Fall 2021

On October 29 and November 5 and 11, 2021, a CLA Strategic Planning Steering Group of over 70 diverse faculty, students, staff, and administrators met to develop a framework to achieve greater equity in CLA. The planning process helped participants focus on five areas:

1. Build connections with each other;
2. Explore how the recent past (mainly since the 1990s) has shaped today’s conditions pertaining to equity at this university;
3. Map current obstacles experienced by individuals and specific groups;
4. Identify potential ‘common grounds for action’ (CGAs), which represent outcomes we want to achieve together and that address the obstacles identified; and
5. Build consensus on a specific set of CGAs.

At the end the fall 2021 planning sessions, the Steering Group adopted the following four CGAs as the framework for a strategic plan to advance equity in CLA:

1. Position the Liberal Arts as central to a quality education
2. Create an inclusive campus climate that values differences and well-being.
3. Build and develop an institutional structure that equitably compensates, promotes, invests in, supports, and centers diverse staff’s and faculty’s labor, service, and expertise.
4. Establish an equitable, sustainable, transparent, and highly functional resource infrastructure that encourages alternative forms of organizing.

The Steering Group was informed that the next planning step was to form Action Learning Teams (ALT) focused on developing key solutions for each CGA. Steering Group members were sign up for an ALT and recommend other participants and people that should be consulted.

Based on the notes from the three planning sessions, PST members crafted a problem statement for each CGA and worked together to ensure that each CGA was clear and distinct from the others.

The following section describes the problem that each CGA aims to address and provides a list of Steering Group members who signed for that ALT. It is important to underscore that the CGAs and problem statements are provisional: they are intended to give enough focus to get the ALTs started, but these statements can be modified as each ALT conducts its analysis and develops key solutions.

Action Learning Teams (ALTs)

To support the work of ALTs, PST developed a document that includes the notes from the Steering Group’s planning work in fall 2021, entitled CLA Strategic Plan Focused on Equity: Notes – Steering Group Planning – Fall 2021.

ACTION LEARNING TEAM 1: Position the Liberal Arts as central to a quality education  

Problem Statement: This CGA addresses the increased marginalization of the Liberal Arts at CSULB. In the context of a broader neoliberal cultural shift that defines quality education mainly as training that helps students achieve financial success, teachers, high school advisors, and families tend to steer students, especially first-generation students, into disciplines that promise higher incomes, such as business, computer and information technology, engineering biological sciences, and related technical disciplines. The university administration, in turn, channels a disproportionate share of resources towards these disciplines, in the form of higher salaries and research support. However, CLA faculty—who are the most diverse of any college—deliver most of the teaching that equips students with the core knowledge and skills that are hallmarks of a quality education: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. To undervalue CLA is to undervalue the university’s stated core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

ACTION LEARNING TEAM 2: Create an inclusive campus climate that values differences and well-being. 

Problem Statement: This CGA addresses exclusion and marginalization stemming from a lack of inclusive practices that have deleterious effects on the well-being of students, staff, and faculty. One key concern is the absence of accountability and transparency at the university, college, department, and program levels. It is unclear which administrators or divisions, if any, are responsible for defining, implementing, and evaluating inclusive practices. Furthermore, efforts to promote well-being and create an inclusive campus climate, including the development of inclusive curriculum, have been sporadic and uncompensated, as opposed to institutionalized. They have also proven ineffective at eradicating racism, sexism, ableism, micro-aggressions, and many other interpersonal and structural practices that exclude historically marginalized and minoritized populations.

ACTION LEARNING TEAM 3: Build and develop an institutional structure that equitably compensates, promotes, invests in, supports, and centers diverse staff’s and faculty’s labor, service, and expertise.

Problem Statement: This CGA addresses a set of disregarded yet interconnected working conditions that create problems with retention and promotion, and that have an adverse impact on morale, mental and physical health, and a sense of belonging, particularly for those from historically marginalized and minoritized populations. Key work-related issues include cultural and identity taxation, invisible labor, wage stagnation, inversion and compression, inequitable and inadequate compensation, burnout, overwork, lack of resources and support, workplace hostility, and inequity and bias in student teaching evaluations and in faculty evaluation processes. These work conditions are all linked to multiple systems of power that marginalize faculty and staff in routine and systemic ways.

ACTION LEARNING TEAM 4: Establish an equitable, sustainable, transparent, and highly functional resource infrastructure that encourages alternative forms of organizing.

Problem Statement: This CGA addresses the lack of an infrastructure that has, as its core function and daily practice, the capacity to encourage, support, and sustain inclusive and empowering efforts to dismantle systemic inequities across CLA. The absence of effective communication and transparent and flexible decision-making processes across all levels of the university and CLA administration and governance tends to dampen bottom-up organizing for transformative institutional change. Moreover, the burden of addressing inequities in CLA tends to fall most heavily on faculty, staff, students, and departments and programs most impacted by these inequities. Addressing inequities therefore usually turns into cultural and identity taxation, not only because this additional work delays career progress and is typically uncompensated. This work can also jeopardize job security and access to opportunities because it entails raising uncomfortable issues for people in positions of power. People addressing inequities are often labeled as agitators or troublemakers, excluded from decision-making processes, and passed over for leadership opportunities—exclusionary strategies that keep systemic inequities in place.