Recent changes and disruptions to teaching and learning at our university related to the pandemic were preceded by a demographic shift in our student body resulting in our University becoming both a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and Minority Serving Institution (MSI) in 2015. Servicing approximately 10,000 students in Northern New Jersey, William Paterson University has a student population comprised of 60% Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), a composition which consists of students who self-identify as 35% Latinx, 19% Black, and 6% Asian.
The shift in our student population revealed structural and pedagogical concerns that led to the development of several task forces aimed at addressing and understanding how to better serve our increasingly diverse student population. Among them was the HSI task force, who among others, received charges by our University President, Richard Helldobler, asking us to recommend ways and strategies that our higher education institution could move beyond being a Hispanic enrolling institution towards becoming a Hispanic Serving one.
Forming an intentional group to address equity
Our HSI task force, which consisted of three faculty, and four staff, one who is an A.V.P., and two student representatives, all who identify as Latinx and bilingual, represented a variety of lived experiences, from a variety of countries including: Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Peru and the United States. Together, we took up the charge of understanding the Latinx student experience and making recommendations for institutional change. Our shared Latinx backgrounds as a task force placed us in a unique position to take up our charge and marked a shift in our university’s structural approach towards institutional improvement—the intentional grouping of Latinx faculty and staff to address issues of equity for Latinx students.
The need for our task force was significant as we understood that Latinx students had been historically underserved on our campus, and nationwide, and as a result were underperforming as evidenced by key university indicators such as 4- and 6-year graduation rates and retention rates year to year. We had recently become aware that Latinx and Black students on our campus experienced disparate outcomes, as institutional data analysis highlighted these demographic disparities. The combined trajectory of increased diverse enrollment coupled with the understanding that BIPOC students experienced unequal outcomes compared to white peers, painted a bleak picture for our future enrollments unless we were able to effectively change course.
Working as an intentional group to better understand the Latinx student experience
The HSI task force worked to understand the Latinx student experience by hosting focus groups. Open calls were made to the Latinx student community with just over 3,000 invitations sent. We hosted several focus groups ranging in size from 8-12 and repeated across forums in each of our five colleges, in the residence halls, and with several Greek life student groups. We also surveyed the entire Latinx student population with questions aimed at eliciting how and why they persisted at WP. Through our focus group interactions with the students a few central themes arose: the importance of representation, what it meant for students to see faculty and staff that looked like them, how it increased their self-efficacy and sense of belonging to meet as a group, and how for many, they never knew so many Latinx ‘faculty’ worked at their university [as an aside, our Latinx students referred to all university employees as faculty]. This sentiment was true for us, the Latinx ‘faculty,’ as well, as few of us had previously been asked to work across units and university silos, certainly not as a group of Latinx faculty and staff. The intentional selection of Latinx faculty and staff to form a task force to understand how to better support Latinx students, marked an important shift from institutional prior practice and represents an important structural consideration to better serve Latinx communities.
