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The primary source of news and information about California State University, Dominguez Hills, its students, faculty, and staff.

Juneteenth

L.A. Sentinel: Emancipating Higher Education

June 23, 2023 By Lilly McKibbin

Portrait of President Parham

Source: Op-Ed by CSUDH President Thomas A. Parham for L.A. Sentinel/L.A. Watts Times

Avoiding the scandalous incongruence between what the emancipation proclamation preached and what was actualized. 

Juneteenth celebrations were in full force this week in communities throughout the country. Interestingly, January 2023 marked the 160th anniversary since the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Lincoln, which people believed freed slaves throughout the nation.”¯”¯And yet, for all of its celebratory flare, the presidential order only partially achieved what it was lauded for.

The moral and symbolic power of the executive order and public policy, as profound as it was and is, was contrasted with the reality that reportedly, more than 500,000 slaves in border states like Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware were not covered by the document.

But wait a minute! How does that phenomenon happen in the midst of a presidential directive? First, to call President Lincoln “the Great Emancipator” is a title that appears to be embellished by idealism rather than fact. Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her substantive text entitled”¯The 1619 Project (2021), chronicles the reported narratives Lincoln actually verbalized, including statements about how the White race suffered from the presence of Black people; that while he thought enslavement to be cruel and inhuman, he was not a believer in true equality among White and Black races; and that one solution after slavery was abolished would be for Black people to leave the country they had helped to build.

With the nation’s chief executive and the document’s primary architect brokering a bi-partisan political deal to try and preserve the union while holding on to these biases and sentiments, it is little wonder why the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation was so difficult to achieve.

I have found that in life, and especially in the human condition, there is often a gap between aspiration and actualization.”¯The ability for all people of African descent to benefit from that order and historic document depended on both the unwavering advocacy of the president, but also various states in the nation cooperating with that directive, even in states like Texas where news that slaves had been freed did not reach them until some two and a half years later in June of 1865.

Alternately, the order required a level of accountability and enforcement by the federal government that somehow at that time, seemed more illusionary than real. Perhaps that can be understood if one balances the cost of actually granting true freedom and equal rights to Black citizens against the former president’s hesitation to severely offend the sensibilities of White people and political foes who were generally not in favor of Black equality.

Having spent more than 40 years of my professional career as a psychologist, academician, scholar, and clinician at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Irvine, and now as the chief executive of California State University, Dominguez Hills, I’ve had lots of opportunity to experience and review different institutions.”¯I’ve explored their profiles, histories, and missions for training new generations of educated students prepared to examine career pursuits that include professional jobs or further study at the graduate and professional school levels.

Whether a Carnegie classified Research 1, 2, 3, or regional comprehensive, these universities share with other colleges a commitment to enroll students, create academic and co-curricular learning opportunities that access the creative and generative capacities of their intellects,”¯help them achieve certain levels of mastery commiserate with their specific degree attainment, and graduate them poised and ready to engage in opportunities that align with their individual goals and aspirations.

However, while many institutions’ offerings are characterized by these experiential opportunities their students admire and appreciate, there are some cohorts of their student body, particularly African American and other people of color, who experience a very different vision and interpretation of what I suspect institutions intend and promise.

It is that incongruence I wish to comment on in this article because as much as I admire what we do in institutions of higher learning, it is always appropriate to review and assess whether the mission we intend is consistent with the outcomes we yield and achieve across all cohorts of students we claim to care about. This is especially true for students of African descent.

In my mind, higher education promises several things to Black students who seek to fulfill their academic dreams.

It represents:

  • A social contract that delivers on the promise and possibility of education for Black people based on the reciprocal investment people of African descent make in its institutions
  • A vehicle for improving educational access and outcomes for Black people at every level of the academy, including students, faculty, staff, and senior executives
  • A robust series of opportunities that harnesses the best of Black talent to address the needs of an institution or organization in comprehensive ways
  • A platform for individuals to exhibit demonstrated proficiency in educational endeavors that allow people of African descent and others to thrive despite the challenges and adversities of individual, institutional, and societal racism and racial inequities
  • An environment where students can develop and enhance critical thinking skills, learn to supplement biases and assumptions with facts and data that help them form more cogent and persuasive arguments, and challenge preconceived and biased notions regarding cultural differences in their peers and themselves; and
  • A mechanism of affordability that allows for education to be attained without saddling the student and their family with enormous and crippling debt

Consequently, as I think about operationalizing Black excellence in higher education within the context of authentic “freedom”, using the frames articulated above as my preamble, I would expect to find several characteristics present in those institutions.

These include strong enrollment trends for African American students; robust retention efforts and persistence rates; support services that help students address needs for competent advising and mental health care;”¯initiatives that help African American students create a cultural comfort zone in the midst of what is sometimes perceived as a sea of cultural sterility; diverse faculty with African American professors and curriculum being reflected in all departments throughout the institution; faculty attitudes and classroom environments that affirm rather than assault students’ humanity with micro-aggressions, micro-assaults, and micro-invalidations; graduation rates that compare favorably with other demographic cohorts; and life trajectories for students and their families that have been elevated as a result of their academic achievements and degree attainment.

Being a chief executive in a regional comprehensive institution that is part of the California State University system and an African American president at that, I have a particular vantage point, albeit biased,”¯from which to view the relationship between promises made and promises realized in the realm of higher education.”¯In this moment, I’m recalling, for example, an article by Scott Pulsipher (2021), who, in writing for Forbes magazine, argued that at its core, higher education represents a pathway to opportunity that should be open to all.

In reinforcing my belief that higher education has fallen short in its mission to create that pathway for all people of culturally and economically diverse backgrounds to travel successfully, he further argued, as many have before him, that while talent in our students is universal, the freedom to traverse those roads of opportunity are not, especially for those students who are not wealthy, privileged, or otherwise advantaged. Indeed, realities are different for those who live their lives at the margins of society, those “faces at the bottom of the well” Harvard’s Dereck Bell spoke so eloquently about (Bell, 1992).

Several years ago, the Campaign for College Opportunity (CCO), in its report on the “State of Education for Black Californians” (2021), also argued that where Black students are concerned, higher education needs to close the persistent college preparation, access, and completion gap. CCO has also recommended that university and college leaders must create a more welcoming environment on campuses that provides African American students with a strong sense of belonging by increasing the proportion of Black faculty & staff, who reflect the experience of students and recognize their assets and strengths.

While synthesizing the perspectives from two very different educational entities, I do not want to ignore the fact that some African American college and university students are succeeding and thriving in institutions across this country. Thus, no observation can be absolute, even as I remember that the question here is not about individual stories of success, but more about the persistent equity gaps in many institutions in the nation where metrics of enrollment, persistence, retention, and graduation for African Americans are compared with their other demographic counterparts.

Indeed, there is a common denominator to their narratives above that aligns with my own thinking about higher education and Black students.”¯Clearly, higher education is teetering on the brink of unfulfilled promises where Black students are concerned. And yet, efforts continue to be made in institutions across America to help African American students realize a fuller measure of their promise and possibility.

And so, this year’s Juneteenth, or Freedom Day commemoration invites us to interrogate how do we in higher education really assess whether the opportunities promised to students of African descent align with those that they realize? Certainly, the State of California has taken one of the most aggressive postures by standing up a Governor-appointed”¯Reparations Task Force”¯in 2020. Their preliminary and near-final report, which was recently released in draft,”¯chronicles the harm and discrimination imposed on Black people and makes a case for how the residuals of slavery, oppression, and racism continue to have lingering impacts on the educational outcomes for people of African descent.

From legalized discrimination supported by public policy to the under-resourcing of public schools in predominantly Black areas, and even the implementation of a state proposition (Prop. 209) that restricted and, in some cases, prevented the ability of higher education institutions to address past wrongs through institutional policies on recruitment, admissions, economic aid, hiring, etc., it is clear from that report that educational freedom for Black people has yet to be truly realized (Custred & Wood, 1996).

Another avenue of exploring this question is acknowledging that data can tell part of the story as we look at admission, enrollment, retention, persistence, graduation rates, and the equity gaps in those numbers compared to other demographic cohorts. Those national data, and conversations with a trusted colleague (Olschwang, 2023), indicate the following:

Eligibility for Admissions to Colleges and Universities

Black students continue to be underrepresented in higher education (Adedoyin, 2022). According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, 2022), there were 1.9 million Black students enrolled in higher education in the Fall of 2020 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). Black students made up 14% of enrollment but only 9% of degree completion, and they are unevenly represented across institution types (De Brey, Snyder, Zhang, & Dillow, 2021).

For example, between 2011-2020, over 400,000 Black students dropped out of community college (HCM Strategists, 2022). This represents a decline in community college enrollment by 44% (Weissman, 2022). Ironically, Black students are more likely to enroll in a community college because for some, only 57% have access to the courses needed for college readiness, and 61% are not able to meet the ACT benchmarks (Bridges,2018). Black students made up 21% of enrollment at for-profit institutions, 12% of the population at 4-year public institutions, and 8% at elite research institutions (De Brey, Musu, McFarland, Wilkinson-Flicker, Diliberti, Zhang, …& Wang, 2019).

HBCUs account for 3% of the colleges and universities and enroll over 10% of Black students (Bridges, n.d.; United negro college fund, n.d.). Overall, enrollment in higher education has increased a few percentage points since the start of the pandemic, however, first-year enrollment for Black students is down 6% compared to a year ago (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2023).

Admission Rates

Nearly half of applicants are admitted to a college or university in the US, with an admission rate of 68% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). For first-time degree or certificate seeking undergraduate students, there is a 60% admission rate. Institutions with open admissions hold a 49% admissions rate for public and private non-profit or for-profit schools.

Those with some admission requirements that include at least one requirement for grades, class rank, school record, college prep, recommendations, showed a rate of 51% (Clinedinst, 2019). Among institutions with the lowest admissions rates are highly selective institutions with an acceptance rate of less than 10%, where the majority of students at their institution are typically White and Asian (Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner, & Yagan, 2020).

Retention/Graduation

Retention and completion are complicated by many factors for Black students. Black students, on average, pay a higher price of attendance as compared to White students and are more likely to receive Pell Grants and take out federal loans to finance their education as compared to White students (by 17%) (Baker & Montalto, 2019; Levine & Ritter, 2022). Over 65% of Black college students are independent and enroll while working full-time and often with family responsibilities (Bridges, 2018).

A recent study by Lumina and Gallup (2023) examined the campus climate factors impacting retention and found that in addition to these responsibilities, students faced cultural challenges, including discrimination, lack of representation, and an unwelcoming environment. Hence, there is a high emotional and social cost, in addition to economic (Museus, Ledesma, & Parker, 2015). Given the economic downturn, there is also a greater pressure to demonstrate the cost and value of a degree.

The 6-year college completion rate is 40% for Black men and 60% for Black women (Causey, Lee, Ryu, Scheetz, & Shapiro, 2022; Reddy & Siqueiros, 2021). These rates are lower than any other racial/ethnic group and have been for decades. Black students remain underserved in tuition reductions, childcare, and financial aid, among other areas.

A third vantage point from which to view promises realized is to ask ourselves, as institutional gatekeepers, a series of questions that chronicle the efforts we are making at our universities and colleges to support student achievement. Those questions might include inquiry into three domains: students, faculty, and curriculum, with the hope that we can all answer in the affirmative, and if not, use those questions as markers to set goals for improvement.

Where Students Are Concerned, Institutions Might Investigate:

  1. What are we doing to increase the enrollment of students of African descent on this campus?
  2. What are we doing to create a climate on each campus that ensures Black students feel welcomed, affirmed, and like they belong on campus?
  3. What are we doing to ensure that programs and services (cultural affinity centers, clubs and organizations, financial aid, and scholarships) are in place that support and contribute to increasing the rates of retention, persistence, and graduation rates of African descent students? This is about helping students create a cultural comfort zone in the midst of what many Black students perceive as a sea of cultural sterility.
  4. Do we offer culturally competent advising to help students stay on track and elevate their trajectories toward success?

Where Faculty Are Concerned, Institutions Might Interrogate:

  1. What are we doing to increase the intentional recruitment of African American and other diverse faculty in specific disciplines like education, business, the natural & behavioral sciences, humanities and the arts, STEM, etc.?
  2. How are our institutions financially supporting African descent faculty with resources to initiate research, professional development, or programmatic initiatives that better support Black students and other students of color?
  3. What is the institution doing to create a climate of welcome and support that allows faculty across disciplines to connect and commiserate with Black colleagues throughout the various campuses?

When it Comes to Curriculum, Institutions Might Want to Explore:

  1. What new courses are our institutional curriculum committees and individual faculty developing to ensure a more culturally relevant content that is aligned with each academic major and department so that students can see themselves reflected within the fabric of all academic disciplines?
  2. How is the existing curriculum in our academic disciplines updated and changing to be more inclusive of culturally different perspectives and content?
  3. How are the instructional methodologies and systems of pedagogy employed by faculty keeping pace and adapting to the ways culturally different students learn best?

Closing

If we can argue that emancipation should equal freedom from the way things used to be to the way things should be, how are our institutions of higher education using their time, intellectual assets, research agendas, modes of academic instruction, and co-curricular learning opportunities to create a greater degree of congruence between what currently exists for Black students in higher education, and what we all hope higher education to be for them?

As this year’s 160th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation looms over us, it is my sincere wish that most, if not all institutions”¯of higher learning pause to reflect on this important question and take a critical look at their own convergence and divergence between what they intend and subsequently promise, and how those intentions are experienced by Black students on each of their campuses.

Thomas a Parham, Ph.D., is the president of California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Press-Telegram: Experts, Scholars Talk Juneteenth, Societal Change During Groundbreaking CSU Symposium

June 17, 2022 By Lilly McKibbin

Obioha Ogbonna
CSUDH ASI President Obioha Ogbonna

Source: Long Beach Press-Telegram

The two-day event – titled “By Any Means Necessary: Synthesizing the Voices of Our Ancestors and Everyday People” – aims to engage and support Black students in their pursuit of college success, prosperity and self-fulfillment, Cal State officials said.

CARSON – Discussion focusing on higher education in the Black community, the meaning of celebrating Juneteenth and the importance of amplifying diverse voices on Cal State University campuses are some of the key points being discussed during the Inaugural Juneteenth Symposium, hosted by Cal State Dominguez Hills and livecast throughout the CSU system.

The two-day event – titled “By Any Means Necessary: Synthesizing the Voices of Our Ancestors and Everyday People” – aims to engage and support Black students in their pursuit of college success, prosperity and self-fulfillment, Cal State officials said.

“This event was a long time coming,” said, the CSU system’s interim chancellor, during the first of the event’s two days.

“Many of the CSU campuses have celebrated Juneteenth for years with performances, displays, lectures, symposiums that recognized the rich history and achievements of our Black and African American students, faculty and staff,” Koester said. “But this is the first time that we have linked arms at the system level to evoke systemic change.”

The panels on Wednesday and Thursday feature a lineup of national figures and scholars. Also on the agenda: performances by CSU students and other special guests.

On the first day of the symposium, more than 600 attendees attended in-person and at least another 1,300 were online watching the livestream.

William Franklin, vice president of student affairs at CSU Dominguez Hills, opened the first session to describe the “voyage” of the event, which would include discussions on how to serve, celebrate but also interrupt and instigate the community.

Opening remarks were also delivered by Obioha Ogbonna, president of CSUDH Associated Students Inc. Ogbonna described how his views changed about celebrating Juneteenth since he arrived from Nigeria to study cyber security.

“What does Juneteenth mean to me now? It’s an opportunity to meet and connect with my brothers [and] sisters here in the present and look back at the past at what separated us,” Ogbonna said. “I hope we learn a lot from this symposium and we get closer to reconnecting the link that was broken.”

Juneteenth is celebrated on or around June 19 each year to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the U.S. The holiday was first marked in Texas, where in the aftermath of the Civil War, slaves were declared free under the terms of the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.

Earlier this year, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, giving federal employees the day off to celebrate the new holiday. As celebrations have blossomed in popularity in recent years, some cities and other local entities have also decided to make the day an official paid holiday.

Framing the discussion during Wednesday’s symposium was Thomas Parham, president of CSU Dominguez Hills. Parham emphasized that true societal change will not be possible until Black voices are not heard and become enmeshed in the processes of government.

“If Juneteenth is to have real meaning and not simply represent another programmatic initiative that we can feel good about because we put it on and check the box, then our efforts over these next two days must integrate the biases and assumptions that we bring with us into the academic spaces we occupy,” Parham said.

“Our efforts must develop new and substantial programs that address the true needs of African descent students, staff and faculty and senior administrators that we claim to care about,” he added.

Keynote speakers include: Tyrone Howard, professor of education in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA; Shaun Harper, a professor at USC; and Cornel West, author and professor emeritus at Princeton University.

West described how Black excellence comes with learning history, and working on finding a voice today to forge changes in the community.

“When you get deep enough into Blackness you have a human connection that makes you international, global and universal rooted in the local,” West said in his speech. “And you can’t do that if you don’t find your voice.”

To virtually attend the concluding day of the CSU Inaugural Juneteenth Symposium on Thursday, visit www.calstate.edu.

EdSource: Cal State Juneteenth Symposium Focuses on Racial Progress Beyond Campus Diversity

June 17, 2022 By Lilly McKibbin

CSUDH President Parham
CSUDH President Thomas Parham

Source: EdSource

In Cal State’s first biennial Juneteenth symposium, the nation’s largest public university confronts the need for societal change that uplifts Black students, faculty and staff. 

The symposium, which was hosted in person and virtually by CSU Dominguez Hills on Wednesday and Thursday, featured Princeton University professor and author Cornel West, Grammy Award-nominated singer and actress Angie Stone, University of Southern California professor Shaun Harper, UC Irvine professor Michele Goodwin, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and other academics and student advocates from across the state.

The symposium went beyond higher education and covered reproductive health, medical disparities and voting rights. 

“We want to set the standard for what all of higher education in this nation ought to be thinking about in celebrating this Juneteenth holiday,” said Thomas Parham, president of the Dominguez Hills campus, located south of Los Angeles. “I want us to start with the fact that there is a lot of folk who look at diversity, equity and inclusion in the context of demographics … we kind of check the boxes and say we’re making diversity progress.” 

But that’s a “very basic” way of measuring progress, Parham said. 

“The question we want people to interrogate is, given these demographics, how have the policies and practices of our institutions and agencies changed?” he said. 

People who spend time on campuses are seeing more people from different ethnic, racial or religious backgrounds, but policies and practices remain the same, Harper said. 

“Until we do right by Black people, everything that we do in the name of racial justice will fail.  It will be incomplete,” Harper said. 

Ed Bush, president of Consumes River College – one of the 116 California community colleges – said part of the problem is that making more racially equitable changes doesn’t always benefit the status quo. 

“Even when we get Black people in the system, you don’t feel like you are able to be Black, so you don’t lean into your authentic self that will allow you to have the greatest benefit for Black students,” Bush said, adding that the California Master Plan for Higher Education needs to be redesigned to more closely improve education for Black people. 

During the symposium, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who started her career as a professor at San Diego State University, said as a college graduate, she never thought she would be fighting the same battles for education and voting rights that her grandfather did. 

“Juneteenth never stood as a celebration but rather as a stark reminder of our country’s continual struggle to have its civil rights laws and edicts align with the action of providing the freedom, the opportunity and social justice mandated,” she said, adding that educators must better prepare citizens of their role in understanding our democracy. 

“It is not OK when only 37% of the population votes over the last two years,” Weber said. 

Weber, who pushed for ethnic studies requirements across the state’s higher education sectors, and was an advocate of eliminating standardized testing, said she told Gov. Gavin Newsom that if he wants to fight institutional racism the first place to start is the “ivory tower” of academia. 

Other than the state’s community college system, the CSU reaches nearly every student in the state, Weber said. And with that power, the system has a “unique opportunity to push forward, not with the same old rules and regulations that we’ve had for years to produce the same old folks, but for so many who are left behind and left out.” 

The system also has a responsibility to the K-12 system, as the largest trainer of future teachers and educators, Weber said, adding that California has the fifth-largest economy in the world but routinely ranks in the 40s and 50s for K-12 education and funding. 

“That is embarrassing,” she said. “I deal with members in the Assembly that won’t put their own children in public schools. Why? Because they want them to be successful. That is a reality we have to face.” 

Parham said there’s no one solution to solve the issues or problems the symposium addressed, but he hopes people across the CSU will really examine their own campuses and policies and make intentional improvements. 

“How can the system, the largest system of public higher education in all of America … develop programs that massively assert the dignity, worth and humanity of African-descent people, staff, faculty, students?” he asked.

LAist/KPCC: Cal State University Commemorates Juneteenth With First Biennial Conference

June 17, 2022 By Lilly McKibbin

Dr. Cornell West and President Parham
Dr. Cornell West and CSUDH President Thomas Parham

Source: LAist

This story also had a radio segment on KPCC.

On June 19, 1865 – more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation – enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally received word that they were free.

That day, known as Juneteenth, was declared a national holiday last year. To commemorate it, the Cal State University system held a two-day symposium this week, the first of what will now be a biennial event.

Dr. Thomas Parham, president of Cal State Dominguez Hills, said:

“We are not simply acknowledging Juneteenth by putting on a program that lasts for a couple hours, then everybody goes home. We want people to be inspired, and we want people to be impressed. But I want them to take that inspiration and translate it into specific activity, to interrogate the assumptions they bring with them into academic spaces and to see where their biases might be anti-Black.”

Parham volunteered to host the inaugural event at Cal State Dominguez Hills. In his view, it was the ideal place to launch. When the campus first opened in the early ’60s, it was located in Rolling Hills Estates, an affluent city in the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Then, following the Watts Rebellion in 1965, the campus was relocated to Carson, where the South Bay meets South L.A., so as to better serve the county’s urban core.

“We are born out of those social justice roots,” said Parham, who also noted that Cal State Dominguez Hills has one of the highest percentages of Black students in the CSU system.

The symposium, titled “By Any Means Necessary: Synthesizing the Voices of Our Ancestors and Everyday People,” was originally set to take place just off campus. But demand to participate was high, said Parham, so the university moved the event to the Hyatt Regency hotel near LAX. There, some 650 students, alumni, faculty and community members gathered to listen to a broad range of speakers, from philosopher and activist Dr. Cornel West to Dr. Shirley Weber, California’s Secretary of State.

The event has been years in the making, Parham added, and was first envisioned by student leaders following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.

At the time, Maryana Khames served as student trustee for the CSU, representing the system’s more than 485,000 students.

As civil unrest spread throughout the country, Khames interviewed dozens of students, asking what they’d like to see in response.

Those conversations, she said, revealed that “the community was experiencing a lot of pain,” especially among Black students. Together, they developed the idea for the symposium.

“We wanted a place to celebrate Black excellence,” said Khames, “but we also wanted to look at our system from the inside out and figure out what we need to do to improve it.”

Khames, who immigrated from Iraq, graduated from San Diego State last month. She was moved to see the event come to fruition, proud that it celebrated African American history while highlighting the need to better support Black students.

At the event, Dr. Shaun Harper, a business and education professor at USC, addressed the need to make campuses more welcoming to Black students. Over the past 18 years, he’s interviewed more than 10,000 college students of all backgrounds. He’s also surveyed over 2 million more. Time and again, he said, Black students reported feeling unwelcome at their own campuses and getting called the N-word, most often by peers, but sometimes by school employees.

Harper encouraged the CSU to launch its own inquiry and use that data to transform the racial climate across its 23 campuses.

“If we’re going to sustain the seriousness of these two days, synthesizing the voices of our ancestors and everyday people, don’t you think you’d want to know [if] your Black students are being terrorized in the same way that our Black ancestors were?” he asked.

Diversity, equity and inclusion have become trendy, Harper added, but it needs to be taken seriously. Sending graduates unequipped to engage with people unlike themselves out into the world, he said, makes higher education institutions “complicit in the cyclical reproduction of racism.”

Faculty Highlights: May-June 2021

June 24, 2021 By Lilly McKibbin

Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and journal papers that contribute to their field and highlight their expertise. We feature those accomplishments and more in this section. To share faculty news, email ucpa@csudh.edu.

College of Arts and Humanities

Salim Faraji, professor of Africana Studies, was featured on a panel hosted by the U.S. Africa Institute and U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa on June 24, 2021. The discussion centered on Juneteenth 2021, commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in the U.S.

 

 

 

Mara Grayson

Mara Lee Grayson, assistant professor of English, had her poem “Missing Barcelona on Christmas Day in Southern California” published in West Trade Review.

Grayson’s article “To Teach or Not to Teach First-Year Composition: That is the Profession” was published in UC Davis’ Writing on the Edge Journal. She also authored “Information, Identity, and Ideology: Reading toward Racial Literacy in a Composition Classroom,” which was included in Pedagogy.

She was also announced as a 2021 poetry finalist by Slippery Elm literary journal for her poem “Kettle of Fish.”

 

Mary Talusan Lacanlale, assistant professor of Asian Pacific Studies, was published in Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections. Her chapter was titled: “Tradition and Innovation in the Dayunday Courtship Drama of the Magindanao, Muslim Filipinos from the Southern Philippines.”

Lacanlale also gave a lecture for the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies entitled “Indigenous Musical Responses to U.S. Colonization: The Philippine Constabulary Band and the Continuity of Filipino Tradition” on May 19, 2021.

 

College of Business Administration and Public Policy

Ann YoungAnn Young, full-time lecturer of Criminal Justice Administration, was featured on a USC-sponsored panel of female law enforcement veterans to discuss women and policing on May 15, 2021. The event focused on Fanchon Blake’s historic class action discrimination lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department.

 

 

 

College of Education

Stephanie CariagaEdward CurammengAssistant Professors of Education Stephanie Cariaga, Edward Curammeng, and Elexia Reyes McGovern, along with their colleagues, co-authored “A Praxis of Critical Race Love: Toward the Abolition of Cisheteropatriarchy and Toxic Masculinity in Educational Justice Formations.” It was published in Educational Studies, the flagship journal of the American Educational Studies Association. In this conceptual paper, they offer an intersectional framework of a “praxis of critical race love” to highlight cisgendered, heteropatriarchal toxic masculinity often reified in education contexts, and use narratives to demonstrate how they apply a healing-centered praxis within their service, teaching, and research to challenge such harm.

Stephanie Cariaga, assistant professor of education, also co-authored “Social and emotional learning is hegemonic miseducation: students deserve humanization instead,” published in Race Ethnicity and Education. In this article, they posit humanization in place of social and emotional learning (SEL) because SEL’s inadequate analysis of intersecting oppressions justifies existing power relations in communities and schools. In essence, this article examines the pedagogy and psychology of humanization as a viable framework to confront systemically imposed self-hate, divide and conquer, and suboppression if it teaches students knowledge (and love) of self, solidarity, and self-determination.

 

College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences

Terry McGlynn, professor of biology, has been appointed as director of the CSU’s California Desert Studies Consortium. A collaborative of seven southern California CSU campuses (Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Northridge, Pomona, and San Bernardino), the consortium works to advance understanding about desert environments through faculty and student research.  The consortium also operate CSU’s Desert Studies Center field station in the Mojave National Preserve. During the appointment, McGlynn would continue to run his research lab on campus.

 

 

 

Recent quotes and/or interviews in the media from faculty

Giacomo Bono, associate professor of psychology, was interviewed about how gratitude can shape children’s development, personal relationships, and social skills. The article, “Childhood Illness Inspired This Dad’s Lifelong Interest in the Power of Positive Relationships,” was published by Parent Map.

 

 

Thomas Norman, professor of management, was interviewed for the podcast Learning Made Easier. He spoke about building the best applied business administration program in Southern California, and his insights about how to apply that learning both within and beyond the classroom.

 

 

“Asians are thorough otherized in American society, which makes discrimination against Asians different from discrimination against Blacks. Whereas Blacks are others inside American society, Asians are others who are kept outside of American society,” – Jung-Sun Park, professor of Asian-Pacific Studies. Park was quoted by South Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh for the article “Racism Behind ‘You Speak English So Well!’”

Mary Talusan Lacanlale, assistant professor of Asian Pacific Studies, was quoted in Random Lengths News to comment on the rise of anti-Asian attacks:

“The rhetoric of the past administrations, specifically former President [Donald] Trump exacerbated the very unnecessary target of Asian Americans in general. The whole focus on the origin of the pandemic in China, that combined with just general ignorance about where Asian Americans come from. That encouraged not just his supporters, but it really played off the American public’s ignorance against Asian Americans.”

Lacanlale was also quoted in “Reclaiming Filipino musical identity and tradition against U.S. empire,” an article by the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies reviewing her scholarship presented at a colloquium in May 2021.

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Press Releases

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CSUDH University Art Gallery Presents “Personal, Small, Medium, Large, Family” by Mario Ybarra, Jr.

September 19, 2023

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CSUDH Recognized as a Top Performer in the 2023 Sustainable Campus Index

September 15, 2023

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Getty Foundation Awards CSUDH $180,000 for Brackish Water Los Angeles

May 9, 2023

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Daily Breeze: Upcoming CSUDH Exhibition Takes on Mass Incarceration

September 27, 2023

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Daily Breeze: CSUDH Offers New Master Program for Incarcerated People for Fall 2023

September 11, 2023

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KTLA: California Department of Corrections, CSU Dominguez Hills Unveils Graduate Program for Inmates

September 5, 2023

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Faculty Highlights: September 2023

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