By Shruthi Lakshmanan
The San Jose State Academic Senate discussed the possibility of making an ethnic studies class a graduation requirement, undergraduates receiving credit for graduate degree courses and recruiting diverse faculty members during Monday’s meeting.
Ethnic studies
Academic Senate Chair Ravisha Mathur claimed that Assembly Bill 1460, a proposal by the California State Legislature, gave lawmakers too much power in creating curriculum.
Under the bill, the California State University system would be required to provide ethnic studies courses on all of its campuses as a graduation requirement.
“All of us do support ethnic studies,” Mathur said. “It is the issue that once you open the door for legislators to come and make comments or determine your curriculum . . . They can then feel free to come and say not only what you should be teaching, but also in the future what we should not be teaching.”
Psychology professor Mark Van Selst, who represents SJSU in the CSU Academic Senate, spoke about the way CSU
campuses would make a curriculum change incorporating ethnic studies into lower division undergraduate requirements.
“[The] campus is free to define other ethnic studies outcomes,” Van Selst said. “[The] campus may choose to have a cultural diversity requirement in addition to that.”
Van Selst said it is important to integrate the studies as early as possible into students’ schedules for absorption of the material.
“It’s also appropriate that that’s a lower division where they have the impact route,” Van Selst said. “You don’t want it to be the last thing you take.”
Van Selst said that academic research explicitly states the benefits of the “exposure to ethnic studies is good for both undergraduate students who are minority members and those who are not.”
However, if students transfer to a CSU, they may not have the necessary exposure to the subject.
“For transfer students, there’s an upper division element,” said Van Stelst. “That’s just a short reflective piece.”
With a strategy in place for both lower division undergraduates and upper division transfer students, the state assembly bill can be implemented for all students to grasp an understanding about ethnic issues.
Because the policy is a state initiative, faculty members were not allowed to vote for or against it.
The proposal was shared with the committee for faculty feedback.
A decision to implement the policy will be made by the state upon receiving comments and concerns addressed by CSU campuses.
Undergraduate students earning graduate credit
The SJSU Academic Senate passed a motion for undergraduate students to receive partial graduate credit for graduate degree courses.
Brandon White, biological sciences associate professor and policy chair of the Curriculum and Research Committee, explained the potential for undergrads to receive a partial graduate education.
“[Undergraduates] would have to first meet the prerequisites to be able to take the course,” White said.
At the moment, graduate students are allowed to take courses marked between 100 and 199, courses considered as upper division undergraduate classes.
Undergraduate students do not have the chance to take graduate classes labeled as 200 or above.
Students will also need to have a 2.75 GPA or above to qualify for a graduate course.
However, each college on campus holds the ability to determine if the units can be used for a major or minor credit.
Students who have taken graduate courses will receive some credit for it on their transcripts, but it will not place them at an advantage for the graduate programs on campus.
The motion is now awaiting President Mary Papazian’s signature for official approval.
Recruitment of diverse faculty
Senior Director of Faculty Affairs James Lee shared statistics his office gathered that showed an increase in diversity of faculty members’ race, ethnicity and gender.
“When there’s a mismatch between faculty and students, and often it’s with students of color, not having persons who look like them or talk like them . . . That has an impact on student success,” Lee said.
According to Lee’s statistical report, the student-faculty ratio is significantly disproportionate between racial categories.
The report states that white tenured professors represent 55% of the faculty members while less than a quarter of the student population is white.
Meanwhile, 28.9% of SJSU students identify as Latinx, yet 7.1% of the faculty members are representative of the Latinx student demographic.
However, there is a steady decrease in white faculty members with a simultaneous increase in non-white teachers.
“I pulled our 2017 data and our 2019 data and if you just kind of draw a line from where we are proportionately white to the rest of the country, you can pretty much see, we might be doing a better job,” said Lee.
Lee also indicated from the report that there has been a steady increase in the hiring of female faculty members.
Despite this, more men are getting jobs as faculty members.
Committee members commented on possible recruitment techniques focalized to female faculty members and said they were curious about numerical data involving international faculty members.
“I think it’s very important to remember that those who are applying to come to San Jose State who are not US citizens have many more barriers . . . To even accept an offer,” said Karthika Sasikumar, a political science associate professor.
