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For Public Comments to the Commission, please click here
00024
1 room. The quicker you can transition people
2 into mainstream school life, and get them into
3 sports and after school activities, and things
4 like that, I think the better it will be.
5 Unfortunately, because of the situation of so
6 many of our parents -- I know in Orlando
7 Florida they are working two jobs because the
8 Magic Kingdom is magic to the visitors but is
9 hell to the people who are working two jobs at
10 minimum wage in order to make ends meet and,
11 you know, making hotel beds in the morning and
12 taking tickets someplace at night.
13 So the fact is that family
14 circumstances are difficult sometimes and
15 children sometimes have to leave school, don't
16 get to be in the after school activities and
17 things like that. To the extent that
18 children, I believe, can be made a part of the
19 whole, that is I think the best recipe for
20 success. Again, I understand I am not an
21 educator. As a lawyer, I don't really want to
22 debate these issues with educators. They
00025
1 probably know a lot more about it than I do.
2 But from my personal life experience I believe
3 being segregated out is not helpful.
4 It is good to be with you all.
5 All the best. I look forward to hearing from
6 you. I will join up. The Governor of Florida
7 is very committed to a lot of these issues as
8 well, and we are lucky to have him there.
9 Thank you all.
10 MR. HANNA: We are going to
11 continue with today's agenda but we will
12 switch things around a little bit.
13 Dr. Antonio Flores, who is the President of
14 the Hispanic Association of Colleges and
15 Universities, is going to ask five or ten
16 minutes to address us. He is here now. We
17 are going to switch the agenda just a bit and
18 have him come up for a few minutes to address
19 us.
20 DR. FLORES: Unfortunately, things
21 came up and I have to be at a place later on.
22 Otherwise, I would be here all day with you.
00026
1 I really would like to learn about your work
2 and the goal you are pursuing as a national
3 commission.
4 Let me briefly tell you a couple
5 of things. One, what HACU is all about, just
6 a couple of minutes. What are some of the
7 main priorities we are pursuing, the policy
8 side and the program side of our work.
9 I see here Dr. Alex Gonzalez who
10 is one of our distinguished presidents of one
11 of our member institutions, Cal State San
12 Marcos. He is on our board. So I feel like
13 we are family.
14 HACU was founded back in
1986,
15 just about
15 years ago. It is a membership
16 association of colleges and universities. It
17 was founded originally in the southwest, based
18 in San Antonio, Texas where its headquarters
19 is still based.
20 Back in those years there were
21 only
18 member institutions that created this
22 association. Primarily from the southwest
00027
1 part of the United States. Today HACU
2 includes 319 member colleges and universities.
3 Over the last five years we have
4 more than doubled the number of institutions
5 in our membership. This tremendous growth
6 ultimately represents, also, the explosive
7 growth of the Hispanic population across the
8 nation. What is even more significant is that
9 our member institutions, almost three-fourths,
10 three out of every four Hispanics who are in
11 college today. We are talking about 1. 5
12 million Hispanics. Our responsibilities are
13 very important because we, number one,
14 advocate for Hispanic member institutions,
15 Hispanic serving institutions, with respect to
16 greatest support from the government and from
17 the corporate community.
18 Secondly, we have programs that
19 help the faculty, the students, the
20 administrators to improve the programs and
21 operations on each of the campuses across the
22 United States.
00028
1 Thirdly, we do all of this through
2 partnerships. We have partnerships with
3 federal agencies, with corporations. The
4 success is due primarily through that fact.
5 Everything we do, we do it through
6 partnerships.
7 The member institutions we
8 represent are everywhere. We have even now
9 the first member institution from Alaska. We
10 didn't know we had Hispanics in Alaska but we
11 do. We have them in the State of Washington
12 and we have them, obviously, in places like
13 California, in Texas and Florida and New York,
14 Illinois, New Mexico, Arizona and so forth.
15 All of the major states.
16 So our charge is to do that.
17 What are our priorities for the
18 foreseeable future? Number one, we have just
19 around the corner the reauthorization of the
20 Higher Education Act. This is the most
21 important piece of legislation at the federal
22 level that deals with higher education. It is
00029
1 to be renewed throughout 2003 and signed into
2 law by the President sometime at the end of
3 the next year or beginning the following year,
4 depending on how things go. But the
5 groundwork has to be done now. It is what we
6 have began to do as an association. Doing the
7 research, doing the analysis, doing the
8 consultation work with our membership in the
9 communities.
10 This is our number one priority
11 for the next couple of years, to make sure our
12 institutions and our communities are well
13 represented in the law. Because up to 1992,
14 with the amendments to the act in 1992, we
15 still didn't have a place at the table in
16 terms of federal legislation. We were not
17 recognized as Hispanic serving institutions.
18 In 1992 is when we became part of that
19 legislation. In 1998 the scope of the work
20 for these institutions was expanded with the
21 amendments of 1998. We hope to continue
22 building on the record of success in the next
00030
1 couple of years. The new amendments we have
2 even more provisions to help our institutions,
3 to help our students and faculty and so forth.
4 You probably already know this
5 data about the fact that we don't have nearly
6 enough people in leadership positions in
7 higher education. Less than three percent of
8 all the presidents around the country, more
9 than three -- 200 presidents of colleges and
10 universities around the country, are Hispanic.
11 If you look at the number of Ph.D.s that are
12 earned annually, fewer than three percent are
13 Hispanic. If you look at certain areas like
14 math, computer science and engineering, the
15 numbers are even worse. So we really have a
16 major challenge to turn that around.
17 Sometimes we struggle with the
18 issue of what is first, the chicken or the
19 egg. Should we do more, pay more attention to
20 K 12 or higher education. I don't think it is
21 an either/or proposition. We have to pay
22 attention to both sides. Unfortunately, in
00031
1 past years we really haven't given enough
2 attention to higher education. I think we
3 need to create many more quality teachers like
4 Jaime Escalante who teach our young children
5 to excel. To do that we need strong
6 Hispanic-serving institutions that have
7 quality teacher-training programs. That have
8 the technology, having the faculty to teach.
9 That is the charge that we have as an
10 association. Those are some of the
11 priorities.
12 Obviously, one priority that is
13 ongoing all the time is getting more money
14 from the government for our institutions. As
15 Secretary Martinez was leaving, I thanked him
16 because in HUD we have a little pot of money
17 for Hispanic-serving institutions. This year
18 we got an increase in funding. It was in
19 large measure because of his leadership. We
20 stopped to see him when he first came on board
21 and shared with him our interest in seeing
22 that money grow, and now it has grown just in
00032
1 one year he delivered for us. But we need
2 more Mel Martinezes across the federal
3 government that can do that kind of leadership
4 work.
5 That's pretty much what I wanted
6 to share with you and then see if you have any
7 pressing questions. I know you have a very
8 important agenda to cover. I will be more
9 than happy to answer it.
10 MR. CANCHOLA: In terms of
11 presidents of universities, back, I guess, in
12 1992, 1993, I experienced something. Of the
13 committee of ten, two were Hispanics. When
14 they came to our community they said, like
15 every other large corporation, they have been
16 working for us for 500 years, but they can't
17 get past the bedroom where the ladies take
18 care of our beds, or the gardeners, things
19 like that. One of the things was didn't they
20 understand that first you got to crawl before
21 you walk.
22 Being a natural troublemaker down
00033
1 there, I raised so much hell and got the
2 community together that we were able to get
3 Manuel Pacheco. Even though he didn't have
4 the credentials, allegedly, Manuel turned out
5 to be a very fine President of the university.
6 But there are currently now
7 schools that are making changes. ASU is one
8 of them. The U of A, Pete Liken, (phonetic) I
9 guess, is going to retire next year.
10 Is there, somehow, do you have a
11 system where we can draw upon, we can call
12 upon, because, luckily, because my son is at
13 Brown University in admissions, he sent me a
14 list of 20 qualified Hispanic individuals who
15 could go beyond the standards that they were
16 looking for. And I don't know what it is,
17 whether you are a teacher or a janitor or
18 whatever, in some of these systems. There is
19 a tendency that we have to be 500 percent
20 better than everybody else, just for the
21 interview process.
22 Do you have in place where,
00034
1 whatever they are looking for, department
2 heads or whatever, through a computer or a
3 system that we can get into through the
4 internet, and say here is a list, and if you
5 don't like these 20, I got 20 more and I got
6 another 60 more.
7 Because I think the time has come
8 that, because we are very fortunate,
9 especially in the southwest where we have very
10 highly qualified people, we need to be able to
11 get into a process that allows us to identify
12 individuals so they just don't try to give us
13 the same old song. We can't find qualified
14 Hispanic men or woman. I know they are out
15 there. We don't know how to find them.
16 DR. FLORES: This is, of course, a
17 complicated question. Let me very briefly do
18 two things. One, there is no such database or
19 system in place that I am aware of. Is it
20 needed? Of course, it is needed. HACU,
21 itself, is trying to develop, precisely, the
22 capacity to provide that service to the higher
00035
1 education community. Not only in terms of
2 preparing people that are already known to be
3 qualified and competent to take higher level
4 positions but also to develop people for those
5 kinds of positions. Presidents or chancellors
6 of universities.
7 That takes a lot more than a
8 database, of course. There are already
9 programs like that. The American Council of
10 Education has a program, a scholarship
11 program. AASCU, the American Association of
12 State Colleges and Universities, has another
13 program like that. But guess what? Very,
14 very few Hispanics are in those programs,
15 number one, and secondly, those program do not
16 always, do not always or, I should say, don't
17 reflect some of the realities of our
18 institutions to be competent leaders of a
19 Hispanic institution or any institution in a
20 globally-minded society as we are now. We
21 need people who are trained not just to be
22 competent executives and administrators, which
00036
1 CEOs need to be. They need to know finance.
2 They need to know governance. They need to
3 know about academic affairs, faculty issues,
4 student affairs, and so forth, the whole range
5 of things. But guess what? They also need to
6 know how to be transformational leaders so
7 that they actually are able to lead their
8 institutions to places that they have never
9 gone. And that means to Hispanic homes and
10 communities, in our case.
11 There is no such system that we
12 have created. Manuel Pacheco, of course, is
13 such a star in the universe of leaders of
14 higher education institutions, who is a
15 chancellor now of Missouri, University of
16 Missouri. Yet he has proven precisely the
17 conventional wisdom wrong. He was not with
18 the kind of background necessary to be CEO of
19 the University of Arizona. Yet he became one
20 of the best presidents the University of
21 Arizona ever had and now he is leading an even
22 bigger system.
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