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…

*

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.

*

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?! 🙂