In a landslide victory, sophomore Blanca Garcia and junior Krista Heiden will be the new president and vice president, respectively, of the Student Government Association.

With 67 percent of the vote, Garcia and Heiden defeated the ticket of senior Hannah Kurtzweil and sophomore Samantha Cook, which received 33 percent of the vote.

Garcia and Heiden more than doubled the raw vote tally of Kurtzweil and Cook, 488 votes to 240.

“We feel very privileged; we worked so hard for this,” Heiden said. “There is a long list of things we want to do.”

Garcia said the pair has a lot of work to do to represent students’ interests.

“Right now, Krista and I need to sit down and develop a plan of what they want to work on first so they do not have to back track,” Garcia said. “We will focus first on the students and start a plan, and we will start it before the end of the semester.”

When she is officially sworn into office, Garcia will become the first junior to serve in the position since Lucy Garcia, who served as president during both the 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 academic year.

Total voter turnout appears to be down 25 percent from last year. This year’s election had an estimated 770 voters as opposed to the 2009 election, which had 1,052. However, there were also five competitive races last year as opposed to just two competitive races this year.

Kurtzweil and Cook also did not begin campaigning until six days into the campaign cycle.

“We got off to a slow start,” Kurtzweil said. “I went on a trip with my class for a week during Easter break. In all honesty, Krista and Blanca will be great presidents and vice presidents next year.”

The Student Government Constitution and Student Bill of Rights also passed with more than 85 percent in favor. This was the first year a constitutional referendum was put in place since 1999.

The only other contested race was among three candidates vying for the two sophomore senate positions. Olivia Bouree and Andrew Guerrero won the spots with 38 percent and 34 percent of the vote, respectively. The third candidate, Fremen DeRuvo received 28 percent of the vote. All three are currently serving as freshman senators.

The new SGA officers will take office May 1 and will be officially sworn in when the fall 2010 semester begins.

 

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The diversity of the St. Edward’s University student body has always been a key selling point for incoming freshmen, but statistics show these students won’t find the same diversity in their professors.

Over the last few years, St. Edward’s has won several awards for its ability to promote and maintain an ethnically diverse student body. In 2006, The New York Times named the university to its “Colleges of Many Colors” list. The university has also been repeaid 11 percent of the 187 full-time faculty at St. Edward’s were members of minority groups. Within this group of full-time faculty, 54 are tenured and of these 54, 20 are women, 15 are minority and none are African American, Street-Allen said.

In comparison, 54.9 percent of the undergraduate student population is white, while 30.4 are Hispanic, 3.9 African American and 10.9 are other ethnicities, according to the 2009-2010 FACT Book distributed by the Office of Institutional Research.

That means the full-time faculty employed at St. Edward’s would need to almost quadruple its current diversification to accurately reflect the diversity among the undergraduate students.

The Reaction

Sara Villanueva Dixon, an assistant professor of Hispanic heritage, said the diversity of faculty is not even close to representing the diversity of the student body, especially in terms of the prominent Hispanic and Latino student population.

Dixon said the mentor relationship between professors and students is influential in both the success and retention of students. She said it is important for ethnic students to have faculty that they can communicate with, relate to and respect. She questioned whether the current numbers of ethnic faculty are able to provide enough resources for students.

Street-Allen said the university does not have a quota in place, as some federal courts have found that having such processes actually constitute reverse discrimination, but there is a general philosophy to hire faculty with whom the diverse student population can identify.

The diversity percentages have fluctuated over the years, said Street-Allen, but because St. Edward’s has a comparatively small population to start, it takes only a couple of people to alter statistical representation.

Sr. Donna Jurick, executive vice president and provost, said that she suspected that the university might never have a faculty that exactly reflects that of the student body in terms of diversity either because of the difficulty.

Dixon suggested the university should specifically address the issue through a university-wide committee.

“If there was a committee devoted to diversity, these issues could be addressed in a formalized way,” she said. “We would be able to be creative in terms of our hiring and recruitment process and figure out ways to achieve our goal.”

The Role of Recruitment and Hiring

Over the course of her 20 years at St. Edward’s, Jurick said there have been numerous committees that have taken interest in the diversification of St. Edward’s faculty, although not formally.

“We wish we could do better, but it’s very difficult,” Jurick said. “I think we are trying very hard. We’re all interested and we’re all conscious of it.”

St. Edward’s is currently looking to fill several faculty positions and a dean position.

Each position is hired through a decentralized process. Every school within the university conducts its own hiring practices in partnership with Human Resources, Street-Allen said.

HR first announces job openings on the university’s Web site, in the Chronicle of Higher Education and in other discipline-specific journals. Street-Allen said HR makes every effort to show that St. Edward’s offers equal opportunities and is interested in recruiting minority applicants, both through the language used in position postings and through hiring practices.

“Current faculty will reach out to minority faculty they know and make sure they know about our job openings,” Street-Allen said.

Jurick said one of the ways St. Edward’s has been the most successful in hiring minority faculty is through maintaining close connections with post-doctorate researchers and adjunct professors.

“They know us and they want to be here,” she said. “Those are situations in which [President] Martin and I are very supportive.”

Varner said her employment at St. Edward’s progressed similarly, and is an ideal way to recruit more minority faculty. She was originally hired as an adjunct professor but after a year, Sr. Donna and Fr. Lou Brusatti, dean of the School of Humanities, offered her a full-time position. A year later, she was offered a tenure-track position as an assistant professor.

HR also provides each school an extensive kit that guides search committees through hiring and includes faculty applications, a booklet of interview guidelines and best practices.

Most of the school deans follow the kit almost exactly, but each also adopts their own practices for further evaluating applicants. Most search committees conduct phone interviews after initial evaluations, then invite their top few candidates on campus for a day to meet with students, faculty, the dean and, many times, to teach a class.

Marsha Kelliher, dean of the School of Management and Business, said the campus visits are the most telling about how candidates will react in the classroom and fit within St. Edward’s.

“My ultimate goal is I just want someone who loves students, is passionate about teaching and follows the mission of St. Edward’s,” Kelliher said. “Those are the overriding factors.”

Overall, Jurick said St. Edward’s needs to remain legitimate in its hiring process, and should only hire when a position is necessary. She said that the university would never hire a minority for the sake of hiring a minority.

“We want to hire someone because they are a good teacher, not because they are a minority,” she said. “Either way, you have to be even-handed in hiring. And you must hired in accord with what the school needs and with the particular position.”

Dixon said increasing diversity is a challenge, but she thinks that there are ways to go about it without compromising laws, ethics or values.

“Of course, first and foremost we want to hire trained and qualified faculty,” she said. “But I think diversifying needs to become a priority.”

Cynthia Naples, dean of the School of Natural Sciences, said the school follows the law, tries to be fair to all applicants and find the best fit.

But Naples admitted that the School of Natural Sciences does not have a high proportion of minority faculty. In fact, each dean said they would like to see a larger minority representation in their respective schools.

The Competition Issue

One of the contributing factors to the limited diversity at St. Edward’s is the institution’s focus on teaching and advising. Because St. Edward’s is small and strives to recruit professors who prefer teaching to research, the school deans said many diverse applicants are lost to research institutions. In most cases, top-tiered research-based institutions are able to offer lighter teaching loads, more opportunities to pursue research and more financial support.

“[Teaching and advising] is not always a part of the job in some large universities, but we value it here at St. Edward’s,” Street-Allen said.

Dixon said the reason she was attracted to St. Edward’s was for this exact reason. She had been offered two positions at the University of Texas at Austin, but chose St. Edward’s because she knew the position would allow her to balance her career, raise her two children and interact with her students.

Brenda Vallance, dean of the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences, said it is not the hiring of diverse faculty at St. Edward’s that is the problem, but rather, the small initial applicant pools that themselves contain a lack of diversity.

“We are all running after scarce resources in ethnically diverse Ph.Ds,” she said.

Many of the deans noted that the faculty qualification for a Ph.D degree eliminates many minority candidates because there are not as many minorities receiving Ph.Ds. Street-Allen said that within the total number of those who recieved Ph.Ds in 2009, only 9.6 percent were of African American and Hispanic descent.

Dixon said there still exists unequal numbers of minority students in higher education as a result of a combination of variables. She explained that the differences in available opportunities, socioeconomic status, incomes and family expectations all potentially influence how many minority students are able to pursue bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees.

Jurick said St. Edward’s supports the McNair Scholarship program because it seeks to increase the number of minority students able to pursue higher education and thus, give them the opportunity to enter the job market with these degrees.

The Next Step

Jurick said every dean is conscious of the issue and are all encouraged to look at the question.

“Some disciplines are better at recruiting than others,” she said, “but I think we are all trying very hard.”

Brusatti said the issue is at the front of his mind, and he would like his department to better reflect the student body.

“Diversity reflects the reality of what the United States is these days,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to hear other conversations in the world.”

Vallance, too, said the diversification of faculty is discussed often at St. Edward’s.

“It’s not a pressure,” she said. “We are all interested in diversifying and it really fits well with the mission of institution. When students see people they can relate to, I think that makes education that much richer.”

The deans and professors alike alluded to the difficulties diversity raises. While the university has a legal obligation to consider every applicant equally, regardless of race, color, gender or ethnicity, they also have an obligation to ensure students at St. Edward’s feel comfortable and that they can relate to the faculty that gives them their education.

Varner said diversity and the reasons for increasing it are often discussed in terms of moral principles, political philosophies or legal requirements.

“However, at least with respect to the hiring, promotion, and retention of faculty at [St. Edward’s], the reason that seems to make the most sense to me is actually very simple: A diverse faculty can carry out the mission better than a non-diverse one.”

She continued to say that if the university doesn’t actively push to diversify, the percentages will stay where they are.

“They need to break the glass ceiling,” she said.

Humanities

64 full-time faculty

2 African Americans

1 Hispanic

Natural Sciences

29 full-time faculty

1 Hispanic

Education

13 full-time faculty

2 Hispanic

Behavioral and Social Sciences

29 full-time faculty

1 African American

1 Hispanic

1 Asian

Management and Business

45 full-time faculty

1 African American

1 Hispanic

2 Asian

2 Indian