The Accidental and the Intentional: A Critical History of Two Hispanic-Serving Institutions

• In Event: 30.042 - Examining Latina/o Students Where They Enroll: Furthering Research on Hispanic-Serving Institutions

Abstract

An often-cited distinction between Hispanic-Serving Institutions and other Minority Serving Institutions are that HSIs were not created with the distinct mission of serving Latina/o students (Contreras, Malcom, & Bensimon, 2008; Núñez, Hurtado, & Calderon Galdeano, 2015). This paper presents archival data from two Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Loma Verde University and Azul City University in Chicago. These institutions offer two useful institutional histories for how their Hispanic serving identities grew and evolved over time. This paper investigates the development of these institutions as regional universities and as Hispanic-Serving Institutions. We examine whether there are fundamental differences in these universities as “intentional” and “accidental,” respectively, and their issues for serving Latina/o students in terms of their history, student services, funding, and so forth.

Loma Verde University (LVU) was created in the 1960s with the intentional mission of serving the Latina/o population of South Texas that experienced a persistent lack of access to postsecondary education. Yet over time, LVU struggled to fulfill its mission of serving the Latina/o population, and with its move toward a research-intensive focus, it has been argued that the institution is once again losing sight of its original mission. Azul City University (ACU) was established in 1867 in Illinois. Its original purpose did not include serving the Latina/o population which began to grow in Chicago as early as the 1920s. ACU established its first Latina/o cultural center in 1969 and became a designated HSI in 2007. Among the findings, we note that ACU, the more recently designated HSI, promotes its institutional identity far more widely than LVU and offers more services that target Latina/o students and issues salient to them (e.g., services for undocumented students). This calls into question assumptions whether newly-designated HSIs are merely Hispanic-enrolling students rather than Hispanic-serving (Contreras, Malcom, & Bensimon, 2008).

Among the emerging findings is that while LVU was created with an intention to serve Latina/o students, the institutional initiatives to highlight or nurture Latina/o students in particular were met a various times with backlash on its campus. This backlash usually followed Supreme Court cases dealing with affirmative action in admissions policies (e.g., Hopwood). Similarly, a push from an Anglo president in the 1990s to hire more Latina/o faculty contributed to the downfall of that president. In sum, the Hispanic-serving identity at LVU has not been an automatically accepted as one might think considering that this identity was established at the institution’s creation. Azul City University, on the other hand, has fostered a much more open Hispanic identity that is more openly advertised and accepted compared to LVU. In a comparison of more recent student services and course offerings, for example, ACU has created services that directly serve certain subgroups of its Latina/o student body (e.g., undocumented students). The HSI identity at ACU appears to be more widely nurtured by institutional faculty, administration, and students though that campus did not start out as an HSI.

Authors

• Erin Doran, Iowa State University

• Øscar Medina, University of Missouri - Columbia