University Resources and Latinos

The Utilization of University Resources

Raymond V. Padilla
Hispanic Research Center
Arizona State University

Paper presented at a conference on the Role of Higher Education and Latinos:

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The university where I have been employed for more than a decade is located
in the heart of the American southwest. It is a large, urban institution bent on
becoming a first-tier public, research university. It has a long way to go, but following
the old Avis motto, “It tries harder”.
When I first arrived at this university in the early eighties, I observed a most
peculiar pattern of interaction between the local Chicanos and the campus
administrators. It went something like this: A Chicano staffer, the director of this or
that, would get fired by the university. The unemployed Chicano typically would have
some connections to community influentials - activists, heads of agencies, politicos,
and the like. Some of these influentials would storm the campus, with some students
and faculty in tow, and demand to meet with the university president or the vice
president for academic affairs. Often the media would be present at these meetings,
lights blazing and cameras whirring. The discussion would be animated, tensions
would rise, and often the meeting would degenerate into a shouting match. It was a
cathartic experience. As the saying goes, “A good time was had by all”. But little or
nothing of value would happen as a result of the meeting. Rarely did the fired person
regain his or her job. Seldom did university administrators take proactive measures to
avoid future confrontations. Few community influentials contemplated alternative
strategies.
Surely at least some of you have participated in the same scenario, perhaps in
your own campus. It was the typical modus operandi of Chicano campus activism
from the late sixties through the early eighties. And I suppose that in some places
meetings of this type are still taking place. The approach is spontaneous, highly
political, short term, and noticeably lacking in positive results.
After an especially notorious meeting of this type, several of us on the faculty
decided that there had to be a better way to do things. Community needs were
genuine. Community resources were precious. Universities had to be more
responsive. Better educational services could and should be provided. But how can
one move large, bureaucratic, and largely conservative institutions to do the right thing
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for a struggling community that has so much to gain and so much to offer?
We as academics decided that the most practical thing to do was to use
common sense. Why not meet with the president of the university? Convince him
that what was needed were long term solutions. Have him agree to a ten-year time
frame to get something going. Why not propose specific programs aimed at solving
longstanding problems, try them out, improve them if they produced positive results,
or dump them if they were useless? If the president agreed to a long-term approach,
why not produce a plan of action that could be supported by the president and offered
to the institution as a blueprint for action? Could we as Chicanos agree on an
institutional plan for action that met our collective needs? We thought so. And as in
all matters of true importance, if you want something to get done right, you’ve got to
do it yourself.
So we created an institutional plan for action. It contained twenty-five
recommendations in all. The plan covered most of the areas that I am sure you are
familiar with: faculty recruitment, hiring, and tenuring; student recruitment and
retention; curriculum matters; research; staff diversity, etc. It took us about a year to
get the plan together. Perhaps the most important thing in this exercise was that we
as Chicanos agreed on what was important to us and what it was that the university
should do to better meet the needs of Chicanos on and off campus. Through this
planning process, we discovered that for all practical purposes universities can deal
with one thing only: programs. If you cannot frame your ideas or needs in terms of
programs, you are wasting your time. Programs are the framework within which a
university describes to itself and to others what it is doing, why it is doing it, what it will
take to do it, and how we know that we have done it well. “It” can be anything within
the large programmatic territory that a university encompasses. There is no reason
why “it” cannot be programs that meet the expressed needs and aspirations of the
Chicano community.
We also learned that plans and their implementation are two quite different
things. Being right, either in a moral or in a logical sense, does not necessarily mean
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that you will prevail. There are too many hooks and snags along the way. Like most
large social institutions, the university is a patchwork of cross-cutting interest groups,
each bent on promoting its own programs. Seemingly good ideas abound; resources
are limited. Some groups will get what they need, perhaps what they want, others will
go wanting. You try to be in the first group, at least some of the time. A good
definition of failure is that you are always in the second group.
To increase your chances for success, you must prioritize your wants and
desires. You must push for the things that are really important to you. You must be
capable of individual and group sacrifice. You must be persistent. You must not be
discouraged by temporary setbacks. You must not reduce your effort when you have
achieved partial success. You must be prepared to provide leadership to those who
will follow, and you must follow those who are willing and able to provide effective
leadership. In short, implementing your programs is an ongoing struggle. Not the
struggle that involves killing and violence. But the struggle of a life trying to be born,
generative in spirit and full of hope.
The program to which we gave, by far, the highest priority was the Hispanic
Research Center (HRC). To the trained academic eye, what was most lacking for
Chicanos on our campus was an intellectual space where the Chicano experience
could become the centerpiece for our collective reflection; where our imagination
could be unleashed without the artificial constraints imposed by alien criteria of so-
called universals, and where we could create synergistic relationships with each other
to promote, appreciate, and validate our own academic work. We also wanted a
physical presence on campus. Something palpable. A “here we are” kind of
statement that only a place can make. A piece of the intellectual action. A bit of
academic turf.
We also wanted an institutional linkage to the outside Chicano community. As
part of our common sense critique of Chicano-campus relationships, we concluded
that there was no effective interface (see Fink & Cooke, 1972) between the Chicano
community and the academic community. Without such an interface, it would be
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hopeless to expect that a productive relationship could ever be established between
the two communities. So our approach was to build the Center in such a way that it
could also function as an interface between the Chicano community and the
university. But we figured right along that this function of the Center would take a little
longer to establish. What needed to be done first was to earn some respect from our
academic peers on campus. We also needed to recruit Chicano and Latino scholars
to become part of the Center and its programs. A grave error that one can make in
these matters is to assume that universities automatically possess the kind of
expertise that the Chicano community needs. The opposite is often the case.
Universities do not necessarily recruit faculty to fit the needs of those who pay the
bills. It least it is not an automatic process. Hence, it is important to develop the
capacity to respond to community needs before opening the doors for business.
Otherwise, many will be disappointed. And surely we’ll be back to the shouting
matches.
The fact of the matter is that it took us almost three years to establish the part
of the Center that relates directly to the Chicano community outside the university.
This is not because we gave community service a low priority. Rather, it was a matter
of practicality and strategy. As a practical matter, we needed to build up the resources
of the Center before we could make any promises of service to the outside
community. Promising and not delivering is worse than doing nothing at all. We also
needed time to do the right thing. Doing the wrong thing, even if you do it well, is
bound to turn sour sooner or later. To tell the truth, we didn’t immediately know
exactly what it was that a university could and should do to help the Chicano
community. More importantly we were not exactly sure what we should do as a
Center, let alone what the university, in all of its institutional possibilities, should do.
Consequently, we proceeded by establishing first the Center’s programs that
relate primarily to the university itself. One important activity was recruiting Chicano
and Latino professors collaboratively with other departments. Within five years of
establishing the Center, more than three dozen such faculty were hired by the
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University, many of them with a part time assignment to the Center. Through these
efforts, we were able to build Chicano expertise for the Center as well as for the many
departments that chose to collaborate with us. We also created projects that helped
the university to increase its minority enrollment. Under the leadership of Gary Keller
and other professors, we started such large-scale projects as Project Prime, Project
1000, and more recently the Coalition to Increase Minority Doctorates. Through these
and similar activities, our presence began to be felt within the university. We were
able to demonstrate to others that we understood the proper functions of a university
and that we could design effective, or at least promising, solutions to long standing
problems. One of the peculiar and erroneous beliefs in academia is that issues
dealing with minorities are low brow; they are seen as not substantial in an intellectual
sense and consequently not worthy of serious intellectual effort. Nothing could be
further from the truth. In more than twenty years of wrestling with Chicano academic
issues, I have learned that such issues should not be addressed by the faint hearted
or the intellectually weak. If you want to seriously challenge your brain, try finding
solutions to the vexing educational problems that Chicanos face, or try bringing to
fruition the enormous potential that the group possesses. This is not territory for
intellectual dwarfs. So as a result of successfully launching large scale programs that
dealt with Chicano issues, we were able to garner some measure of respect. And
respect is important in academia.
While we were setting up shop, assisting the university with its internal agenda,
and gaining respect from our academic peers, we were also struggling with the
problem of linking the community and the university in a mutually productive
relationship. In the end, it again was common sense that prevailed. The fact of the
matter is that the university has essentially two functions: To produce and to
disseminate knowledge. Hence, our conclusion was that the university could best
serve the Chicano community by producing and disseminating knowledge that was
important to the Chicano community (cf. Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher
Education, 1969). That’s the long and short of it. It’s a revelation to understand how
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little knowledge the university has produced that is explicitly applicable to Chicano
needs. But once this is understood, it becomes apparent what the proper relationship
ought to be between the university and the Chicano community and what kinds of
programs should be created to cement the relationship.
One way to look at the relationship is to think of the university as a knowledge
producer and the Chicano community as a knowledge consumer. We are talking
here, of course, of formal or academic knowledge which is the stock in trade of the
university. We know that historically the university has often produced knowledge that
was tailor made to the needs of specific constituencies: For example, the professions,
such as law and medicine, or farmers and businessmen, or the military, or the
government. To be sure, often the universities resisted what they considered to be the
intrusion of outside interests, but invariable they adapted to the social demands
placed on them (Kerr, 1963). In time, they even prospered as a result of meeting the
needs of significant outside constituencies. Who remembers now Jefferson’s struggle
to introduce science into the university curriculum when science has now become an
icon representing the university? Who remembers now the fight to get universities to
address the issues of farmers and mechanics that led eventually to the establishment
of a new segment of American higher education, the Land Grant Colleges? Who
doesn’t take for granted the expansion of postsecondary education after the Second
World War that made possible the American dream for returning GIs? And so today,
what some consider another great intrusion into the academy, this time by minority
communities, will one day be seen as the further opening of the university to the
needs of society. As in the past, the universities stand to be the great winners in this
enterprise if they approach it with the same commitment and energy that they gave to
earlier generations who also came calling to the academy’s gates.
Having gained clarity as to what needed to be done, it was now a matter of
waiting for the proper moment to take action. Such a moment occurred when a large
number of community influentials and politicos as well as high ranking university
administrators were gathered at a Latino conference luncheon. During the open
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discussion part of the meeting, some of the community folks demanded that the
university president resign for failure to address the needs of the community.
Needless to say, it was a call heard around the campus and around the town. This
was the moment for our ideas to surface. We proposed to the central administration a
program that would provide direct services to the Chicano community. Following the
nomenclature proposed by Tomás Atencio for such a program, we adopted the name
Community Documentation Program. The title doesn’t fit exactly what we proposed to
do, but it wasn’t completely off the mark either. At any rate, the name was not the
important thing. It was the activities that were proposed that were important.
As you might suspect, what we proposed was that the University make
available its expertise to the Chicano community, largely in terms that would be
defined by the community itself. It’s the idea of recognizing the Chicano community
as a consumer of knowledge and the university as a producer and a repository of
knowledge. The Center, through the Community Documentation Program, would
become a sort of knowledge broker, bringing together experts from the university and
knowledge consumers from the community who had specific needs.
The program was designed to run on university resources, and to be phased in
over a period of several years. A Coordinator was hired to run the program, to make
contacts with professors, and to get the community involved. We did not think of the
Center as the only source of university expertise. Rather we felt that all of the
hundreds of faculty members on campus could be potential sources of expertise. Of
course, we wanted to coerce no one, so all participation had to be voluntary. But
being voluntary doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be without compensation. On the
contrary, we proposed to pay consultant fees to any faculty member who participated
in the program. Naturally, pro bono involvement was not discouraged, but it wasn’t
required.
To show the community our good intentions, we created a search committee for
the Coordinator that included a majority of its members from the community. But it
also included members of the faculty and the Director of the Center. The search
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process was wide open. We were looking for the best that money could buy within
our budget. We took our time. We were in it for the long haul and expected the
community to understand that we were searching for long range solutions. I think that
they did understand.
Once we had the Coordinator on board, we spent several months planning the
details of the program and carrying out the enabling steps that would bootstrap the
progam into action. We established an external advisory committee to guide the
development of the program and to keep it tuned to the needs of the community. A
majority of the members of the advisory committee are from the community.
Since we were starting from scratch, we needed some baseline information to
carry out our planning effectively. We did two surveys. One survey involved the
university faculty. We sent a questionnaire to each faculty member, roughly twelve
hundred of them, explaining the Community Documentation Program and soliciting
their participation, either for pay or pro bono. More than four dozen faculty members
from every corner of the campus agreed to participate in the program. Some may say
that four dozen faculty out of many hundreds is a miserable showing. Not me.
Dozens of experts set to work on problems facing the Chicano community is a
significant development. And it is only a start. I was encouraged by the results. Now
at least we knew who we could count on in the university and what expertise they
possessed.
The second survey involved the Chicano community. The fact of the matter is
that it is almost impossible to define who the community is exactly. We made some ad
hoc decisions. For one thing, we decided not to focus the program on individuals but
on institutions. The most logical institution that defined the community for us was the
community based organization (CBO). We understood that the university was not the
ideal institution to deliver direct services to the community. But it didn’t really need to
do so. There were numerous community based organizations that were trying very
hard to deliver much needed services to the Chicano community. They were probably
much more successful at providing services than we as a university could ever hope
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to become. But we could be helpful to these important CBOs. If we could use our
expertise to help them become more effective, more productive, than we could be
doing what we can do best and the CBOs could be doing better what they are already
doing.
The problem was to identify the field of likely players on the CBO side. Using a
snowball technique we eventually identified about seventy-five CBOs whose chief
mission was to provide services to the Chicano community. This became our target
group. In the questionnaire that we sent to these organizations we explained the
functions of the Community Documentation Program and invited their participation.
We took great pains to explain exactly what we would be able to provide and to define
a set of procedures for requesting help. We kept everything simple and
administratively tidy.
The services that we were able to provide were divided into four categories:
First, we could provide experts as consultants so that a CBO could get technical help
as needed. These were generally short-term consultations. Second, we could
conduct short term research projects, say equivalent to a week’s effort. Third, we
could assist CBOs in conceptualizing and proposing projects to external funding
agencies. These projects, however, would be conducted exclusively by the CBO.
Fourth, we could engage in long range collaborative projects in which both the CBO
and the Center would seek external funding for a joint project. In addition to these
services, we also provided what we termed “situation analysis groups”. CBOs
sometimes need help simply to understand a problem or a situation. This help must
be provided on short notice, say within twenty-four hours. Situation analysis groups
include representatives from the client CBO and one or two experts. The business of
situation analysis groups is discussion and clarification of issues. There generally is
no other product. Sometimes the best thing that you can do for a community group is
to help it clarify a problem or to understand a situation better.
As a result of the CBO survey, we made contact with dozens of CBOs,
informed them of the Community Documentation Program, provided a menu of
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services that we could provide, showed them how to request the services, and
generally opened the doors for business between the university and the Chicano
community. During its first year of operation, the total cost of the program was
approximately $50,000, including administrative costs and the fees paid to
consultants. For this modest investment we undertook some 32 projects that involved
consultants from the university or the surrounding community. Here is just a brief
sampling of the kinds of projects that were requested:
1. Provide technical assistance to do a survey of the service needs in the
incorporated town of Guadalupe. This survey enabled the CBO to
continue planning for services needs by minority populations in the
community.
2. A 69 page research paper was prepared for a CBO to help it promote the
use of the Spanish language.
3. A special report was prepared for a CBO to help it expand its Academia
del Pueblo/Parents as Partners Program.
4. Prepared a report for a CBO on administrative reorganization. This CBO
had experienced extraordinary growth during the previous ten years but
its administrative structure had not kept pace with its institutional growth.
5. Cosponsored a workshop on mariachi music with a CBO in conjunction
with the Tucson International Mariachi Festival.
6. Assisted the local chapter of a national organization to develop culturally
sensitive materials to be used in a barrio elementary school.
7. Produced, with a local arts CBO, a video tape in which a group of Latino
artists discussed their works and individual art concepts. The tape
was to be used to promote the arts program of the CBO.
8. Assisted the local Chicano museum to develop its first exhibit.
As you can see, there is a richness and variety to the requests that are made
by local CBOs. What is interesting about this process, though, is that the CBOs were
in the driver’s seat. They were the ones who identified the areas in which the
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university could help with its expertise. We as a university were not trying to do their
job for them. Nor were we simply working on the community to get another
publication out or to gather information for some client who had awarded the university
a grant. Instead, the university responded to the needs of the community as
expressed by the CBOs. This was such a novel approach, that the first reaction of the
CBOs was incredulity. They had grown to expect little if anything from the university.
Now they were actually getting services that they wanted and the university was
picking up the tab! It didn’t take long for the word to spread around town.
The Community Documentation Program was expanded during its second year
of operation. The total investment in the program was about $75,000 with the majority
of the funds supporting actual services to CBOs. The number of projects went up
sharply. More CBOs were involved, and we got better at monitoring the projects and
documenting their impact. For example, we collected reports from the various
projects and deposited them in the Chicano archives of the university library. Thus the
materials that were produced to help a particular CBO can be used by other
organizations as well as by students studying community groups and community
development. We hope to maintain this documentation of our projects so that in the
long term we will have a rich repository of materials that document the development of
our community.
So where are we today in our efforts to use university resources to address
Latino community needs? For one thing, I believe that we have demonstrated that
universities can be linked to Latino communities in productive ways. For years we
have realized that such a relationship was possible and desirable, but we could not
demonstrate its practical implementation. In order to create such a practical
demonstration, we had to change our perception of the university as a knowledge
producing institution. We also had to change the ways in which we were interacting
with campus administrators. And we had to struggle with the technical problems of
developing an interface between the community and the university.
Of course, we are not out of the woods yet. Since the university is using its
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own resources to support this program, there isn’t universal eagerness about
continuing to invest money in our community. We have to provide continuous
justification for the program’s existence. Getting additional money for the program is
like pulling teeth. But we are confident that the program is right for the community and
it is right for the university.
We realize that there are limits on a university’s involvement in the community
(Bok, 1982), but as Clark Kerr (1963) pointed out:
Knowledge is now central to society. It is wanted, even demanded,
by more people and more institutions than ever before. The
university as producer, wholesaler and retailer of knowledge cannot
escape service. Knowledge, today, is for everybody’s sake. (p. 114)

Since everybody needs knowledge, the university must learn, and we must
help it to learn, to produce knowledge for everybody. What John Gardner wrote in
1969 is remarkably applicable even to this day. He concluded that:
. . . the university community . . . must learn to sit down with people
who do not speak the same language, people whose style of
discourse is different, people with whom it does not feel particularly
comfortable, and it must learn to solve problems collaboratively with
those people. (quoted in Fink & Cooke, Vol. 2, pp. 86-87)

Over the last two decades we have learned that implementing Gardner’s ideas
is not particularly easy. Universities are remarkably conservative institutions and
changes in the way that they think about things or the way they do them does not
come easy. Gladfelter was very close to the truth when he concluded that
. . . the kind of talent required for effective participation in community
problem solving activities are an amalgam of intellectual ability,
entrepreneurial and political acumen, action commitment, and a
capacity for accommodation to the possible. (quoted in Fink &
Cooke, Vol. 2, 1972, pp. 84-85)

This may not sound like the professor who spends all day in the library. Or the
professor who is mostly interested in “cranking out” the next journal article for his
friends to see and count at personnel committee meetings. But I submit to you that
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we need more of the kind of individuals that Gladfelter describes. In fact, we
desperately need them in academia today. And if I am not mistaken, such individuals
will be key in maintaining the dynamism of American universities into the next century.
Without them, in the future we might not just buy our cars and stereos from abroad,
we might have to acquire our knowledge from the same sources as well. So much
hangs in the balance, that I am more convinced than ever that we urgently need to
find as many ways as we can to link university resources to Latino communities.
Once again we are at a great historic turning point when we either hang together or
hang separately. I think that we should hang together and prosper together.
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References

Bok, D. (1982). Beyond the ivory tower. Social responsibilities of the modern
university. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. (1969). El plan de Santa
Barbara. Oakland, CA: La Causa Publications.
Fink, I. S., & Cooke, J. (1972). Campus/community relationships: An annotated
bibliography. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California.
Kerr, C. (1963). The uses of the university. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.