Shaun Harper, the founder and executive director of the USC race and equity center gave a lecture on Wednesday as part of the week of events to celebrate the installation of Mike Munoz as LBCC superintendent-president.
Here, he highlighted the inequalities pertaining to race within post-secondary education and offered solutions to close the gap.
Harper acknowledges that “equity is so on trend right now in American higher education right now, especially in California. It is plastered here, there and everywhere. If you ask ten different people who work in leadership at a college ‘what does the college mean by racial equity’, you will get nine and a half very different answers.”
Harper insists that to strive for a truly equal institution, you must participate in surveys to get statistics that truly reflect a college’s racial climate.
“Many well-intended institutions think that they can move the needle on becoming an anti-racist institution without any experiential data- wrong,” Harper said.
Experiential data goes beyond demographics and other basic statistics that most colleges provide. Harper elaborates on the contrast between the two saying, “our understanding on what produces (these) inequities is incomplete if we don’t understand how students are experiencing the college campus differently because of their race or ethnicity.”
Thanks to Mike Munoz, LBCC was one of the first community colleges to participate in the National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates during 2019. This provided us with the experiential data necessary to implement changes at LBCC. Next year, staff are expected to participate in the survey as well.
Following up after the speech, Munoz stated, “What Dr. Harper did for us today is help paint a picture of possibilities, of what it could look like at LBCC in a more equity and racial justice environment. We have the data, we’ve had this lecture, where do we go from here?”
“Part of that is by convening people and campus leaders. This has to be a shared vision, but I can’t do this work alone. This is about bringing students, faculty, administrators, and maybe community leaders to really think about what we want to put into place to achieve this prism of possibilities,” Munoz added.
A week prior, an app called Equity Connect was launched, which Harper describes as “a virtual resource and engagement portal for all Racial Equity Leadership Alliance (RELA) member institutions, it includes many racial equity solutions.”
In upcoming weeks, the app will also launch a way for the faculty of these colleges to communicate. The purpose of this feature is to “pose problems of practice to each other, give each other advice, and to share resources with each other,” Harper explains.
Typically, all colleges pay an annual fee for access to this data. “Because I love your president and I really want him to succeed, I said to (Munoz) that ‘as an inauguration gift, membership to RELA will be perpetually free as long as you are the president.’”
To conclude, Harper urges teachers at LBCC to “use Equity Connect, use your NACC data that is included.”
Munoz looks to the future and how we might implement the data gained from our NACCC survey back in 2019, saying, “we gotta bring people together, we gotta look at the data, we have to have the hard conversations, and most importantly we have to decide how we are gonna act, data is only as good as you use it, and so that is what we’re gonna do.”
With nearly three years having passed since our NACCC survey, it is unclear what actions we have taken to apply this data and make a change. However, COVID closures may have limited our options to apply this data thus far.