Frustrations simmer as equity challenges linger for CSUN’s Latino faculty
By Perry Smith
California State University, Northridge professor José Luis Benavides believes the school should have done something about the lack of Latino representation in its faculty years ago.
The journalism professor has watched the disparity persist between the campus’ steady increase in its students who identify as Hispanic and Latino, and those like himself who are tenured faculty, since he was first hired as a tenure track professor in 2002.
“It was all white people except me when I came in,” he said of his department. At the time, Latino students were 27% of the campus. Six years later, Latino students emerged as the campus’ largest ethnic demographic. But the university hasn’t kept pace with hiring for its tenure and tenure track faculty.
The number of students who identify as Hispanic or Latino has doubled as a percentage of the student body from 2005 to 2024, and it’s now at approximately 56% of the undergraduate population. The percentage of Latino tenured faculty, meanwhile, hasn’t hit higher than 13%.
While CSUN has made some gains in faculty diversity, critics say they haven’t been achieved with the strategy needed to make them sustainable, pointing to the number of Hispanic and Latino faculty lingering around 91 for about 10 years, before 10 more were hired last year.
Benavides said he was encouraged to see the new faces at faculty orientation, but they were long overdue.
“I mean, it’s getting to be an incredible disparity,” he said in a November phone interview, “so there are many disciplines in which students would never see a faculty member of a Latino background.”
The problem
Advocates say there’s empirical data to support diversity, equity and inclusion goals for the campus. One oft-cited 2021 study comes from Texas, where researchers reported links between faculty diversity and improved dropout, graduation and retention rates in data for 120 community colleges.
The university’s faculty affairs department declined to be interviewed for this story, but mentioned in an email that its Equity in Faculty Hiring Initiative is part of the university’s strategic vision, which is called “Road Ahead.”
There are many studies showing students benefit from mentors and professors who are “like them,” according to Carrie Saetermoe, a CSUN psychology professor. She’s one of four leaders at BUILD PODER, which has supported campus diversity in a number of ways through nearly $40 million in National Institutes for Health grant funding over the last 10 years.
“You know from the literature, and you know just from knowing that, you know Latino students are going to do better if they see people like them in positions of authority and positions of knowledge, and people who can make social change,” Saetermoe said.
CSUN hasn’t done enough to support this in its hiring, she said. So the “stopgap” has been faculty and staff training.
“So … that’s the idea, is to train folks … to be anti-racist — not nonracist, to be anti-racist,” she said, explaining what BUILD PODER’s website refers to as its lens of critical race theory.
“As far as what the university strategy is for all that, I have no idea,” she said. “You know, its lack of transparency is notable. That’s all I can say. I have the same access to the dashboard as you have. I have no more information about what we plan to do to diversify the faculty.”
Stevie Ruiz, a professor in the Chicano/a studies department, said the discrepancy didn’t happen by accident.
Between his department and Central American studies, CSUN has its highest concentration of Latino/Chicano tenure professors on campus by far, 24 of the 101 total in 2024. “Departments look the way they do for a reason,” he said. Gabriel Gutierrez, department chair for Chicano/a studies, did not respond to a request to be interviewed.
It’s not easy to track the numbers of Hispanic and Latino professors in most departments campuswide, because CSUN’s institutional research only releases a figure when there are at least four in the dataset. Outside of ethnic studies, the only departments with at least four Latino professors are biology (4), communications studies (5) and psychology (8). There are over 150 undergraduate majors and options at CSUN, according to its website.
A theory called “inertia” was cited by DEI advocates as a big reason for the representation discrepancy. It’s called that because it keeps departments looking the same.
“You think, right, ‘Oh, somebody that is like me, that studied like me, that went through the profession just like me, they must be qualified,’” Benavides said. “I think the core of the problem is really … how do you define who’s qualified.”
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The solution
The university’s best DEI-hiring efforts to date are laid out on its Equal Employment Opportunities Toolkit, according to Ashley Thompson, an academic personnel analyst in faculty affairs.
Anne Soon Choi is CSUN’s assistant vice president of faculty programs and initiatives, a new position created this spring “in alignment with the university’s commitment to increasing equity in faculty hiring,” according to Christina von Mayrhauser, interim associate vice president of faculty affairs, in an email.
Choi’s duties include overseeing the toolkit, which has been in place for several years. She did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this story.
However, the equity-hiring conversation began with CSUN’s previous provost, Mary Beth Walker. The talks involved changing the hiring pattern with liaisons on the faculty search committees to keep eyes on equity, according to Daniel Olmos, a CSUN sociology professor who was a part of those conversations as a member of the Latino Faculty & Staff Association.
“So in the past, the concern was that faculty hiring was based on a sort of subjective interpretation and bias,” Olmos said.
Olmos said that’s why an objective, quantitative rubric for analyzing and comparing job candidates’ achievement is a vital step, as well as increasing cultural representation on hiring committees. Training search-committee members is widely regarded as a way to change a pattern without illegal favoritism for an ethnicity.
“The chair of the search committee, with the help of that faculty equity representative of the college, would help craft the different, you know, instruments of assessment for the faculty hiring process, would oversee making sure that everything goes right,” Olmos said. “Like if one candidate gets a dinner and another one doesn’t get a dinner, then there’s an issue there for equality, right?”
The results, so far
Recent faculty-diversity efforts have increased the information for administrators. CSUN’s past includes a history of incomplete tracking for equity in hiring practices, according to a Public Records Act request for internal emails on faculty-diversity efforts.
“It is apparent that search committees have not always filled out the intermediary stages (e.g., who had a phone screen, and who moved on to the second interview), so the historical data is incomplete and therefore of limited use,” wrote Diane Guido, a former assistant vice president of faculty affairs, in April. “We hope that with more training, folks will keep logging candidates’ progress in the search as intended so that we can have more usable data.”
The 2020–21 academic year prior to the equity initiative, one-third of searches for tenure-track faculty were audited or cancelled due to problematic hiring practices, according to an email from Janet Oh, senior director of institutional research, to Meera Komarraju, who became provost in 2023.
However, the first year with the equity practices, the tenure track hiring cohort was 47% women with 9.8% underrepresented people. In 2022–23, with all searches “on board” with the new system, the hiring cohort was 75% women and 34.2% underrepresented people, in a report to Komarraju.
In terms of support, faculty affairs shared data by ethnicity from 2007 to 2016, counting retention as those hired as assistant professors who stayed through their sixth year.
The numbers indicated CSUN’s retention of Hispanic/Latinx professors (84.4%) was highest, next to Asian American (82.6%), unknown/other (81.3%), Black/African American (80.8%) and white (79.5%). The department did not have data for the average length of employment for a tenure or tenure-track faculty member.
The future
Even with adequate mentorship, best hiring practices and staff support, it could take years to make tenured faculty be more reflective of its student body. The tenure track can take around a decade to complete.
Joshua Arechiga, a Latino grad student in the math department, said he tutors and grades to help pay for his master’s. He’s grateful for the support he gets, which allows him opportunities for work study, so he can afford to stay in school.
But there’s not enough incentive or guarantee for him to pursue the tenure track, he said.
“I think in my community, education isn’t really valued as much as working, so — especially for men in particular. Women are encouraged to stay with family until they get married, which allows them a lot of time to pursue higher education. But men are encouraged as soon as they can work, to start working, whether that may be construction or plumbing or something — but it’s usually trade with your hands,” he said. “None of my uncles finished college, so when I was trying to go to college, they were telling me that I was wasting time and it wasn’t really useful, and I’m not going to make any money — so that wasn’t helpful, right?”
He went back to CSUN because he really didn’t like the culture of the financial world where he started working after earning his bachelor’s, he said. So he’s pursuing a master’s with a focus on statistics in hopes of getting a steady government-planning job.
He loves research, mentorship and the idea of furthering human knowledge, he said, but if he went somewhere else to get his PhD, there’s no guarantee of a job when he returned.
“I have thought about it before,” the Granada Hills Charter High School alum said of becoming a professor. But he felt the entry point was nearly impossible because there are so few positions available, and those who get hired can stay on the job for decades.
“So we have certain professors, especially in the math department, who’ve been teaching at CSUN for 30 or 40 years there, and they have no plans of retiring, no plans of leaving,” he added, “so those positions won’t open up for several generations.”
Progress: A timeline
