Do We Need to Have "Latina/o" Studies Programs?
George C. Leef, The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy

Last spring, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill established a new minor in "Latina/o Studies." A recent announcement from UNC's College of Arts and Sciences proclaims that "The establishment of the new program, beginning this semester, follows recognition of the increasing importance and influence of the rapidly growing number of people in North Carolina and the region who came -- or whose ancestors came -- from countries in Latin America." So UNC students can now minor in "Latina/o Studies" and the program's director, Professor Maria DeGuzman, hopes that eventually it will become a major.

It probably will, but has UNC done something wise or something silly in putting its imprimatur on yet another ethnic studies program? I'm inclined to see this as silly, another of those "feel-good" things that are so appealing to politicians, university administrators, and everyone else who gets to spend other people's money.

It is true that North Carolina has a growing "Latina/o" (has the term "Hispanic" now been retired?) population, but it is difficult to see how we go from that fact to the conclusion that the state's flagship university needs to have a "Latina/o" program.

UNC's dependably liberal student newspaper, the Daily Tarheel, provided a view into the workings of the multicultural mindset when it editorialized that "Students of all races have a use for cultural studies, and becoming a leading university requires improving cultural awareness." So if more people of Latin origins or ancestry are moving in, we had better get ready to understand them by offering some university courses under the umbrella of "Latina/o Studies."

The implicit assumption seems to be that unless the university takes the lead in promoting "cultural awareness," people of minority groups will not be socially accepted, or even face hostility. Never mind that there don't seem to be any problems between the state's non-Latino residents and the Latinos who have been living here for years. (Even if there were, it's hard to see how the random bigot would be changed by the availability of some courses at UNC.) Real problems are not necessary; the mere suggestion that a new course might enhance the level of "cultural awareness" is sufficient. In the thoughtworld of academic administrators, cultural awareness is so presumptively beneficial that when professors want new courses or departments, they know they're half way home just by swaddling them in that blanket.

Let's examine the justification for the Latina/o Studies Minor.

First, is it the case that "cultural awareness" is necessary for people to cooperate or peacefully associate? Does someone think, "I understand and appreciate the Latino culture, therefore I like Jose"? It is far more likely that someone would think, "Jose is a good co-worker, so I like him," or "Jose roots for the Tar Heels, so I like him." Good human relations don't depend on a deep knowledge of another person's culture, but instead on a small number of shared interests.

Second, is it even true that there is a "Latina/o" culture to understand? Like whites, blacks, Chinese, and all other population groups, there are great differences among individuals of Latin descent -- they don't all believe the same things, like the same things, or act in similar ways. Whatever generalizations a student might draw from having taken courses in the Latina/o minor are apt to be inapplicable to many individual Latinos they might encounter.

Third, would the courses students could take to complete this minor actually convey much knowledge about Latinos living in North Carolina? To get the minor, students have to take five courses drawn from a variety of departments. Here are some of the choices.

• English 49E, when taught as "Chicana/o Noir" but, in the new curriculum, to be taught as English 465: Difference, Aesthetics, and Affect. Examines interrelations between cultural difference, socio-political circumstances, aesthetic form, and the representation, production, and conveyance of subjectivity (affect, states of feeling) in texts, other media, and material culture.
• English 50/Women's Studies 150 (to be taught in the new curriculum as English 665) when listed as Queer Latina/o Culture in connection with the Sexualities Minor as well as the Latina/o Studies Minor. This course explores literature, performance art, film, and photography by Latinas/os whose works may be described as "queer" and that question the terms and norms of cultural dominance.
• English 180 (to be taught in the new curriculum as English 666) when taught as Queer Latina/o Text/Image. This course explores Latina/o literature about photography in relation to photography by queer Latina/o artists and, through this double focus poses certain questions about identity, subjectivity, and culture.
• History 145: The American Colonial Experience [from a multicultural perspective]. This course examines the history of Native North America, the Europeans (the Spanish, French, and English) who colonized North America, and the Africans brought as slaves, to 1763.
• Drama 86: "Latin American Theater." This course explores the historical and aesthetic development of the Latin American theater, focusing upon particular factors that distinguish this theatre from the Western European tradition.
• Music 86: Music as Culture, History of Latino Music in the United States. The course focuses on music in the framework of its social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. Spring 2005 . . . this course will focus on the history of Latino music in the United States, specifically the underlying musical, social, cultural, and political issues shaping the trajectory of styles such as conjunto and Tejano, salsa (New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles), hip hop (NYC and L.A.), and banda and narcocorrido.

Other courses include Geography 152: Mobile Geographies, the political economy of migration, Anthropology 30: Anthropology of the Caribbean, AFAM 65: Diaspora Art and Cultural Politics, and Public Policy 49: New Immigrants and the New South.

I submit that even if a student took all of those courses, he would gain precious little knowledge pertinent to the Latinas/os he might wind up living near or working with in North Carolina.

And looking at this program (and others like it) through the economist's lens, there is a steep opportunity cost here. Students who are lured into this minor and its abstruse courses lose out on the chance instead to take courses that would do much more to develop their abilities to reason and to communicate, the key attributes for success in almost any kind of work. It's like filling up on cookies and ice cream when you could have had meat and vegetables.

There is nothing wrong with "cultural awareness," but let's not pretend that it is a necessary ingredient in social harmony or that the only way to it is through college courses.

NAS9:44 AM

Who's Assessing the Assessors?
Candace de Russy, SUNY Trustee

Imagine if the managers of a multinational corporation with assets worth billions of dollars demanded that its board of directors free it from any accountability to shareholders or the investing public. What if the president, CEO, COO, and other top brass assured the board, which is legally bound to oversee the company, that they would henceforth exercise oversight themselves - by themselves? To assuage skeptics, what if these officers promised everyone that their hand-picked staff would develop cherry-picked assessment and research instruments to ensure accountability? Not to enter the world of make-believe, but what if the board and the SEC agreed to this charade while publicly proclaiming victory for shareholders' rights?

Given such a stunt, the media would make a feast of everyone involved. The Wall Street Journal would jump on the story, and politically ambitious prosecutors would leap to the fore. Yet something analogous to this scenario recently occurred right under taxpayers' noses in New York State, and nary a peep has been heard. In an abandonment of its historical and legal role to ensure that "the state university . . . provide the people of New York educational services of the highest quality" (as written in Education Law, Article 8, Section 351), the State University of New York's Board of Trustees voted on June 22 to grant each of the system's sixty-four campuses the freedom to develop and implement its own General Education assessment policy, thus allowing SUNY administrators to write their own job performance. Such an approach not only fails to fulfill the Board's obligations, but also effectively isolates each SUNY campus from external scrutiny so that comparisons in-state, much less national comparisons, are impossible. The results are predictable: administrators and faculty win while students and taxpayers lose.

Some historical perspective will reveal the degree to which the new policy sidesteps the Board's previously mandated assessment program. Last June, the Board approved a path-breaking charge to fulfill a portion of its legally-mandated mission of giving New Yorkers the best system of higher education resources will allow. Among this charge's core tenets was the development and implementation of "a University-wide process . . . using common measures" on each campus to assess the achievement of General Education goals. The newly-approved measure, however, allows campuses to choose among incommensurate assessment measures, thus ensuring that student learning achievement may not be compared on a system-wide basis. Ironically, it also provides for assessment in only three areas of General Education: mathematics, writing, and critical thinking -- the areas most easily objectively tested. Such a pared-down program abandons any universal assessment of those three areas as well as of the bulk of the General Education program, thus failing to provide rigorous oversight of SUNY's most fundamental programs.

To gauge students' intellectual progress, the Trustees' 2003 resolution called on the System Administration to "measure the actual student learning . . . general educational learning outcomes . . . at two different points in time so as to permit the determination of the growth in learning that has occurred ('value added')." Yet the new measure completely abandons this requirement by reducing it to a mere suggestion. A value-added framework would offer all segments of SUNY, from community colleges to research centers, a fair opportunity to demonstrate their ability to ensure success in learning. Absent a value-added assessment policy, the System Administration and Trustees are blocked from making competent analyses of these programs over time. Such investigations are essential not only for determining the true quality of these institutions, but also for allocating increasingly scarce public resources in a way that best fulfills SUNY's mission.

The Board's failure of will as revealed in its latest vote makes a mockery of its original mandate that SUNY "regularly and publicly report on . . . the results of our assessment efforts." Public reports are only as accurate and useful as the information from which they are composed. Absent university-wide, common measures of a value-added nature, any information made public will be unique, incomplete at best, and risibly self-serving at worst. Comparability provides the most meaningful reference point for interpreting and soundly judging performance in all areas of human endeavor. Of what value are reports on a state-wide university system if cross-campus comparisons are impossible? If no bases for comparability within SUNY are provided, by what standard can students, parents, and taxpayers judge the quality of any particular unit?

What does this new, weakened resolution provide? In brief, more paper work, job safety, and all-around kudos for those responsible for running and measuring the performance of each campus. Lest you deem this prediction too cynical, consider the mechanisms now in place for assessing a campus's fulfillment of its General Education mandate. An intermediary "representative" committee comprised mainly of faculty from throughout SUNY, the General Education Assessment Review (GEAR) Group, is charged simply to "review" the individual campuses' local "assessment processes" for conformity to a very limited set of general principles -- with no duties for assessing the "assessment outcomes." The GEAR committee will only "function as a resource and a colleague, making itself available to campuses to the extent that they would be welcome." In other words, the campuses need have no fear of any serious, rigorous oversight. Indeed, GEAR also "reviews" the implementation of the General Education requirements themselves, which the Board established in a 1999 resolution, as well as the local assessment processes. Such an arrangement solidifies the Board's abrogation of its duties in this regard, because the new procedures provide for neither a separation of powers nor a formal, external verification process to measure the quality of GEAR's work, let alone of the campuses. Indeed, the Trustees are effectively delegating their legal responsibilities to GEAR in exchange for glowing future reports on the performance of each campus.

While it is understandable that a high-stakes project such as system-wide assessment would be uncomfortable for campuses which have operated in the past as free agents in the matter of quality assurance, it is not acceptable that the Board of Trustees of the nation's largest public university system pander to this discomfort by permitting campuses to use public financing for General Education with no obligation to comply with national standards and norms. Trustees should require high standards in every field of General Education and commission a quality "triage" of nationally-normed tests (such as the Academic Profile or the College Level Examination Program) rather than permit campuses to choose whether or not to adopt a recognized national standard -- and then in a subset of only three areas. In addition, such testing should be actively monitored by the System Administration in tandem with Trustees and "visiting experts," and not by representatives of the campuses, to ensure and enforce fairness and uniformity. Instead, the SUNY campuses openly protested the requirement of comparisons and rankings among themselves, and within the state and nation; they aggressively lobbied the System Administration to change the Board's mandate -- and, urged by Chancellor Robert L. King, the Trustees unfortunately obliged.

SUNY's new assessment plan was assembled with the express purpose of eliminating the requirements of the Board's 2003 resolution, ratifying the status quo, and diluting Education Law's mandate to provide education of the highest quality. Because of this, I fear that SUNY will indeed have, as the System Administration ironically claims it desires, "an assessment initiative without equal in the nation," for other states will look to SUNY for the prime example of what they wish to avoid. In the Board's 2003 and 1999 resolutions, the SUNY leadership had the rare opportunity to begin to establish high expectations for a SUNY education so that all would know the quality of a SUNY degree. Instead, the revised and compromised resolution ensures that SUNY will remain a loose federation of independent campus fiefdoms ultimately accountable to no one but themselves.

In the post-Enron era, it is imperative that the trustees of state university systems fulfill their legal responsibilities for transparency and accountability to the citizens of their states. Assessment of the assessors of public university systems to ensure an external review of quality is the obvious first order of business.

NAS1:22 PM