Long Beach City College faculty does not reflect the racial demographics of its students; faculty is more than 60% white and student body is 80% people of color.
There are several contributing factors to the racial gap, including existing full time faculty are predominantly white and many of them are tenured, so their positions cannot be filled until they retire.
According to the article “How Faculty Create Learning Environments for Diversity and Inclusion”, the faculty-student relationship is key to student success.
The article goes on to state that belongingness is a contributing factor to student success and students are more likely to earn their degree when they feel connected to the school.
The racial gap between students and faculty is a historic issue that persists today; some students, faculty, and administration share similar views on this subject.
A computer science major, David Harang thinks students can be more successful in classes where the teacher looks like them.
“When you see someone of your same color doing it, it makes you think you can do better,” Harang said.
Biology student, Realitea James believes connecting to instructors is important.
“If students connected more to the professors maybe our success rates would be higher,” James said.
Nursing student, Paola Sagastizado has a dissimilar opinion of judging professors on first sight.
“I don’t think much of it. When they start talking, that’s when you can judge them as a professor,” Sagastizado said.
Dean of Language Arts and communications, Lee Douglas believes there are benefits to having a more diverse faculty.
“We’re not talking about diminishing the faculty that is doing great work now. We’re talking about the potential benefits, added benefits, of having a diverse faculty,” Douglas said.
Cynthia Quintero a professor of Foreign Language feels that any issue that has to deal with equity is important.
“I think as an educational institution we need to be at the forefront of calling out these things that we think are not right,” Quintero said.
Annahita Mahdavi makes a larger point when talking about the racial gap at LBCC.
“This is not just in Long Beach City College, this is in academia across nation.”
The inequity is also felt on an individual level by faculty like professor of history and political science, Donald Douglas.
“Sometimes I feel a little bit I guess unrepresented or a little bit isolated as a minority faculty member that unless you really work hard to work with or to belong to other groups of minority faculty you might feel isolated … as a faculty member myself sometimes I don’t feel like the college is doing as much as they can. It could be better,” Douglas said.
Leadership in the administrative and human resources offices are taking steps in the direction of diversifying new faculty hires.
Also, LBCC has historically started the application and hiring process later than other institutions of higher education, and just recently began implementing the process earlier.
“LBCC was late to the game in terms of faculty hiring. We would hire after a couple of other colleges would pick up their faculty hires. We used to advertise more in February or March for the fall hires. Now we’re advertising in December and January,” Romali said.
Another issue with increasing diversity hires for faculty is lack of outreach, in 2016 LBCC established the Equal Employment Opportunity Advisory Committee for the college and adopted a new plan.
According to the Long Beach Community College District Equal Employment Opportunity Plan 2016 – 2019, adopted by the Board of Trustees on May 24, 2016, when recruiting qualified applicants the hiring and application process is required to be statewide and employ the California Community College Equal Employment Opportunity Registry.
“We’ve gone to quite a number of more job fairs, reaching out to more diverse organizations, and also we are going to locally based organizations that represent people of different cultures to try and reach as many applicants as possible. The more I can get the word out the more diverse pool of applicants we’ll have,” Romali said.
This is an issue that cannot be fixed right away, it is a continuous process that requires ongoing attention.