by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
There are not enough academic role models for African-American students at UNM, said student Kimerie Smith.
"If it was up to me, I wouldn't be going to UNM right now," she said. "I'm a junior, and I've only had one black professor."
Smith, a biology major and co-chairwoman of the Black Student Union, said that makes it difficult for African-American students to do well.
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"Unless you're studying African-American Studies, you don't get to interact with black professors," she said. "We don't have anybody we can go talk to that can break things down in a way that we can relate to."
The ethnicity of UNM's faculty does not match the ethnicity of its students.
About 48 percent of students are white, compared to about 78 percent of tenure and tenure-track faculty, according to the UNM Fact Book.
That's a problem, said Finnie Coleman, a tenured professor and director of African-American Studies.
Minority students need faculty members they can go to for advice, he said.
"I can walk from one end of campus to the other and not see another black faculty member," he said. "If a student needs someone they can talk to, and they want someone of their own race, where are they supposed to go? If they come to me, and I tell them no, then every black faculty member they know has just turned them away."
UNM needs to recruit more minority faculty members, said Veronica Mendez-Cruz, director of El Centro de la Raza.
"The vision I have is that eventually the faculty will match the students," she said. "We have to hold the University officials' feet to the fire when they're picking faculty."
Art Gonzales, director of UNM's Office of Equal Opportunity, said it will be difficult to recruit enough minority faculty to match the student population.
"It would be nice if we could make the faculty equal to the students," he said. "What we're going up against is how to recruit them if they're not available."
The office sets goals for diversity at UNM by examining the national availability of specific ethnicities, he said.
If a department's minority faculty is less than 80 percent of the availability, the office gives that department a goal to recruit more aggressively for that ethnicity.
Roberto Ibarra, sociology professor and former assistant to UNM's president for issues of diversity, said that technique is not good enough.
"The people we hire come from a preferential system," he said. "The horse is out of the barn, and now we're running around trying to catch it. You can't just slap on a diversity initiative when there's a systemic problem."
Most professors are hired because they know someone at the school to recommend them, he said. That can make it difficult for UNM to recruit from schools with a lot of minority graduates, he said.
"It really isn't about looking at recruiting faculty," he said. "It's about an old-boy network. We need to look at how to reform that or take advantage of it."
About 10 percent of tenure and tenure-track faculty are Hispanic, compared to about 30 percent of students, according to the fact book.
Rosalinda Olivas, president of the Hispanic Honor Society, said she is not happy about the diversity of faculty.
"It just comes down to discrimination," she said. "We need to have diversity. We need role models."
One way for UNM to get more minority faculty would be to have more minority students who want to be professors, Ibarra said.
He said the University should make careers in academia more appealing to its students.
"A lot of minority students come from cultures that are really community-oriented, so they want to get degrees and jobs that reflect that," he said. "Law and medicine can be a lot more appealing in that way than being a professor."
UNM could begin offering more applied courses in traditionally theoretical fields such as math and physics, he said.
"That would have two effects," he said. "It would encourage more minority students to get involved in those programs, and that would also make it more attractive to minority faculty."
Not having many minority faculty members is a vicious cycle, because a lack of minority faculty makes minority students less likely to become professors, Coleman said.
"The vast majority of people that I know in academia didn't start out wanting to be professors," he said. "They're there because they met someone who inspired them to get into it."
The University needs to offer more classes taught by Hispanic and African-American professors to give students a well-rounded education, Mendez-Cruz said.
"Many of our tenured faculty have been sitting in their ivory towers for several years," she said. "History and languages and sociology take on a different flavoring if you have different people teaching those."
Gonzales said UNM should work on its national image.
"You can't just post a job opening and hope that minorities apply," he said. "You have to really sell the University. Whatever things make us unique are what we need to play on when we're recruiting."
Smith said UNM should examine universities with a more diverse faculty.
"We need to look toward black colleges and see what cultural atmospheres they have and what they're doing right," she said. "A lot of African-American students at UNM feel like they're missing out on something because we don't have as many people that share our background."
