By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

A recent visit to UCLA by Jet Bussemaker, Minister for Education, Culture, and Science of the Netherlands, included meetings with UCLA student mentors and the university's senior diversity team.

UCLA International Institute, April 1, 2016 — Jet Bussemaker, Minister for Education, Culture and Science of The Netherlands, visited UCLA on March 16, 2016 with a delegation of Dutch education specialists. The goal of their visit was to learn about the university’s efforts to encourage diversity in its student body, faculty and curriculum.

The minister and delegation saw both sides of the community college-University of California bridge that UCLA cultivates through its Center for Community College Partnerships (CCCP). After visiting East Los Angeles College in the morning with Alfred Herrera (UCLA assistant vice provost, academic partnerships, and director, UCLA CCCP), the delegation returned to UCLA for a luncheon with UCLA students who work as CCCP mentors. Following the luncheon, Bussemaker and her colleagues met with Scott Waugh, executive vice chancellor and provost; Laure Murat, professor of French & Francophone Studies and director, UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies; and Professor Charles Corbett of the Anderson School of Management and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

A meeting with UCLA’s senior diversity team and a representative of one of UCLA’s ethnic studies programs concluded the delegation’s visit; participants included Jerry Kang (vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion), Belinda Tucker (vice provost, Institute of American Cultures), Patricia Turner (vice provost and dean, UCLA undergraduate education), Charles Alexander (associate vice provost for student diversity, director, Academic Advancement Program), and Abel Valenzuela (professor and chair, Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/Chicano Studies).

Increasing higher education access to underserved communities

CCCP aims to increase the number of students at UCLA from underserved and disadvantaged communities. It reaches out to 19 community colleges in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, offering a one- or two-year program that prepares students to transfer to a University of California campus (preferably, UCLA). The program includes regular meetings with UCLA student mentors, tailored programs, help with academic and scholarship applications and special courses at UCLA before they transfer.

For Dutch Minister Bussemaker, it was a discovery to learn that U.S. colleges differentiate students as “traditional” (immediate post–high school) and “nontraditional” (generally high school graduates who work for several or more years before returning to school). Opening the meeting with UCLA CCCP representatives, she said, “Some of the challenges that we are facing in The Netherlands is that we have vocational training, universities and research universities. I think they are quite separate and I think we have to pay more attention, especially to disadvantaged groups, in making the bridge from one system to another.”

Santiago Bernal, assistant director of UCLA CCCP, explained that the program hires about 30 paid peer mentors each year, seeking “a diverse group that is representative of the diverse communities that we work with.” After receiving 40 hours of initial training, these UCLA students are assigned a student cohort at a local community college (usually the one from which they themselves have transferred to UCLA).

“The mentors meet with these students on a monthly or bimonthly basis,” said Bernal. “They coach them and guide them through the process of navigating through the community college — not only the educational aspect of it, but all the other aspects and dimensions that impact their academic performance as well. That could be family, that could be community, that could be finances,” he explained.

UCLA CCCP Assistant Director Santiago Bernal and Director and Assistant Vice Provost Alfred Herrera.

Many of the UCLA student mentors said they had taken a job with CCCP to give back to their communities. A number were also interested in pursuing careers as academic counselors or in pursuing higher degrees to conduct research on community college students. 

Cristina Torres, who transferred to UCLA in 2014 from Santa Monica College, is now a peer mentor there. “I didn't even know about the program when I was at community college. So that's what I really wanted to do: to help do outreach to people like me.”

UCLA student Jeremy Solorzano is a graduate of the CCCP program at El Camino Compton College, where he now works as a peer mentor. “What I was able to find with a CCCP . . . was to gather a lot of information that helped me formulate a plan to transfer from community college to UC.

“What I'm trying to supply students is my personal narrative, as well as opportunities to navigate around the college. Having been a student at El Camino, I understand some of the issues there and can give suggestions on resolving problems…. On average, daily I see 30 to 40 students on campus.”

Another student mentor (Citrus and LA Trade Technical Colleges), Lucy Plascercia explained, “I really wanted to provide this sort of guidance to community college students because I was a mentor at my community college for a similar program.” When Minister Bussemaker asked her if it was an advantage to have this experience on her CV, Plasceria responded, “Definitely, because I want to become an educational counselor at a community college or a university.”

Denise Phelps, a student mentor at El Camino Compton College, also came to UCLA through the CCCP transfer program. “There's a 20-year difference between me and most of the students in my cohort on campus,” she said. “I think I would have had a more difficult time to transfer, especially as a nontraditional student and a parent. The peer mentor that I was paired up with at the time — she helped guide me and it made a big difference. It’s not easy being an African American student here.”

Added Blanca Juarez, a mentor at East Los Angeles College, said, “I find sometimes that because I'm at UCLA and it's a big university, people might be a little nervous to talk to me. I [try to] approach them and then once I get them in, they become very comfortable and they can relate to me…I guess that's how we are able to talk about problems that are not related to studies.”

Diversity efforts at UCLA

At the meeting with UCLA’s senior diversity team, Minister Bussemaker noted that despite equal access to secondary and higher education in The Netherlands, universities — especially research universities — in the country had a significant gender imbalance (only 17 percent of professors are females), despite the fact that more female than male students attend those universities.

Belinda Tucker, vice provost, Institute of American Cultures, gave the Dutch delegation a brief overview of diversity efforts at UCLA. UCLA was well ahead of many universities in creating ethnic studies centers and awarding those centers faculty slots that could be used to help traditional departments (i.e., history, English) hire people to teach ethnic studies, she explained. Nevertheless, it took 30 years for UCLA to implement a mandatory diversity requirement in its undergraduate curriculum. “We battled fiercely to get that course approved last year,” she recounted.

Vice Chancellor Jerry Kang and Vice Provost Belinda Tucker.

“I think because we did wait so long, we were able to base the requirement in scientific evidence that demonstrates that having a diversity requirement does make a difference with respect to individual development and campus climate,” added Tucker.

Patricia Turner, vice provost and dean, UCLA undergraduate education, explained that ethnic studies centers across the country had largely been born of a reaction against a “cannon” in various disciplines that ignored the viewpoint and agency of the oppressed. “You could go through a course on the [American] Civil War or on 19th-century American history and not get any perspective on being a slave,” she explained. The implicit assumption, she continued, was that the cannon would eventually expand over time, something she said that most people agree has now occurred, albeit unevenly.

Abel Valenzuela, professor and chair, Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, noted that part of how ethnic studies departments fit into the greater project of diversity is educating not just young people of color, but also young white majority students in classrooms that include a mixture of both. He pointed out the faculty in ethnic studies departments tend to focus on research that engages multiple audiences, including elected officials, the general public and the student body. This engagement, he noted, is part of the responsibility of a public university.

“You can think of it as maintaining relevance in a demographically vital big city like Los Angeles and drawing students who want to know about urban poverty, who want to know about immigration and its impact on neighborhoods and the educational system,” he said.

In the opinion of Jerry Kang, vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, “diversity is just a brute fact.” Kang emphasized two cases for the importance of diversity at UCLA. “There's a pedagogical case for diversity that argues if you have different kinds of people in the classroom, you will think differently, you will canvas perhaps a broader set of potential answers to questions and will learn things that may actually decrease biases,“ he said.

“The signaling value of diversity,” he added, “promotes the idea that there is equal opportunity for all, that everyone has a fair shot, that if you hustle, you can get to the top of the mountaintop. It's something that you have to show and you can't just say anymore,” he remarked.

Added Charles Alexander, associate vice provost for student diversity and director of the UCLA Academic Advancement Program, “It's also an expectation of a public university. There are employers who come here looking for the kind of people that are able to perform in the workforce that is a diverse as the public in their field.”

* All pictures by Peggy McInerny/ UCLA.

Published: Friday, April 1, 2016