By Melanie Escalante
(From left to right) Maryellen Baeza, Dominick Casadonte, Sarah Cuevas, Jarett Lujan, Alesi Hernandez and Liane Vásquez-Weber at the Texas Tech “Shaking up Servingness” Panel on April 25. Photo provided by Cristal Sanchez.
In 2019 Texas Tech became a Hispanic Serving Institution, which is defined by the Federal Government as a non-profit, postsecondary degree-granting institution in which at least 25% of the undergraduate student enrollment population is Hispanic.
According to the American Council on Education website, the concept of servingness entails not just enrolling Hispanic students, but also providing the proper infrastructure to meet their needs.
Jarett Lujan, a graduate student in the higher education research program at the College of Education, said ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ are umbrella terms that represent Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans and various other cultures. Therefore, serving Hispanic students is going to look different for each student.
“Some of the things the scholars are suggesting is that we need to rethink financial aid, mainly kind of targeting Latinos and making sure that they have specific financial aid because Hispanics are more likely to take on a second job than they are to take out a student loan,” Lujan said. “How are we financing them so that they can have the experience of going to a Hispanic Student Society meeting as opposed to having to go to work?”
Lujan said it is no secret that our institution sometimes has issues with inclusivity.
“Inclusivity means everyone has a seat at the table but not only that, they’re comfortable at the seat that they’re in,” Lujan said. “They’re able to openly and willingly and comfortably express their lived experiences without fear of harm or without fear of retaliation so that to me is what the true meaning of inclusivity is.”
Lujan said as part of his research on physical spaces and how Latino students avoid or run to certain spaces on campus, he conducted a study at a four-year HSI in the southwest United States where a student told him they did not feel comfortable going to the library because they felt like everybody was watching them and they felt that they could not speak Spanish openly.
“It’s really kind of sad right that students are avoiding spaces that have tons of resources like they have free wifi, computers, printing, maybe even books and references to help out with their studies but yet they’re willing to avoid the space just because they don’t feel comfortable being their true Latino self in that space,” Lujan said.
Dominick Casadonte, Minnie Stevens Piper professor, said what really sets Hispanic students apart is a sense of family, community and belonging which he tries to foster in his classes.
“A lot of my students like to learn in groups,” Casadonte said. “They like to learn together, they don’t like to be just isolated and trying to figure things out so we try to have — we have large aside sessions, we have learnings assistants in our classes that help try to once again put people into smaller groups so they’re not just sitting in a class of 300 feeling really isolated and alone.”
Casadonte said the chemistry department has tried to hire more Hispanic faculty members and works with a lot of groups that support Latinx students on campus. He said their department has a lot of work to do.
“It can’t just be Hispanic students, Hispanic faculty, it has to be everybody,” Casadonte said. “I mean I’m not Hispanic, I’m Italian and Irish but I think this is a really important thing that we need to be doing so you have to have allies who are not necessarily in the culture.”
Casadonte said if the university receives the three million dollar National Science Foundation grant, the chemistry department will revamp chemistry classes by bringing in Hispanic learning assistants.
“One of the things that students would like to be able to say is ‘there’s somebody else here who looks like me and there’s somebody specifically who is helping me to learn who looks like me,’ so we’re going to try to provide role models for our Hispanic freshman so that they can learn chemistry which is a foundational course for a lot of other STEM disciplines,” Casadonte said.
The Minnie Stevens Piper professor from Cleveland, Ohio said it is hard to say you are serving in just one way when there are also emotional and psychological needs that require fulfillment.
“The most common reason I’ve heard for Hispanic students to drop out is because they need to go home to work to take care of their families or instances like that so we need to be more sensitive to that or provide opportunities that let people still continue on in classes even if they have to go home for a semester for a family emergency or for taking care of their grandparents,” Casadonte said.
Sarah Cuevas, program manager for the Office of the Dean of Students and advisor for the Hispanic Student Society, said serving means getting your hands dirty by listening or pushing something that you might not have thought to push.
Carol Sumner, Vice President of the Division of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, leads the recent “Shaking up Servingness” panel at Texas Tech. Photo provided by Cristal Sanchez.
“We have to remember the situation right and she (Carol Sumner) gave me this beautiful example of being able to connect with an inner-city student from Houston and helping their family understand that, or talking with someone from the valley — down from our South Texas area — and helping their parents understand the importance of getting your FAFSA in,” Cuevas said.
Cuevas said in her role with the dean of students she can serve Hispanic students better by breaking the barrier of seeking resources for their mental health and helping them understand how to go back home and tell their parents that they are struggling.
“Taking away that fear and creating a safe place I think is one of the most important things and also being physically out there with our students, listening to them, hearing them on what they need,” Cuevas said. “I met with several students last week who didn’t have money for food but they were working two jobs just to get to their graduation point and it’s hard in those situations sometimes as we navigate, you know our higher education system.”
Cuevas said another way to better serve students is to break the barrier of the language used within policies on campus.
“A student is terrified to drop a class because they think they’re going to get kicked out of Texas Tech or they can’t go home for the weekend because they haven’t seen their parents in three months,” Cuevas said. “They seek that validation, they seek that place that tells them ‘it’s okay, it’s okay,’ but one of the things I intentionally do, and I think we can do better at is reminding our students they do belong here. They are meant to be here.”
Cuevas said when she feels tired from serving she remembers the end goal of getting students graduated to be the remarkable people they want to be. What helps her continue is having hope, something she also passes along to students.
“I’m also a single mother, with two daughters and so showing them the capacity that they can be a Dr. Lujan, or they can be a Dr. Higgins and reminding myself that it is something greater and for the greater good to just continue that mission even when you’re weary,” Cuevas said.
Jarett Lujan, graduate vice president of the Student Government Association, said SGA tries to reiterate the need to understand and listen to individual students’ needs because service to them will be unique.
“That same policy extends to faculty and staff,” Lujan said. “How are we serving our faculty and staff and administrators that also have those needs? Yes, student service is our priority but we also have to fill the cups of those faculty and staff members, otherwise they’re going to be burnt out also and we need them to be able to serve our students correctly.”
Lujan said SGA endorsed all Latino candidates that ran for office this year to get their voices heard and have an organized place where Latinos and Hispanics can help each other out.
“I’m going to be very honest, SGA is a historically white organization everywhere across the country and that’s just fact because for decades people of color weren’t in college so when student governments were founded they were mostly white students,” Lujan said. “To this day, most student governments across higher education institutions are predominantly white students.
Lujan said SGA is doing great at embracing the HSI name and is starting to do more things in relation to Hispanics, including establishing the very first Hispanic caucus.
“Every representative of SGA whether you’re an executive member or a legislative member you sit on this caucus and what we do — I was actually the chair with my friend Alana Hurst Lopez, she was the co-chair with me — and what we did was we just said ‘this is a focused area where Hispanic Latino students can come to us with issues and then we can take those issues and work on them in SGA.’”
Lujan said before coming to Tech in 2019 he came from an HSI that did not really do a lot of cultural programming for Hispanics and instead relied on students to put on everything. At Tech he has seen more culture programming than he’s ever seen before, including a newly added HSI week during Hispanic Heritage Month and having an HSI university-wide committee that works all year long.
Members of the Texas Tech community attended the “Shaking up Servingness” panel on April 25 in the matador room at the Student Union Building, as well as via zoom. Photo provided by Cristal Sanchez.
“I served on a hiring committee, I served on the HSI committee, the Hispanic Heritage Month committee, parking and appeals — I mean there’s a lot,” Lujan said. “There’s a lot of different ways that they’ve utilized my voice to help and it’s not just that I’m graduate vice president, I have served in those roles in previous years even during COVID I served on a hiring committee and things like that.”
Lujan said the Hispanic Latino population is going to be the majority in the state of Texas and is vastly outpacing any other population while also being the youngest demographic.
“The average age for Hispanic Latinos in this country is somewhere between 29 and 27 years old and so because of that you think of all the young pipeline,” Lujan said. “We’re already the majority in K-12 schools in the state of Texas and so because of that all of those students are going to be going to college, or considering going to college within the next 10-15 years.”
Lujan said if we are not prepared to serve, house and meet the needs of students in ten years then we are going to be failing them.
“What’s going to end up happening is that the socio-economic value of getting a degree isn’t going to happen for this population and then we have not an opportunity for social mobility for this entire population to succeed in this country without a degree,” Lujan said.
Lujan said as the population is increasing we need to be prepared and ready to serve students when the demographic shift vastly changes student, staff and faculty makeup.
“Servingness is a very unique problem and the more that we pay attention to the individual identities that we hold and that the people that we serve hold, the better we’re going to be at serving these populations,” Lujan said.
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