My colleagues and I hear that some Latino students leave our campus every fall before most of us have even gotten a chance to meet them. As minority students of working-class origin, they feel like outsiders at our liberal-arts college.
Compared to many of our peer colleges, however, we are actually quite "diverse," with Latinos making up more than 10 percent of our enrollment and with many students on need-based scholarships. Yet I, too, have felt the homogeneity of my institution weighing on me.
During my years as an undergraduate at a large public university, I had only one minority professor and met few other Latino students. It was not until graduate school that I took a class taught by a wonderful young Latina professor where I met several students who, like me, were either born in Latin America or had parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents from that region.
We had different experiences, but the general label -- Latino -- was applied to all of us, and within that label, we found commonalities of family, language, interests, and "otherness" within the United States. Many of us asked the Latina professor to serve on our dissertation committees and went to her for academic and nonacademic advice -- even when she was not our adviser. She was the only Latina professor in a large department where white men were the majority. We felt she understood us, and we wanted to learn from her experiences in academe.
In the six years I was in graduate school, she gave birth twice and became a tenured professor. She had a fascinating research topic and a great ability to teach students inside and outside of the classroom. I respected her for several reasons, one of which was her ability to balance her career and family. After I gave birth during the dissertation write-up process, I would stop by her office to chat, and our conversations usually covered two things: my progress and our children.
I saw her as a woman who worked hard to get where she was and to stay competitive. I heard her discuss her children, and sigh about what must have been her frustrations with balancing a successful career and a happy family. As an observer, sometimes those two things seemed incompatible but I never really asked her for specifics -- how, exactly, she was managing.
Now that I am an assistant professor myself, I think I understand her experiences even better, especially the ones she did not discuss with me in detail. I find myself in the early stages of what I hope will become a successful career and of what has been, up to this point, a happy family. I also find myself overwhelmed at times in my attempts to respond to minority students and the issues they raise within my own institution.
Those details my Latina professor and I never discussed? I am living them.
During my first two years on the tenure track, I have received many requests to speak -- to minority-student organizations as well as at diversity conferences, at faculty events indirectly connected to Latin American and Latino issues, and to the community at large about minority issues. I confess I sometimes know little about the issues involved because they have little to do with my research specialty. But still the speaking invitations come. Because I am identified as Latina, it is assumed that I know all about Latino and Latin American issues.
I have accepted all of the requests for two reasons. First, because I am a junior faculty member and feel I have little choice if I want to earn tenure at my institution. And second, because I realize that if I don't accept, there may not be another minority professor available to speak, and an opportunity to bring "minority issues" to a wider audience might be lost.
A lot of my service obligations come from minority-student organizations that want me to serve in some capacity, or give talks, often in the evenings or on weekends. I want to support those students, I am flattered by the requests, and I know they have few minority faculty members to approach.
But few students understand that in accepting their requests, I am adding to my regular service load -- the advising, committee work, and research talks that are required of all faculty members.
After thinking about my conversations with my old Latina professor and with my own students now, I have decided to start speaking more openly to students about what it means to the individual behind the faculty title to be overloaded with service obligations. I want minority students, especially those considering academic careers, to understand both the rewards and the costs.
On a recent weekend, a Latina-student group invited me to speak on the topic of Latinas in academe. During a Q&A session, a young woman asked how I managed my dual roles of parent and academic. I used the question to open up about how difficult it can be -- even more so because of all the service work I do.
I related my experiences earlier that morning as a case in point: I admitted that actually being with the organization that day had required me to skip breakfast with my young son, and that he had cried and cried as I left. That was on top of not having been home much that week due to other extracurricular commitments, and I listed some of those commitments.
I then emphasized that I wanted to be with them that morning and support them in the future by being a positive role model (as my graduate-school professor had been to me). I wanted each of them to succeed. And that was precisely why I thought we should discuss how supporting minority organizations such as theirs contributed to the time constraints and service load of individual minority faculty members.
We had one of the best discussions I have ever had with a student organization. Some of the students truly seemed to have a better understanding of the messiness of academic life and of the role of minority faculty members in it.
I regularly see those students, in hallways, in classes I teach, and at social gatherings. When we smile and greet each other, I hope they not only see their professor but a human being whose ethnic identity shapes many of her experiences. I hope they realize I opened up to them because I want fewer students to feel like outsiders as often as I did, and because I want minority faculty members to have a time when we feel like insiders.
For now I will continue to accept more invitations from student groups than part of me thinks I should. And I'm happy to report that the Latina-student group has invited me back.
