for a longer read, just take a look at one of the case studies and you’ll get a general idea of how to apply Dhaliwal’s critique of liberal inclusion to concrete issues in higher education.

Case Study 1 – Women in STEM Fields

Since the early 1970s, affirmative action programs worked to admit women into fields of study and careers that they had formerly been barred from due to social norms.  Many high schools and universities now have special programs for women in the science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) fields that encourage young women to consider these historically male-dominated fields and to prepare women for success in these disciplines and careers.  Using Dhaliwal’s analysis in this case study of liberal inclusion is quite revealing.  STEM fields have been historically restricted to men through the use of overt and covert mechanisms to discourage women from both attaining the proper education for these careers or from even entering these professions.  Throughout those decades, and centuries, these fields developed a set of work cultures and standards that were thoroughly male-normative, Dhaliwal’s “oppressive core.”  In the last several decades, more women have penetrated these disciplines of study or, after college, these work environments, but the fundamental cultures and practices of these disciplines/professions still remains heavily male-normative.

Without consistent efforts to change the ‘oppressive core’ of these disciplines, women will often remain at the periphery of these courses of study and careers.  So, if we don’t take the time to rework classroom norms that assume a male learner (low-emphasis on group work, heavy use of linear thinking, etc) it becomes difficult for the ‘included’ female students in STEM classrooms to excel.  If we don’t take into account research that makes a compelling case for adopting gender-based learning and development theories (i.e. for female students, moving geometry later in the high school math sequence to account for differing brain developmental patterns) in a way that will allow female students to be more successful, female students might have to work harder than male counterparts to achieve academic success.

Finally, research labs, medical schools, and science/technology companies (not technically in education, but frequently partnered with higher education) are still currently male-dominated work/learning environments, particularly in regarding the over-representation of men in their leadership structures.  If we don’t take a serious look at the cultural norms and practices of these gendered spaces, what will female students and employees have to ‘survive’ in order to be considered successful in the STEM fields?  The women that can’t endure in the oppressive rules of these historic boys’ clubs are often seen as dropping out, when they have, in actuality, been pushed out.  While these core flaws still remain far from transformation, STEM education and STEM careers are able to laud themselves as “inclusive” or “fair and equal to both men and women.”  While this list is not, by any means, exhaustive, I think that it begins to help us understand the dangers of simply ‘including’ women in STEM academic systems and career environments without taking the time to change the oppressive, male-normative, core structure of these fields.

Case Study 2 – Students of Color in Higher Education

The “inclusion” of people of color into higher education offers much evidentiary support for Dhaliwal’s push to problematize liberal inclusion.  While students of color have continually grown in numbers on college and university campuses since the 1960s, they still often face serious campus climate and structural issues at predominantly White institutions and often persist through to graduation at significantly lower rates than their White peers.  Much of this has to do with the dynamics of liberal inclusion: while people of color were allowed into the undergraduate fold, the serious work of dismantling the academy’s ‘oppressive core’ has largely been unfulfilled in American higher education.

American colleges and universities were historically overwhelmingly White and classist.  This isn’t just a demographic claim, it is also a cultural truth.  Admitting increasing numbers of low to moderate income students of color into this system undoubtedly leaves these students at the margins of campuses that were never designed, culturally or structurally, for their authentic inclusion.  Culturally, college campuses are often extremely White normative spaces where students of color do not see themselves represented in the classroom, in the professoriate, in the administration, and in the campus public spaces.  Each year, campuses across the country receive media attention for racially offensive theme parties that occur amongst members of the student body.  Hate crimes and public defacement of racial diversity related posters and art are not uncommon on campuses either.  All of these issues are neatly packaged in the industry term, campus climate, but this framework serves to minimize essential cultural issues of Whiteness that continue to generate ‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’ on our campuses.

Structurally, financial barriers continue to disproportionately impact students of color, a large number of whom have high financial need, preventing them from moving into the center of university life.  Top-tier schools are moving rapidly towards merit-based, rather than need-based, financial aid structures that chronically-underfund students of color that are disproportionally going to attend college with lower standardized test scores (do we even have to go into why this is wack anymore?).  Public institutions are caught between state-level budget deficits and shrinking federal funding for higher education.  Private institutions, with their extremely high tuition costs, are equally challenged to provide requisite tuition-discounting to effectively support lower income students of color.  Taken as a whole, these structural fiscal issues result in students of color working more hours, more often, than their White peers.  This, in turn, presents a myriad of barriers to their ability to escape the margins of campus life.  Much like the cultural issues detailed above, these structural issues can be linked to a failure to critically examine and re-imagine the fundamental system of higher education.  When seen through the historical longview, we are attempting to make a system financially equitable that was originally designed for the second sons of America’s landed aristocracy.  Simply ‘including’ students of color in this system results in exactly what Dhaliwal critiques: a reification of the margins and centers endemic to liberal society.

Conclusion – The Story Behind the Picture and Questions to Consider

Rather than engaging a third case study, I would like to use the last part of this post to revisit the picture that provoked this whole line of thinking.  I think further meditation on the story of the Elizabeth Eckford and the integration of Central High will help us understand one last dimension of the problem of liberal inclusion.

While many Americans are familiar with the image of Eckford being mobbed by angry White students and protected by National Guardsmen on the morning of September 4^th, 1957, most do not know the story of the 24 hours that preceeded Eckford’s brave and solo arrival at Central High.  Danielle Allen, in her book Talking to Strangers, charts the following tale.

On September 3^rd, the day before the famous photo was taken, superintendent of Little Rock schools, Virgil Blossom, called a meeting of all the Black families that were to send their students to Central High on the 4^th.  At this meeting, he explained to the parents that they should send their children to high school the next day unaccompanied because it would be harder to protect their children if the parents were present (Okay…sure…What?!).  The parents were deeply confused and concerned by Superintendent Blossom’s message and Daisy Bates, head of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP Branches, decided to spend the night of the 3^rd organizing some protection for these Black children.  Bates worked late into the night, organizing a local minister and a host of community members to form a protection group to accompany the children to school the next day.  She then called each of the Black families and asked them not to send their children straight to Central High, but to send them to the minister’s house.  Eckford’s family, however, did not have a phone, so Bates made a plan to wake up early and drive over to their house to deliver the details of the new plan.

The next morning, Bates overslept and missed her opportunity to loop the Eckfords into the plan.  Elizabeth’s parents decided to follow the superintendent’s instructions and sent their daughter to Central High by herself.  Eckford caught the bus to school and as the bus neared the stop near the school, a mob of White men and women surrounded the bus screaming the N-word at Eckford, calling for her lynching, and pointing at a nearby tree.  This is background context you cannot see in the photo that started my previous post.  Imagine sitting on that bus, looking out the windows at the mob.  Consider this young woman’s bravery, exiting the bus and attempting to enter the school.

Elizabeth never made it into Central High on the morning of September 4^th.  The mob succeeded and she had to turn back.  A White newspaper reporter, Benjamin Fine, was moved to action upon witnessing the mob’s behavior and Eckford’s vulnerability.  Fine helped her walk back to the bus stop and sat with her while she waited for the bus.  The mob continued to taunt and intimidate Eckford.  Fine put his arm around her and said, “Don’t let them see you cry.”

It is Fine’s advice that shakes me to the core each time I revisit this picture.  His words remind me that marginalized group members must pay an enormous price to enter institutions from which they have been previously barred.  The dynamic of liberal inclusion provides access, but at what cost?  When Eckford and her peers were finally able to enter Central High, what did they have to hide in order to survive their newfound inclusion?  What critical components of their way of being and way of knowing did they have to leave at home each morning in order to even have a shadow of an experience in their newly “integrated” school?

Fine’s words challenge me to consider whether a college degree offers a wholesale “good” for historically barred groups.  When you add all the positives of a college education and subtract all the negatives attributed to liberal inclusion, does the calculus of pain and gain reveal a net worth?  If not, what must be done to fundamentally dismantle the oppressive core of the academy so that marginalized group members no longer have to pay a unique toll to pass through our hallowed halls?

Can Inclusion Harm?

The Black woman in the foreground of this picture is Elizabeth Eckford.  On the morning this picture was taken, Elizabeth was attempting to show up for her first day of school at Little Rock Central High School.  Most trips to school, however, don’t merit the presence of angry White mobs and National Guardsmen.  When I look at this picture, I generally start by looking at the mob.  Take a look at their faces.  Then, I look at the few National Guardsmen I can see.  Yeah, not sure what’s going on there.  And, finally, I spend a few seconds staring at Elizabeth Eckford’s face.

This photo was taken in 1957, on the first morning that Central High was being forcefully desegregated in compliance with the Brown vs Board Supreme Court ruling…and from the looks on the faces of the White students behind Eckford, not everyone feels that inclusion is the right thing to do.

This picture became a catalyst in the national conversation on school desegregation in the 1950s.  The story of Eckford, and the other members of the “Little Rock Nine,” became a central thread in the broader Civil Rights narrative of Black sacrifice, White hostility, and eventual reconciliation.  In fact, Hazel Massery, the White woman caught in mid-scream in the center of the mob, actually apologized to Eckford in 1963 after she had a change of heart about integration.  Awwwww!  How sweet!  In 1998, Massery, along with the remaining members of the Little Rock nine, was invited as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the integration of Central High.  Sacrifice, hostility, and reconciliation…all captured neatly in an hour-long episode of Oprah.

The story of the Little Rock Nine is such an important part of the popular Civil Rights narrative because it supports the over-arching liberal ethic of inclusion.  Inclusion, along with pluralism, are two cornerstones of liberalism, the guiding philosophy for American civic, social, political, and economic life.  Recently, I was reading an article critiquing liberalism by the radical theorist, Amarpal K. Dhaliwal.  Part of the article offers a fabulous meditation on the role of inclusion in reifying the oppressive aspects of liberalism.  Dhaliwal writes, “If inclusionary attempts [in liberalism] often reaffirm a hegemonic core to which the margins are added without any significant destabilization of that core or continue to valorize the very center that is problematic to begin with, it is clear that the motivation to include needs questioning.”  Now, as is often the case with critical theory, you might have to read that sentence several times, take a trip to the coffee shop, slug some espresso, come back to read the sentence again, and then, maybe, just maybe, will these ideas begin to congeal into some fragile sense of coherence.

Let me save you both the time and the cost of a shot of espresso!  Dhaliwal challenges us to think about liberally institutions, systems, and societies that are fundamentally oppressive.  When these systems operate on a discourse of inclusion, they will, at times (generally, these ‘times’ seem correlate with intense social activism…hmm, is there a pattern here?), shift their exclusive structures to allow for the inclusion of marginalized group members into systems from which they were formerly overtly barred.  Prominent examples of this in American history would be the inclusion of women into aspects of political life through granting them the right to vote, the inclusion of people of color into educational life through school desegregation, or the inclusion of gays/lesbians/bi-sexuals into the military through the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  In each of these examples, overt exclusion ended and marginalized group members were added into the system.

Dhaliwal argues that this type of inclusion presents two serious problems: first, if the oppressive core of the system is not changed, then the newly included group members will remain at the margins of the system and, second, that the existence of these group members within the system (even if/when they remain at the periphery) will offer the system the chance to brand itself as “tolerant, celebratory of difference, open, fair, or committed to equality.”

When I think about my own career field, higher education, I see Dhaliwal’s critique of liberal inclusion as a central problem in American education today.  Historically, mainstream education in the United States was a highly exclusive system for land owning (read: wealthy), White, men.  Previously excluded groups have been nominally included in the system of education after prolonged movements of social activism, but many of us would argue that these historically excluded groups still remain at the periphery of P-20 education.  When these groups struggle to achieve academic success in systems that often are designed to produce and extend this struggle, special programs are enacted for these marginalized groups.

While many of these special programs do laudable work, their very existence allows mainstream education to continue to ignore the much deeper fundamental issues and systems that contribute to this marginalization.  In a sick, twisted irony, the existence of special programs actually often feeds stereotypes and misconceptions about historically excluded groups by inadvertently problematizing the struggling group instead of the institution or system that was never designed to successfully incorporate difference! Aaaah! Furthermore, marginalized group “presence” in the system is often used to validate the current system as a paragon of liberal inclusion and critical scholars and practitioners that attempt to illuminate these internal contradictions and hypocrisies are often labeled as “radicals” or as “un-American” and dismissed (Check out what happened to Lani Guinier during the Clinton administration or to Bill Ayers since the start of the Obama era.  And, yes, I chose two examples from ‘liberal’ administrations because, unfortunately, this dysfunction isn’t limited to partisan politics; it is a product of liberalism, which encompasses both liberal and conservative party politics.).  It is for all these reasons that mainstream education is a fantastic site for exploring the possibility of inclusion being harmful.  This blog post, however, is getting long so I will finish this post in a second part…

Stay tuned for my next post, where I will use case studies from P-20 education to explore how liberalism uses inclusion to extend marginalization while cleverly obscuring deeply oppressive systems and structures that must be the focus of any social change agenda.  And, in case you were wondering, I promise to come back to the photo that started this blog post.  I swear, by the end of the next post, I will connect this runaway train to the original ideas that I opened with. 🙂

Higher Education Graduate Programs…Preparatory for Multicultural Affairs Practice?

(This post is Part Two of a series of posts…you can read this post independently or read my previous post for background context on Multicultural Affairs as a sub-field of Student Affairs.)

Many universities and student affairs departments have either formal programs or informal mentoring to actively support undergraduate student leaders in considering a field in student affairs.  Students that have thrived as RAs, Orientation Leaders, Sorority/Fraternity Life leaders, or campus activities leaders are often encouraged and challenged to apply to masters programs in higher education.  I work as the director of a department called the Office of Multicultural Student Success.  I feel proud to say that my staff are all passionate about issues of access, equity, student success, and cultural exchange.  In a recent departmental staff meeting, members of my team and I were talking about how we could get more involved in supporting some of our student leaders to consider a career in Student Affairs.  We run some fabulous programs that allow higher-risk students to have a much richer college experience and we hope that some of our student leaders pursue a career in Student Affairs.  For me, I secretly really hope that some of our superstar student leaders pursue careers specifically in Multicultural Student Affairs.  I’m biased…what can I say!  In light of these aspirations, my staff and I did some brainstorming on what kinds of structures we could put in place to prepare some of our students to successfully enter higher education masters programs.  Our brainstorm was moderately productive and we were all excited by the possibility of getting more students of color interested in our field.

I left work that day still thinking about our brainstorm.  My mind was buzzing with creative energy and I felt a bit unsettled by some unresolved questions that lingered for me.  If we were all so excited to get more students of color involved professionally in Multicultural Student Affairs, would simply helping them go to masters programs in higher education accomplish our ultimate goal? The more I think about it, the less sure I get.  Here are some of the questions that continue to trouble my thoughts on this subject:

1.       How many masters programs in higher education, student development, or educational leadership offer one or more courses to prepare students to work in Multicultural Student Affairs?  To be more specific, how many masters programs effectively teach graduate students about the key issues, theories, and practices that inform successful work in a Multicultural Affairs department?  A best practice would be programs that interweave this knowledge throughout their core curriculum, rather than compartmentalizing this set of issues into one course.  Have any of you attended a program that does this well? Let us know!

2.      How many masters programs in higher education have structured graduate assistantships or practicums in their universities’ Multicultural Affairs or diversity-focused offices?  Without this type of practical experience, it will be difficult for newly minted student affairs grads to compete for coordinator positions in Multicultural Affairs departments.

3.      What conferences should graduate students and new professionals attend to learn more about the core competencies and best practices in Multicultural Student Affairs?  I hear from my colleagues in residential education that going to NASPA and ACPA is great for broad professional development, but that they get the most useful material for their work in residential education from the ACUHO conference (or their local CUHO conference).  I often hear staff in orientation offices saying that they get enormous value out of NODA, similar to our conduct officers’ remarks about ASCA.  This spring, I am going to the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) for the first time.  Is NCORE the conference to advance the core competencies, best practices and skill-sets of our field?  I’ll definitely let you know after I get back from the conference this June!

For those of us who are passionate about getting our undergraduate student leaders to consider a career in Multicultural Student Affairs, these questions about our graduate programs reveal some serious gaps in the preparatory experience.  Getting our students to go to higher education graduate programs is still a fantastic thing, but I think it is important for us to take note of the possibility that these programs might not be preparing many grads to successfully work in Multicultural Affairs-type departments.

To end this post, I thought I’d respond to a comment I received on my previous post.  Someone requested a reading-list that could help students and professionals become more educated on the issues central to the broader mission of Multicultural Affairs.  Well, look no further!  My sister and brilliant colleague, Sumi Pendakur, sent me this fabulous reading list that she was part of compiling at the University of Southern California.  A while back, the staff from each of USC’s cultural advocacy offices helped build this list.  Enjoy!

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/topic.php?uid=51918367879&topic=9548

Multicultural Student Affairs: Black Sheep** or Key Player?

**Black sheep, as defined by Urban Dictionary: “Term used to describe someone who feels left out in a family. Basically, the outcast of the family because they choose to do other things than live up to their parents’ standards.” (And yes, I just cited Urban Dictionary)

A few quick questions for my wonderful readers:

Do you have an MA or MEd in higher education administration, student leadership development, or some similar student affairs preparatory degree?

If you’re reading this blog, then the answer is probably either “yes!” or “Hang on for a few more semesters…working on it right now!”  Okay, cool…next question.

What do you know about the field of Multicultural Student Affairs?

Think about it for a few seconds…okay, now continue reading this blog post.  Thanks for humoring me…

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In the new millennium, most universities and four-year colleges have some type of multicultural affairs department.  At the national conferences for ACPA and NASPA, dozens of sessions are offered each year addressing students of color, retention issues, social justice education topics, and inter-cultural dialogue programs.  The prominent journals in our field seem to regularly feature articles on issues of campus climate, student success, and the role of non-dominant identities in the college student experience.  At the same time that all of the statements above are true, I continually find myself speaking with well-meaning, competent student affairs practitioners who know very little about the work of Multicultural Student Affairs.

This two-part blog post is my attempt to share some of my broader thinking on this often overlooked sub-field and sort through some of the crucial issues that I’ve seen while working in Multicultural Student Affairs for eight years now.  This first post will focus more on departmental and divisional organization issues and the second post will be a set of reflections and questions on the access pipeline for Multicultural Student Affairs as a student affairs field.

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Every few weeks I end up meeting with a graduate student or a new professional that is either conducting informational interviews to prep for their first job search or they have just been hired and are on their “speaking tour” with different directors in my Division of Student Affairs.  They usually come prepared with some great questions about what my department does, what my professional path has been, or how we collaborate with other departments in the division.  I always start these conversations out by explaining that, here at DePaul University, there are actually three departments handling the multiple charges of a multicultural affairs area.  At this point, the grad student or new professional generally looks at me, blinks, and then goes silent.  I think some of this silence comes from never having encountered the idea that there are multiple, unique, duties and responsibilities to the work of multicultural affairs.  I also think the silence comes from the shock at hearing that there are three departments working on what most people think of as “specialty programs.”  (I’ll address this issue of silence directly in the next blog post.)  So, after inducing silence and possible confusion, I consider it my duty to mend the situation and I explain the following.

Traditionally, a single multicultural affairs office is charged with executing three main functions (according to yours truly!).  The first, and possibly the oldest duty, is heritage month programming, cultural celebrations, and diversity speaker series type programs.  These programs emerge from a multicultural education paradigm that has been popular on college campuses since the early 1980s (for more on this see my earlier blog posts unpacking multiculturalism).  A second duty is developing effective retention and persistence programs for higher-risk students such as students of color, low-income college students, and first generation college students.  It is for this reason that universities that have federally funded TRIO program often locate their Student Support Services office in their multicultural affairs area. And, finally, a third duty has emerged in higher education in the past decade or so: the work of social justice education.  This last charge has found its way into certain well-equipped, forward-thinking multicultural affairs areas and specialty staff positions have been created to explicitly handle the work of designing and implementing workshops that bring students into substantive dialogue on issues of race, class, gender, power, privilege, and oppression (to name just a few of the usual topics).  At DePaul University, these duties have been divided up amongst three separate departments in order to support specialization in these three unique pursuits.  At this point in my explanation, the grad student or new professional generally jumps back into the conversation and the rest of the informational interview is gravy.

Due to having this “Intro to Multicultural Affairs” conversation so many times in the last few years, I’ve developed a neat and tidy capture of the complexities of this work.  In reality, multicultural affairs is just as messy and complicated as any part of student affairs and the distinct contours of each campus environment have a dramatic effect on this organizational structure.  I think that it is worth pausing here and asking the question, how many divisions of student affairs think of multicultural affairs as having multiple, unique charges?  At the places you work, how is this issue addressed?  Do you have one multicultural affairs department? If so, are there clear designations as to what initiatives, staff, and resources are directed at which charge?  If you have multiple departments, are the primary duties and responsibilities designated in the way I’ve described above? Or, do you see something different happening on your campus?  If so…please write in using the comment tool! (Shameless baiting for comments…I know.)

But wait! Some of you may work at places that use the AHANA model, where separate departments exist to serve African American, Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American students.  How does this complicate my proposed framework for understanding multicultural affairs?  Great question!

Universities that employ separate departments to work with each of the major racial groups on their campuses often experience great gains as well as face unique challenges as the result of selecting this organizational strategy.  The biggest gain of the AHANA model is that it allows offices to address the unique specificities in these different populations by hiring staff experts on specific racial groups, focusing their programmatic offerings on the critical nuance of these racialized collegiate experiences, and building deep safe-spaces for in-group participation that can yield much higher levels of institutional affinity in student of color populations that have historically remained at the margins of campus communities.  “Umbrella Model” offices, multicultural affairs departments charged with serving a broad cross-section of students, often lose the advantages of specialization and racial groups that have specific needs, but are not well understood in the field, such as Asian American, Native American, and/or multi-racial college students, tend to not receive effective support from these offices.

On the flipside, AHANA offices face the challenge of their student participants becoming isolated in their own racial in-group safe spaces and not building the skills and capacities for inter-group success.  Secondly, multi-racial students often have to make difficult choices of where they will engage and receive services, since the AHANA model was built on problematic notions of monolithic racial identity saliency.  And finally, campuses that choose the AHANA organizational strategy end up dividing up already scarce resources into multiple departments.  This creates the need for a redundancy of clerical support staff, operational budgets, and campus space resources that can leave each individual AHANA department severely under-resourced.  This resource-efficiency problem in the AHANA model becomes deeply problematic when considering the second charge of multicultural affairs: developing and implementing effective retention and persistence programs for higher risk students.  The AHANA model uses an organizational logic of race-specific programs and services.  Racial identity, however, is only one of many factors in student success and risk mitigation work.  This creates a situation where retention and persistence issues have to be handled separately in each individual department, which can severely limit the effectiveness of these types of interventions.

Do you work on a campus that employs an AHANA model?  How do you see this affecting the way that multicultural student affairs work is implemented with your students?  What other limitations and benefits do you see for the Umbrella Model and the AHANA model?  Or, does your campus not have either model?!  Sweet Baby Ray’s!  We’ll have to do something about that! J

Be on the lookout for the second post in this two-part series where I will question whether multicultural affairs is a legitimate sub-field in student affairs…or are we just the black sheep?! 🙂

 

Reflections on Asian America

I’m not much of a photographer, but I know when a photo makes me stop.

Stop analyzing, deconstructing, reframing, challenging.  This photo made me stop.

Then this blog post made me start again.  🙂

This is a picture of the Chinese Fire Department of Deadwood, South Dakota.  It was taken in 1888.

I have two immediate responses to this photo.

First, let me brain-dump.   I love how this photo is about Asian Americans.  It’s not like the TV show “Deadwood” in which the Chinese American characters simply lurk in the background, never driving the plot, serving as the requisite scenery in any modern Western.  In this photo, the Asian Americans are the subjects.  They have a story.  They drive the plot of their own lives.  If their story was a TV show, it would be a riveting drama of survival in the face of intense xenophobia and racism.  Curious readers of this blog post might ask, “How did all these Chinese people end up in South Dakota in the late 1880s?”  Great question!

Many folks know about Chinese labor being brought from Asia to build the American Transcontinental Railroad, work in the coal mines, or in the timber industry as loggers.  The hidden narrative is the immediate mobilization by Whites against these Asian American laborers all up and down the West Coast.  As U.S. companies (rail, steel, coal, and timber…the heart of the American industrial revolution) actively brought thousands of Chinese workers to build the nation, White Americans worked hard to pass laws that excluded Chinese people from public and civic life in America.  Chinese people were not allowed to marry Whites, Chinese children born in America were not granted U.S. citizenship, and Chinese people were not allowed to vote.  Any attempt at resistance by these new Americans was met with lynching and the burning down of their businesses and neighborhoods.  Chinese Americans didn’t leave the West Coast simply because they craved the beauty of the Black Hills…they just weren’t catching that California Love that Pac and Dre used to rap about.  So, they came deeper into America’s interior, searching for nuggets of that ‘freedom’ and ‘opportunity’ that got them onto ships in first place.  Even more tragically, this Chinese American story isn’t limited to just the Chinese…you could sub the words Japanese, Indian, Korean, Filipino, etc into this story and it would still ring true.

This photo reminds me of the importance of teaching history from the bottom up.  This photo made me stop because I believe that you can’t understand Asian American people without knowing our history in the U.S.

Secondly, let me heart-dump.  I love this photo because it’s proof that we’ve been here.  For me, being Asian American sometimes feels like being invisible.  I can remember going through years of K-12 schooling and never seeing Asian American faces and names in history or social studies books.  As a child, I remember thinking, did we just get here?  In college, when I took my first Asian American studies class I was shocked…then I was pissed.  I learned that, not only had we been here for centuries, but that White hegemony had constructed a historical narrative that made us perpetually foreign, alien, un-American.  How could it be that we have a multi-century history of contributing to this nation that nobody seems to know or value?  Outside of class, this forever-foreigner construct continued to impact me, and I was occasionally complemented on my English and met with wide-eyed, confused looks when I explained that I was actually born here.

Nowadays, working as a student affairs professional, I continue to feel that Asian Americans are largely erased from the picture.  We are the fastest growing racial minority group, along with Latina/os, on 2-year and 4-year college campuses, yet we are largely absent from the “diversity” conversation.  I am frequently in rooms where I hear senior administrators make statements about “…students of color, Black and Latino, …” and I feel like my own college experience and struggle is being wiped away.  I regularly hear student affairs practitioners identify themselves as multiculturally competent and yet know little to nothing about Asian American students.  The thought of having to prove that I am a person of color, that I have been marginalized in a White-normative society, or that Asian Americans deserve attention, is exhausting to me.

The photo at the top of this post reminds me that the struggle for racial justice isn’t new and isn’t about to end.  This photo made me stop because I know that behind my righteous, intellectual anger, I feel deeply hurt by a country, society, and student affairs field that seeks to erase me from its memory and experience.

Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Social Justice – Part 3

(Hi there! This is the last part (whew!) of a three part series of posts.  Please check out the last two posts before reading this conclusion.)

Social Justice : Social justice is a comprehensive platform, an umbrella term for a set of ideologies and theories that have been growing and changing for a long time.  The ideological/theoretical roots of modern social justice (critical theory)  are well over a century old and can be traced back to Marxist critical theory.  (I know, Americans hate to admit it, but it all goes back to Herr Karl.)  American social justice politics might have originated with Marxist thought, but a century and a half is a long time and countless other ideologies have had a transformative effect on this broad conglomeration of ideologies.  (Catholic Social Teaching, The Frankfurt School, Black Nationalism, Feminism, Postmodern Feminism, Friereian Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, the list goes on and on…) Social justice emphasizes praxis, the productive dialectic between theory and practice, in generating sustainable, transformative interventions at both the individual and systemic level.

Pros: Social justice maintains a balance between identifying the agency of individual actors to be both oppressors and/or emancipatory agents as well as the critical role that systems play in shaping the way people think and live.  By engaging both individuals and systems, social justice has the advantage of demonstrating how dynamics of power, privilege and oppression function from the system-to-actor level as well as the actor-to-system level.  Social justice emphasizes the integral role of community in transformational work and reminds us that justice work is both a journey and a destination (shout out to Art Munin!).  Social justice has the potential to fundamentally change our world into a place where human beings can live sustainably and with full dignity.

Cons: Well…as I noted before, social justice theory has been around a long time and the revolution has not yet been televised (or Skyped or Tweeted, for that matter).  As fast as social justice education can evolve its praxis, hegemonic systems seem to stay one step ahead of the game.  Structurally and systemically, our society still remains fundamentally unjust.  The biggest con with social justice work is that it isn’t a quick fix…

It’s a set of pragmatic tools and convictions to drive an aspirational vision.

It requires sharply critical minds and massive amounts of hope.

It requires impatience with the present as well as steadfast resolve towards a better future.

It requires unruly, free-thinkers to act with and through sustainable community.

It is this set of contradictions that makes social justice work so challenging, as well as attractive, to me.

How about you?  What makes social justice work attractive to you?  What do you see as the pros and cons to this framework for social change?  Do you “buy” my attempt to unpack these three commonly used terms?  Holler back! (This is my unsubtle attempt to get you to leave comments…come on, help a brother out!) 🙂

Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Social Justice – Part 2

(Hi there! This is part two of a three part series. If you didn’t read the first part, be sure to check out my last post! It will make this post make more sense, for sure…)

Now that I’ve established a context for the problem and unpacked “diversity,” let’s move on…

Multiculturalism: Multiculturalism is about knowing, and celebrating, the “other.”  The thrust of multicultural education is in educating both dominant and subordinate group members about the experiences, cultures, and religions of people historically excluded from mainstream American life.  The multiculturalist movement, emerging out of the Civil Rights Era, seeks to address the cultural homogeneity of American society so that subordinate group members can fully enter public life, without having to relinquish their ‘cultural selves.’

Pros: Without cultural pluralism, subordinate group members have to deny or suppress integral parts of their identities to participate in American schooling, work life, and political life.  The multicultural movement challenges all of us to value other ways of knowing (geek points: epistemes) and being (geek bonus round: ontologies) in the world and to make space for the open celebration of this difference.  Multiculturalism has the potential to expose privileged group members to ways of being that they have not substantively engaged, thereby enabling them to interrupt oppressive thoughts and behaviors regarding these groups.

Cons: I see a two glaring problems with the multiculturalist paradigm.  First, it is largely a harm reduction model…”know the other so you don’t offend them.”  While this is not what the movement aspires to, it is often what ends up being produced in higher education.  Multiculturalism, for example, has generated heritage months and campus cultural centers that operate on a “food, fairs, and festivals” programming model.  Heritage months bind the engagement in non-dominant cultures and experiences into special times of the year and allow campus communities to continue to have a “regular curriculum” that largely excludes subordinated voices…after all, we’ve got Black History Month, right?  Campus cultural centers are, by and large, wonderfully indicative of the problem with multiculturalism.  After we finish eating the egg rolls, making the paper lanterns, and watching the dragon dance, what’s really changed for Chinese and Chinese American students on our campuses?  Have they been substantively and sustainably brought from the margins and into the mainstream of campus life?  Do the curricular and co-curricular offerings on campus now engage the issues of importance to this community?  Yikes…probably not.

Secondly, multiculturalism, much like diversity, operates on a liberal paradigm…its central conviction is that if individual people learn about other people, they won’t hate them as much and society will be a better place…aaawwww! (I know that I’m being flippant and salty here).  Multiculturalism locates oppression and inequity in individual actors, rather than complex systems that depend on oppression to continue existing.  Multiculturalism, for example, posits that if wealthier Americans knew more about poorer Americans, America would become a less socio-economically stratified society.  Ooops…that didn’t work out, did it?  Individual people’s perception of other individuals does little to change the system and structure of capitalism, which depends on stratification to keep the wheels of the market turning.  Multiculturalism does little to problematize systems and structure in our inequitable society.

 

This is kind of like Spider Man comics in the newspaper when I was a kid…I swear, there will be a conclusion to this rant!  Stay tuned…next post: social justice!

Put ya toe in the water…test the hot tub!

Hello blog world…this is my first post on my first blog.  My toe is in the water…the hot tub feels fabulous.  Alright, here it goes…

“Hello student leaders and welcome to diversity training!  Today we are going to be working on your multicultural awareness, knowledge and skills because it’s important that each of you serve as social justice advocates on campus.”

If you’ve been working in student affairs for more than a few months, you’ve probably either heard something like this, or even delivered a message like this.  As a social justice educator, I know I’ve heard and used this pitch more times than I can count.  And while I’m pretty sure that I’ll continue to use this pitch in the future, I know that the words at the top of this post represent a serious problem in the field.

Diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice are not synonyms.

On most of the campuses I’ve visited, I find the language of diversity training, multicultural education, and social justice education being used interchangeably.  Unconsciously, we’re probably all doing this because using synonyms allows us to not say the exact same words over and over again.  Synonyms are our friends!  Unfortunately, by doing this, we are all collapsing different, and possibly contradictory, agendas into the same set of words.

So, let me take a stab at getting this cleared up and, if I’m lucky, maybe I can get a conversation started.   The rest of this blog post, and the next few posts, will be my own slapdash attempt at sorting through these terms, establishing some historical context for their relevance to the field of education, and establishing what I see as pros and cons to each of these approaches.  My perspective, to make my bias clear, is heavily informed by critical theory (DuBois, Friere, Giroux, hooks, etc) and my own lived experience as a second generation Asian American, heterosexual, male, able-bodied, middle class, atheist. (I could keep listing identities here, but you get the picture…)

Diversity: Diversity is a numbers strategy – how many different types of people are on this committee/staff/e-board/etc?  Do we have representation across gender, race, sexual orientation, class, faith, and ability identities?  To put it bluntly…who’s in the room?

Pros: This was an important strategy for activists in the 60s and 70s.  America was emerging from an explicitly exclusionist period when marginalized group members were overtly blocked from participating in power-vested processes and organizations.  Today, representation continues to be a salient issue and working to open doors for marginalized group members to participate in all sectors of society is still vital struggle.

Cons: A numbers/representation strategy is problematic on two fronts.  First and foremost, representation tactics can be easily co-opted by conservative and neo-conservative groups.  For example, right after George W. Bush was elected President, he appointed many men and women of color to highly visible spots in his cabinet.  The Bush administration was, therefore, able to achieve “success” from a diversity perspective, without attending to any of the crucial equity and justice issues that the diversity strategy is supposed to address.  On a more local level, we have all probably worked for institutions of higher education that have employed this diversity strategy to manage perception.  By putting an ineffective, highly accommodating, or conservative woman or person of color in a visible leadership role, colleges and universities can check the diversity box and move forward without tackling fundamental access, equity, and/or justice issues that plague American higher education today.

Secondly, the politics of representation play into the liberal fallacy that a few good individuals can change systems and structures designed to oppress and exclude.  So, even when used for its intended purpose, the diversity strategy results in select marginalized group members gaining representation in organizations that they were historically excluded from.  Unfortunately, this does not generally result in systematic or structural change, again leaving the core equity and justice issues unmet. A great (and tragic) example of this is the marked diversity gains since 1967.  Today, in 2011, we have many marginalized group members in positions of “power” in the government, in Fortune 500 companies, in the judicial system, etc.  At the same time, we now have overwhelming empirical evidence that poor Americans are worse off than they were 40 years ago, people of color are less healthy and less employed than they were 40 years ago, and the prison system is bursting at the seams (to select a few random examples).

Okay, that wraps up my overview of the diversity strategy…stay tuned for my next blog post: multiculturalism!