838: The 13th Prescription - with Dr. Thomas Parham, President, California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), & Dr. J. Luke Wood, President, California State University-Sacramento

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. I've got to tell you guys, not that I'm not excited every time I do this, but I am very excited today for the group of people that we have brought to the microphone. What a time to do this as we are in Black History Month. We are going to have three amazing guests to talk about the work that they are doing. Not one president, but two presidents. I don't know what happens when you get multiple presidents on an episode.

Whether it's smooth sailing or more of a train wreck, but we're going to find that out today. Maybe the job of a university president is an organized train wreck in many respects, right? Because students are always throwing curveballs at you. You always have to be on your toes and there are always student success elements that we have to address. One of those being keeping people in school and solidifying the value of post-secondary education, which here at the EdUp Experience podcast, I will tell you, I do believe, and I know my co-founder Elvin Freitas does too, in a college degree and all that it does for individuals. However you end up getting there, there are multiple pathways, but we're going to talk about that as we get into it today.

But I want to bring back a former guest, recent guest, and now first-time guest co-host. She has multiple roles and it's impossible to read them all off. So I'm just going to read the one and then she could tell you everything else. Ladies and gentlemen, her name is Dr. LaNitra Berger and she's the president at NAFSA, the Association for International Educators. LaNitra, welcome back.

Dr. LaNitra Berger: Thanks. It's great to be back. And after we interviewed you, you ended up in the EdUp Experience Network interviewing for other of our spin-off podcasts. And here you are back again, I think you can't get enough of podcasting.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, you're making the rounds and I love it. I think you're excited about this episode today. Are you not?

Dr. LaNitra Berger: Yes. Very excited.

Joe Sallustio: OK, well, we're going to get our guests in now. I know they got a lot to say. We're going to bring in one at a time. Ladies and gentlemen, he's the president of Cal State Dominguez Hills. He is Dr. Thomas Parham. Welcome to the mic.

Dr. Thomas Parham: Thank you very much. Delighted to be here.

Joe Sallustio: We're delighted to have you and we'll bring in your colleague as well and just get right to it. Ladies and gentlemen, he's Dr. J. Luke Wood. He's the president at CSU Sacramento. Welcome.

Dr. J. Luke Wood: Hey, it's good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Joe Sallustio: Well, we're going to just start this out really with something really easy, but something that matters a whole lot, which is for each of you just to tell us a little bit about your institution. Who, what do you do? How do you do it? Who do you serve? Dr. Parham, we'll go with you first.

Dr. Thomas Parham: Glad to. Again, let me say good day to our listeners and viewers. I am Dr. Thomas Parham, president of your California State University, Dominguez Hills. We are one of 23 campuses in the California State University system. It is the largest system of public higher education in all of America. Love that we take a backseat to nobody on that. On our campus, we are a campus right now of about 15,000 students. We are a campus that has an 89% demographic for students of color. We are about 67, 68% women. We have six colleges, 80 majors, 57 and 23 undergraduate and graduate majors respectively, even as we are adding two more doctoral programs in education this fall coming up and then applied nursing in another year to go along with our orthotics and prosthetics doctorate. And we pride ourselves on being able to transform lives that ultimately will transform America.

Joe Sallustio: Amazing. All right. Well, let's get the same update from Dr. Wood. What's going on over at CSU Sacramento?

Dr. J. Luke Wood: All right, so I'm the president of Sacramento State, which was founded in 1947. We are in Sacramento, so we oftentimes tell folks that we are the one and only public university in the state capital of the fifth largest economy in the world. We have about 30,000 students, about 23,000 full-time equivalent. We have two very important designations. One, we are a Hispanic-serving institution, which is a federal designation, meaning that we have a large population of students who identify as Latinx. We are also an Asian American, Native American Pacific Islander serving institution (AANAPISI), which means we have a large population of Asian and Pacific Islander students as well.

In addition to that, both myself and Dr. Parham represent some of the most important institutions when it comes to serving our Black and African American students in the system. We have the largest enrollment in terms of headcount of Black and African American students of all the 23 CSUs and more than all of the UCs except for one. And I know that Dominguez Hills has, I think, the highest percentage of Black and African American students. So when you think about areas where we're serving and we're trying to do good work for the community, you know, we're very proud of both of our institutions.

Joe Sallustio: Now I'm going to pass it over to Dr. Berger because she's got a ton of questions and I know when it's my time to step back and get out of the way. I did just as you guys were talking a special message came in for both of you for the work that you're doing. I want to play for you. Thanks so much for the great work you've been doing. Somebody special just wanted to thank you for that. So Dr. Berger over to you.

Dr. LaNitra Berger: He is on my screen saver by the way. I love it. Thanks for passing this over, Joe. I have been so looking forward to this conversation for a number of reasons. One of the big reasons is that I was born in Fontana, California, raised in San Bernardino, California. Surprise. And I got my start in higher education at Cal State San Bernardino. Once I discovered a university library where I could check out all kinds of books, I never looked back. So the Cal State system has a very special place in my heart for its ability to transform lives. And both of you are doing such great work at your institutions.

I was wondering if you could say more about anything that you want to highlight about how you support Black students in particular, since we're having this conversation during Black History Month. I feel as a historian and art historian that the Black experience in California is oftentimes overlooked compared to other regions, but it's very rich in terms of Black people's contributions to California, the economy, its history and culture, and Black students play a very big role in higher education. So could you say anything more about anything that you want to highlight that's going on on your campuses?

Dr. Thomas Parham: So I want to start the answer to that query by really talking about Dr. Wood and I understand the difference between a desegregated environment and a truly integrated one. There are a lot of institutions in the country who measure their worth, if you will, their demographic diversity in DEI by percentage of students. So if you have 5% of this or 10% of that or 15% of the other, we celebrate folk. But Dr. Wood and I have recognized long before, along with the Cal State system, that we cannot simply judge our worth by a percentage of people in our midst, but rather what is the quality of the experience that people are having within the institution? And can everybody who represents our demographics see themselves reflected within the fabric of the institution? So it starts fundamentally from there.

Secondly, I'll say that in California in particular, California has had a master plan that people think needs to be updated, but for me, the core of the plan was anchored in a three-legged stool. The first was excellence in academics and research, which we try to produce. The second was access to California state citizenry and citizens from the nation and really around the world. We have international populations as well. And the third was affordability. And the one that's been the hardest to achieve, I think, has been the affordability measure, even though we are still the most affordable university system, I think, and campuses around.

But I'll say that relative to African-American students where you were going, which is we pride ourselves on being able to provide access. And I've been an Ivy League professor before, spent 33 years after that at the University of California, Irvine. I've been in research one places where we judge our worth in those places by selectivity ratios. Aren't we wonderful that we only admit the top, you know, four, five, six, eight percent of our students? For us, if the master plan set access, then part of what we are trying to do in the California State University system, particularly for students of African descent, is provide them with a level of access to the opportunity.

So we've got students on our campuses that are 4.3 students who pass UCs and other places to come to Cal State for the quality of the experience. But we've also got 2.5 students trying to be 3.0s, 3.0s trying to be 3.5s, 3.5s trying to be 3.7s going to medical school, dental school, law school, et cetera. So those are the kinds of things that we are engaged in. And there's a whole range of both academic and co-curricular learning opportunities that we are proud of, as well as affinity centers that help support not only the demographic space there, but who provide teachable moments for the non-African-American folks so that we're able to dissipate some of the cultural ignorance that is so pronounced in this nation for people who are non-Black. Luke, what would you add to that?

Dr. J. Luke Wood: Man, I mean, how do you follow anything that you say, brother? I mean, I would say that, you know, yeah, those are the things that we're trying to build on our campuses for Black students. You know, one thing that I think is also unique about both of us is that we're scholars, you know, that's part of our identity. I see myself as a professor and a scholar who happens to be in an administrative role. And my life and career has been focused on studying and understanding the Black experience in education. And one of the things that we know is that whether you're talking about preschool or doctoral level education, that Black students are treated by educators inherently differently than other students.

They're trying to clear a lens of distrust. They're assumed to, and you see this particularly in like K-12 education with the over-representation of Black students in suspensions and expulsions. You see very similar things in higher ed too. And so oftentimes there can be this criminalization, particularly if a Black student outperforms low expectations. And that happens in classrooms all the time where sometimes you have educators who don't believe that they are capable, that they bring intelligence to that environment. And so we're oftentimes working too hard to create environments for students in institutions that oftentimes were never designed to serve our communities.

Dr. Thomas Parham: It is lunacy. It is. It's lunacy. It is a challenge. And at the same time, it's responsibility.

Dr. J. Luke Wood: So being in these roles, it's what we try to do is make sure that we're preparing our educators to do something that many of them have never been trained how to do. So let me put that into context. Let's take your average faculty member in a community college or a university across the country. Let's say they are in biology, bachelor's degree in biology, works in industry for a few years, master's, PhD, and they go straight into the classroom with no training on how to teach. So what do they do? They think of, okay, what was a good professor I had? Let me try to emulate some of those things. And so we oftentimes find that they teach how they were taught, but how they were taught is not how our students learn, particularly our Black students and our students of color, because the examples that they're going to be exposed to, the books and literature that they're going to be exposed to, the curriculum, the relational dynamics are ones that are oftentimes reminiscent of a Eurocentric paradigm, which does not support the learning, growth, development and success of Black students.

And so part of what we're trying to do is create environments where every educator is prepared to do what we expected them, which is to create an environment where Black students experience dignity in the classroom. So yes, our campuses have centers, right, that are designed to serve Black students. We have employee resource groups that are designed to serve Black faculty and staff. We have lots of programs and support services, but we're also doing some things across our campuses that are unique. One thing that I'd like to share is a new effort that we have here at Sacramento State that we just announced, and it starts this fall, but we are creating an honors college that is specifically designed to serve Black and African-American students.

And we have to say, we have been looking to see, does anyone have anything like this out there? Now there are some honors colleges that have programs and fellowships to serve Black and African-American students, but no one has ever set to create an institution within an institution that's specifically designed to serve this population. And I'm going to go back to this. Like I said that we had the highest headcount of Black students in our system. We do, but you know what? We're also in the bottom third when it comes to student success. And so we have to say to ourselves that 75 years of history getting to this point, to this moment in time has shown that the way that we're doing it is not working. And so that's why we're doing this at Sacramento State. We've set aside 6,000 square feet of space. They have their own seminar rooms. They have their own office space, their own study centers. We have a Dean of Students and seven staff members who are supporting her that's going to be leading this effort. We have set-alone faculty. Students will be in accelerated classes with faculty members who have a demonstrated record of success in teaching and serving Black and African-American students. So we cannot be a historically Black college or university. We weren't founded in time to be able to do that, but we can create a similar experience by creating an institution within the institution that's specifically designed to serve.

Dr. Thomas Parham: Speak on that. I want to add, Dr. Berger, before you go to your next query, what Dr. Wood and I are really trying to articulate to the audience, even as we remember the words of both Asa Hilliard, and I want to get back to the fact that this happens in African History Month as well. Asa Hilliard used to always argue, even as he walks with the ancestors now, that there was something wrong with an educational system that leaves our people strangers to themselves, aliens to their culture, oblivious to their condition, and inhuman to people who would want to oppress them. So part of our challenge is to try to help our students know that they belong to higher education in the first place. Since there's so many people outside in the K-12 world and even the community college world who are somehow not convincing them that somehow they don't belong.

So our students arrive and stub a toe or get a D or fail an exam or a test or something, and they start questioning, do I even belong in college? So we've got a double burden of not even trying to support their academic dreams and aspirations, but also trying to create the sense of belonging. But the biggest challenge, and I say this as a psychologist who writes the textbooks that people use to teach African psychology in the country. The biggest challenge we face, you look at the news every night, it'll tell you drugs, gangs, violence, poverty, racism, white supremacy. Those are all formal obstacles. But hear me well, the biggest challenge we face as a people, Black folk, people of African descent, is not drugs, gangs, violence, poverty, or racism. It is the need for mental liberation.

In African History Month, Carter G. Woodson, founder of Negro History Week, that we now celebrate in Black History Month, first argued in one of the most important books, I think that you people who are serious about working with Black folk need to have this book on their shelf. It's called The Miseducation of the Negro. And I don't think you have to go much past about chapter one, if I remember right, where he argued that if you allow people to control the way you think, you don't have to assign them to an inferior status if necessary, they will seek it for themselves. So our jobs, not just for Dr. Wood and myself, but all of our colleagues and peers in the CSU system and other places in higher education is to use education that provides a key to unlock the shackles of conceptual incarceration that keep our people locked in the way things have always been instead of the way things might be if we just dreamed about what was possible. And what we're trying to do is unlock that dream. Brother Langston Hughes reminds us, right, that we should hold fast to dreams for if they die, life is just a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. We are in the business of preventing wings from breaking and mending those that do.

Dr. LaNitra Berger: Victory! So there's so much, there's so much, there's so much in what both of you have said that is so deep and meaningful for the times we're living in right now. And the reason why it resonates with me so deeply is that my start in higher education was working for NAFEO, a trade association of historically Black colleges, and so that's where I really was steeped in presidential leadership in the Black college framework. And I moved from that position to an honors college at a public institution in Virginia. So I saw how the HBCU framework of student success, I went from that to a very exclusive environment. And I knew that we were leaving Black students behind. So a lot of my work at George Mason has been to reach out to those students to make sure that they have the academic connections, but also to build that HBCU type of experience where you leave no student behind and make sure that we take everyone where they are and get them where they need to be and where they want to be.

And so that work, I know you all are steeped in it. It is, it's challenging work. It's painstaking work. It's nights and weekends. It's thinking about someone who's food insecure and making sure that they have something to eat so they can study. It's thinking about the textbooks and whether or not students can access those. It's making sure that people feel empowered in their education. So all of what you've said has really resonated with me as an educator and the challenges of being in a Southern state. I'm far away from home right now trying to do similar work as you.

But I want to ask you a question because I think you both referred to the idea of leadership and representation and the importance of being a Black college president right now and setting an example for students and faculty and scholars who are going to look to you and think about what pathways might be open to them. How do you feel right now about your roles as presidents and leading institutions in a time where the presidency is challenging? It's always a challenging job, but right now in particular, it's even more challenging. So I was wondering if you could both just talk about what that means for you right now and how you're navigating some of those challenges.

Dr. Thomas Parham: So let me start with Luke, because he's a new kid on the block. So I also acknowledge, by the way, Dr. Berger, you've got a great leader yourself in my good friend, Greg Washington, who was there. You talk about a bad boy. He is just phenomenal. But I also understand the challenges of being in a state that's still fighting the Civil War and what that represents with that. But anyway, go for it, brother.

Dr. J. Luke Wood: Yeah, so I think one thing that's important context is that I attended Sacramento State as an undergraduate. I'm actually in unique position where I have the privilege of serving as the president of my alma mater, which my guess is, and President Dr. Parham would have a better understanding, there's not a lot of folks I would assume in our system who have had that privilege. And so I'm also in a unique position in that there was, before I came here, a president who was Black. And in fact, we had a Black president at Sacramento State in 1972. And think about it, in the 70s, and his name was James Bond, right? So I can only imagine how that must have been an interesting response from the campus community to have someone like that. And at the same time, when he was president, he moved into his house on the American River Drive and had a cross burned on his lawn. And so that was his welcome to the Sacramento community.

Dr. LaNitra Berger: Yikes.

Dr. J. Luke Wood: And if you think about the challenges that he had during his presidency and some of the issues that have continued, when I see myself in this role as both an alum of this institution and someone who is trying to continue on that legacy. I see it as a big responsibility. It's a responsibility to our community. And I'm talking about, of course, the broader Sacramento community, the broader community of California, but in particular, a responsibility to the Black community to create an environment where students can experience dignity.

Now, Dr. Parham mentioned Asa Hilliard. And Asa Hilliard is one of the most influential scholars for me as well. And I think about one of the things that he wrote, he said, after years of doing research focused on Black students in education and trying to understand like, what is it that really helps Black students to succeed? He said, I have never encountered any children from any group who are not geniuses. There's no mystery on how to teach them. The first thing you do is treat them like human beings. And the second thing you do is love them.

Dr. Thomas Parham: Tell it like it is.

Dr. J. Luke Wood: So the challenge is that that is not an experience that most Black students have because our systems, our policies, our structures are designed to provide the exact opposite experience. And so for me, it's about a responsibility to create an environment where Black students experience dignity, where they experience support and where we hold people accountable to that to understand that that is their responsibility as educators to bring that. And I know that that's an ethos that I have. I know that's an ethos that I think is shared across many of the institutions in our California State University. And it's even more so important when you recognize what role does the CSU have. The CSU takes any student from any background who is eligible, oftentimes first generation, low income students, students of color, and then we create an experience for them that allows them on the other side of their education to create a better life for themselves and for their families. We are the engine of upward and socioeconomic mobility. So if we don't succeed in that mission in providing students with dignity, then we're not just having an impact on that student, we're having an impact on the state of California. And that's why when I talk to students, I don't see students as numbers. I see them as names and I see them as futures.

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Dr. LaNitra Berger: Yeah, that's so important. And no surprise, by the way, in following up on Dr. Wood's comment about the social and economic mobility, you'll find many of our institutions in the top 10 and 20 of most of these social mobility indexes in the country right now. But that's a point of pride for us and similar to what I was talking about earlier.

Relative to the leadership, my journey is probably a little different. And so let me add to what my colleague has said. I come to this work, one, with an identity as a servant leader, but also a reluctant leader. I am doing something I never planned on doing. You can find nobody in my background that ever said, Parham plans on being a university president. I didn't.

Joe Sallustio: Does any university president think that?

Dr. Thomas Parham: You have a lot of them out there who plan on wanting to be in that, you know, develop a track record and a blueprint for how to get to be a university president. There are some that aren't. But for me, I think the reluctant leader understood. Andrew Young, right, as we think about that one of King's disciples, used to say, he was always suspicious of people who sought high leadership positions. Because if you really understood what leadership entailed and the enormous responsibility heaped on your shoulders, you'd be a reluctant leader. But in the same way that Dr. Wood and I adhere to an African-centered tradition, in African tradition, people can be reluctant leaders as they move to it, your hesitation has to yield to the intentions of a broader community who understand that it needs the skill and assets that you bring to the space and that the children who we do this for need somebody who can champion and clear the pathway so that we create a better future for tomorrow.

So I come to this particular work in that particular way. But I also come with a space that as I try to serve my community and the campus and leverage the resources here to make a difference for the folk, not just on the campus and in the surrounding Carson and in LA County community here. But we also come with a mindset of leadership that looks at how to navigate the pathway to productivity and success in ways that don't just uplift our presence as leaders, but rather uplift the communities on the campus and the people who we are sworn to serve. And that to me is what's unique. What's common is that we both come out of the professoriate and that I started as an Ivy League professor as well. Shifted to administration, but simply taught every year that I've been there. I'm very critical about the psychological literature as it pertains to people of African descent, as is Dr. Wood about the literature and education as it pertains to us.

So we write even as we've been on administrative tracks because it's like that grandmama wisdom. My mama told me, she said, son, you should never criticize anything unless you're willing to put something better in its place. And I believe that I could put something better in this place, which is why I'm writing. I haven't written that much. Only have, I don't know, six, seven books and probably, don't know, 50, 60 journal articles, book chapters or something. But had I been full-time faculty all them years, you could double or triple that amount. But the important is the depth of your love and the quality of your service to a people. And sometime the realm of your interventions across the academic side, across the clinical side for me as a psychologist, they cross the consulting side, they cross the scholarly side, and they cross of course the administrative domain.

So I've engaged in all five of those things. The only thing that has changed in all three institutions is the proportion of time I spend in each category, but all of which are designed to try to have the mission. My job is not just to be a psychologist or president, but to be a healer. My job is to be a healing presence in the lives of the people who I touch, either through my words, through my administrative policies, or through my postures or the principles that I try to articulate as we serve as presidents of our institutions in the CSU with an awful lot of support, by the way, from my chancellor, from my board of trustees.

So we are blessed, not just in California, but we have a phenomenal board of trustees who care very deeply about the work, who are very invested in making sure that we support these students that we represent the demographics that we have. And that makes it much easier to serve as a president because we don't have to go to work looking over our shoulder every day like, do I have to watch my back like you do in some states? And part of the assault on the presidency this year is not whether presidents know what the right thing to do is. Because frequently there's an incongruence between what you know is the right thing to do and what the external pressures are forcing you to have to do. But you've got to be able to decide what are you prepared to sacrifice?

And that's the ultimate question we have to do. I've always been clear, as I argue in my own scholarly writings, that the central question, particularly for Dr. Luke and I as men of African descent or even women of African descent, is how do you maintain a sense of your own cultural integrity in a world that doesn't support or affirm your humanity as a person of African descent? But I remind myself, even with the challenges we have to do, on this end of my wall, I keep Brother King and Malcolm. On that end of my wall, I keep a picture of the ancestors in the slave dungeons in Elmina and Cape Coast and Ghana, because it always reminds me to contextualize struggle. So if all I gotta do is deal with a little inconvenience or some faculty that kind of who are on you everywhere, that's inconvenient compared to what it is they had to go through. So if they could get through a slave ship, you mean we can't get through this? We always come. Dr. Wood and I, I know his heart, which is why I'm so delighted that he's now president of Sacramento State, but we always come with a heart that fulfills that notion that Frantz Fanon talked about. When Fanon said that each generation out of relative obscurity must reach out and seek to fulfill its legacy or betray it. We come every day waking up trying to fulfill a legacy that he and I had been blessed to inherit along with our 21 other colleagues in the CSU system.

Dr. LaNitra Berger: Wow, I love what you've said, what both of you have said. And I want to draw on one thing that you've both referenced, which is a connection to the African continent, a dedication to Afrocentric values. And I want to put my NAFSA hat on for a second, because I lead 10,000 international educators. And I'm blessed to be in this position where I am coming from African-American studies and also talking about international education. I got into study abroad as a young person. I studied abroad in Paris. And while I was there, I had the opportunity to understand what James Baldwin went through, why he was traveling overseas to escape the yoke of segregation and Jim Crow and how liberating it was to leave that for a little while.

And I'm curious to know, because you both mentioned Africa, how important is it for young students, Black students in particular, to go to Africa if they don't make it to Africa, to go to other countries, and to have that experience outside of the United States? Do either of you help on your campuses with international education efforts or how do you view the importance of actually going overseas as part of that effort to help students really understand where they came from and to appreciate those values?

Dr. J. Luke Wood: Yeah, I can answer that quickly. We certainly on our campus have efforts to bring students to different parts of Africa. In fact, we had a group that went this summer to Kemet, and that was a very powerful experience for the students that were part of that. I myself have been to the continent, specifically to Nigeria, and had the pleasure and very powerful experience of going to where the location of where my ancestors came from and being able to be there to breathe the air and to have a moment in time where I could just feel this very powerful sense that there was someone smiling from my history that we finally made it home. I think that that's a powerful experience that every student should have. And I think being able to understand where you come from, it's hard to understand yourself as an African person in the United States if you've never been to where you're from. And so I do think that that is an important part of the journey for a number of people.

Dr. Thomas Parham: Yeah, I would echo what President Wood said that for me, I think we do engage in international education and there's a level of reciprocity that not only seeks to visit other nations around the globe, but also invite other institutions around the globe to be able to come in. So we just entertained a group of colleagues from, and I'm trying to think of how many African continents, I'm sorry, African countries, that were here on campus at Dominguez Hills. We also are blessed on this campus with several things. We have just stood up the Black Women's Empowerment Summit. We also have the Mervyn Dymally Institute, who is named after the only Afro-Caribbean brother to serve as Lieutenant Governor in the state of California, along with being a congressman and an assemblyman and a state senator. So with the Dymally Institute, it's run by a brother, Dr. Anthony Samad, who along with the Dymally Fellows and other students as well as students even from some of our local community colleges has begun, in fact with Dr. Gammage who works with them, to take those students on international trips. So two years ago we were in Ghana. Last year they were in South Africa. And so it is important to be able to do that.

Like Dr. Wood, I myself have been to the continent, not enough, but twice. My first trip to Ghana was in Y2K in the year 2000 for national international convention of the Association of Black Psychologists. So in that respect, through all the decade of the 90s, we retraced the steps of the Underground Railroad with our annual conventions starting in Toronto and finishing in Charleston, which as you remember was the largest slave port where they were importing slaves from around the world, with two deviations. One was LA, which was my convention, and the other was Chicago to align with the Black Congress on Health Law and Economics where all the Black organizations get together in an election year to be able to do that. But when we went to Ghana, I mean, when I got down off the plane and walked down onto the tarmac, I knelt down and just kissed the ground because it was home. But when we went into those slave dungeons of Elmina and Cape Coast, what the psychologists did is we performed some ritual and we actually took bottles of rum, which were, you know, was one of the commodities traded for the slaves and other folk. And we broke them against the wall, right, as ritual. But we also told the folk that the people lied because when we stood next to the door of no return and they said, your children would never be home, we told them you lied because your children are home and we are actually doing okay. And we want you to know that we are doing fine. And so we were in those particular spaces.

But my second visit to Africa, actually was my first visit to Africa was to Kemet, to the cradle of civilization, what people call Egypt, with the great Asa Hilliard, who was a good friend of mine. But there is nothing more fabulous I've seen in my life next to the birth of my child, watching her come into the world's most fabulous thing I've ever seen. Next to that, to bear witness to the genius of those African ancestors. So as I've gone from Cairo to Luxor to Aswan to Abu Simbel, which is about 25 kilometers above the Sudanese border and all the temples and tombs in between, you can just bear witness to the genius of African folk.

If I had Dr. Berger, a MacArthur Genius Grant, which I've never been blessed with, I would take most of that prize money and I would get a group of students, put them on a plane, and I'd invite every student I could who was Black to go to Africa. Because once you go inside those slave dungeons and you visit and you just commune with the spirits that are still there and you can just feel the spirits, you could never come back home and engage in some of the foolishness we engage in, right, as a people on the streets. And I'm talking about the illiteracy, not taking education seriously, engaging in violence, et cetera, violence in communities and families, et cetera. You could never engage in some of the neglect we take in terms of our health, because once you know what it took for us to get to these places, you have to be able to honor the sacrifice and the struggle. So in answer to your question, it is very important for us to do that. And we will continue to want to do that and do it collaboratively across institutional boundaries.

Dr. LaNitra Berger: Dr. Parham, if you get that genius grant, I'm coming with you. And we're taking all the students out there.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I do. But they're not going to be as good as yours. Let's just be honest. I have some perspective. I've interviewed, I don't know how many presidents, Black presidents from HBCUs, men, women at public private institutions and one fact is pretty standard throughout institutions right now and that is there are not as many Black men enrolling into college as there were previously pre-pandemic. That is something that is being brought up no matter institutional type, that the Black man is not going to college for whatever reasons. What is, you guys have obviously a really unique take here for a multitude of reasons, but what's your take on what's happening with Black men entering college, staying in college, completing college? What can be done? And I know you both came up with 13 solutions for Black students, for Black student success. So if you could tie in that, that'd be great.

Dr. Thomas Parham: So I'm gonna proudly flow off the report that we spent lots of time. I was blessed to co-chair that, but real briefly, because I want Dr. Wood to wax away on this as well. The pipeline starts early on in kindergarten, first grade through third. And what is true is that our women are outperforming our men exponentially. Dr. Wood and I admit 100 students in a freshman class that are Black or a transfer class, I guarantee you probably 60 to 75 of them will be women and 25 of them being men. I mean, they're outperforming them in that way.

I always hesitate as a scholar to think about assuming that you can ever define a single variable that accounts for 100% of the variance in explaining any equation. It's always multiple slices to the pie, Joe. And one of those slices is the start they get in home. One of those slices is the schools that they are exposed to. And as Dr. Wood said, the teachers who, one, aren't equipped to be able to teach these Black kids, including males, who end up being very intimidating for these teachers, most of which, by the way, are female teachers who aren't equipped to, in some cases, to know how to work with these young Black kids. And I've had some of the best female teachers around. It isn't just the feminine energy that's there. It's the skill and the competence that they have to be able to do that. And the lack of understanding about the cultural congruence, I think that is important there.

I think another slice has to be related to the students themselves and to the family structure in that. There's an old adage in the Black community that talks about we raise our daughters and love our sons. School ends at 2:30, daughter better be home 2:45. Getting homework done, getting whatever. On Saturday up with mom doing chores, Sunday in church with mom sitting in. I mean, there's a level of discipline that we engage with our women and our young girls that we don't engage in with our boys. School ends 2:30, boy might get home five o'clock. If dinner's already been done, they will reheat dinner for young brother when he arrived. Saturday morning, he's on the street looking for a peer group who's playing some kind of athletic competition. Sunday sitting on the couch with dad, you know, not in church. I mean, we raise our daughters and we love our sons and that's one of the slices to the pie.

In addition to the structural barriers that are put in place for folk to do that, because the assault on Black men, whether it's crime in the streets from gangs, whether it's police who engage that, it's just, it's a different experience for being a Black man. All those things have, I think, a part to play in why you see some of the phenomena you do and why some of the programmatic initiatives that we are engaged in are trying to address some of those critical issues.

Dr. J. Luke Wood: And how I would respond to that is very similar. I really think that when we talk, we can't talk about Black college students without talking about what it's like to be a Black male in preschool. And so a lot of what my research as a scholar has focused on is the over-representation of Black students in what's called exclusionary discipline. So suspensions, expulsions, loss of recess, not being able to participate in after school activities, the full range in what is done to strip Black students of a desire to be in an academic environment. And the highest suspensions that we know in terms of suspension rates are in middle school, but the highest disparity between Black students and their peers is not in high school or middle school or even in latter elementary. It's actually in early childhood education. In California, Black boys in kindergarten through third grade are 550% more likely to be suspended than their peers.

So the earliest levels of education, you're being treated through a lens of distrust, disdain and disregard. You're being taught by educators who oftentimes don't believe that you're intelligent or capable and who talk about students with the "they" statements. They're lazy, they don't care. They're not really here for school. They're only here for sports. And so we have to think about the socialization that happens in our educational system that then by the time we get students at the college level, why would they feel like college is a good place for them? Because everything that they've experienced up until that point has shown them that it's not an environment for them.

And in fact, Martin Luther King, he came and he spoke on campus here at Sacramento State six months before he passed. And he talked about what he's called the spiritual psychological violence that takes place in education towards Black people based upon the level of mistreatment, the lack of quality in terms of the experience in which they're provided. And so when I think about what are the biggest issues facing Black student enrollment and success, in my mind, I never look at students and blame their families and blame their communities and say it has anything to do with them. That's like looking out the window into someone else's life and someone else's culture and situating the onus of that responsibility on them. Instead, I say as educators, we have to look into the mirror and see our frailties of what we're doing or not doing that's resulting in the outcome disparities that we see.

And that's why this report that both, that, you know, Dr. Parham was the chair of, I was one of the members who were part of this, it's called Advancing Black Student Success and Elevating Black Excellence in the CSU. It's a call to action. It was part of the Black Student Success Report. It was a statewide group of folks who came together to understand what is going on with the Black student experience. Why are we facing issues in terms of enrollment? Why are we facing issues in terms of student success. And we did interviews, we did focus groups, we did a litany of different things to collect data from students, from faculty, from staff, from administrators. And we came up with a number of recommendations that we know will have an impact and that are being implemented across our system right now, focused on Black students. And we're very fortunate that our chancellor's office has set aside monies, not just to say, hey, this is important, but to actually put some resources behind the effort to make sure that we can actually create a better environment for students.

So if you look at a lot of the recommendations, one of the things that you'll see is a lot of them deal with having a plan, right? You gotta have a plan for enrollment. You have to have a plan for retention. You have to have a plan for engaging students, right? You have to have a plan for those things. And it kind of goes back to old, you know, Bible verse, which is where there is no vision that people perish. So we don't have an idea of where we're trying to go. We can never get done with the things that need to be done.

Beyond that though, it talks about how we create an environment that creates a sense of belonging. Too often our students, they feel like they're a guest in someone else's house and they don't feel like it's their home. And Caroline Turner in her work on students of color in higher education talks about this where the environments that we go into, the sites, the building names, the images that are on the walls, the paintings, the sculptures are representative of someone else's culture and someone else's community. And so you feel like you're a guest in someone else's house.

And so part of the things that we're trying to do as a system is think about what can we do to make it so that students know that they're at home and that they're in an environment that cares about them. And part of that goes back to an earlier conversation we had around representation. Right. So we're two individuals who are fortunate to be in positions where we can help steward institutions into a better future. But we're also even if we teach a class here and there, we're not the primary focus in folks in the classroom doing that day to day work that students needed. So we have to create an environment where students are able to see some point at some time, someone who looks like them, who comes from their community and who has a demonstrated record of success in either research, teaching or serving Black students. And so the report provides a number of different recommendations that's helping us get to that point, recognizing that our past has not been what it should be. So our future has to be different because our history as a system has shown that for many of us, what we're doing is not working. And so we have this report. I see it as it is a call to action. And I think we're so blessed that Dr. Parham and Dr. Jimenez-Sandoval served as the leads for this effort because I think it's really serving as a good roadmap for where we need to be.

Dr. Thomas Parham: And I think we wanna add to that, I think, Joe, for the question that while we are absolutely proud of the report, the blueprint really that it provides, not simply for these 23 campuses of the CSU, but I think for systems around the nation, there are lot of people who are retreating from these efforts to try to embrace and support students of African descent. And we want them to do is to lean in, as Sheryl Sandberg was saying, and really embrace it. But there are a couple of things that are important here. This effort to support Black students for the CSU is not new. I don't want us to get this twisted. So I want to say this clearly.

The California State University system has always been interested in supporting Black students. But as it takes an opportunity for what we call a Sankofa moment, if you will, you know, the Sankofa bird who always looks back and go back and fetch. The goal with Sankofa is to always look back and try to assess because in the human condition, you both know that there's always a gap between the aspirational self that aspires to do these things and the real self that says this is the reality on the ground. What this report represented was a look at that where we were able to point out the profound incongruence between the aspiration and what we preach, but what was actually happening. And so the 13 recommendations see the symbolism here because they correspond to the 13th amendment, right, of the constitution. So the 13 is not accidental.

They represent a connectedness because the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone here between students, faculty, staff, administration and climate. Five elements that get addressed in here that take a comprehensive look at how to elevate Black excellence within the California State University system and among other people. And that piece I think is so important to remember as we move forward with some of these specific initiatives. But fundamentally, we also want to provide a lesson. There's a content domain and a process dynamic. So in the process dynamic, one of the things I argued on the committee and what supported by my colleagues, I'm like, look, we cannot design interventions that came out of the, this committee was started out of the Juneteenth Symposium that happened that I hosted in June of 22, that actually now the 24 version is gonna be hosted by Dr. Wood, by the way. So I'm looking forward to that and what he and his team will bring. But this committee was stood up by then Chancellor Jolene Koester to say, I wanna see some progress on this. And so we worked for the better part of four or five, six months with Dr. Dulce Perez and others and a whole range of people from around the system on this particular report. So it's a lot of work. My point was, that we argued that you cannot design interventions in absence of consultation with the people that the intervention was designed to serve. So those focus groups that Dr. Wood was talking about, where we went and met with students all up and down the system and had focus groups, we met with faculty, we met with staff. What are your issues? What are you loving about what you're experiencing? We need to replicate. What do you need to change? It's just like making you crazy. And so we incorporated all that and then tried to use that into the plan. And that's what you see, I think, within the report.

But also importantly, there is a system of accountability that has been put in. Hear me well on this one. In all the diversity efforts that we engage in, I think there are three critical ingredients. You have to have a cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and even spiritual pledge of support. Someone has to say, this stuff is important. That's what the trustees have done, the presidents have done, and now campuses have done. You have to have sound programmatic planning, which are the recommendations that are in this report. But third, you have to have some sense of accountability. The single most important ingredient missing from a lot of our DEIJ efforts across the country is accountability because nobody's held accountable for missing diversity metrics. If I come in $100,000 over budget, my job is on the line. But if I miss a diversity target, who matters? Well, part of what we also did in our health design is a metric where we are now incorporating progress on these 13 items into president performance evaluations. So each president is now about to be graded on how well we have met our metrics. Now we don't have to be good at all 13. Dr. Wood may have an affinity center, but not have this kind of program for staff, or he has an honors college, I don't. Whatever you wanna do within the 13, each president and campus was designed to say, pick two or three or four that you want to focus on in this next year and a half. And we've all submitted those pieces and those are the things that will be judged on. And so that's why I say it's an important blueprint for other folks. But again, I want to end this comment where I started, I don't want us to get it twisted that somehow this is new for the CSU. It is a historic effort. They've never done something like this. So I'm glad that they supported our leadership. They've always been concerned about Black students in the system, but have never done it in the way we've just articulated it between Dr. Wood and I and the other members of the committee.

Joe Sallustio: Well, speaking of accountability, I think it was somebody from Dr. Wood's staff that said they were going to fly to St. Louis and turn off my mic if I got you guys out after that. Somebody had a hard stop. So I want to respect everybody's time. I will just go about my day working and leave the three of you on to discuss. That's how good this conversation has been. You guys wanna keep going, you can. But I think what you've done is outline some of the barriers that we have to continue to work through when it comes to higher education, what it takes to be an effective leader in higher education. Everything comes back around a student success or none of us have jobs in higher education. We have to retain the students that come into our systems and get them out to gain full employment one way or the other.

I would thank my guest co-host Dr. LaNitra Berger for asking way better questions than I could have ever done. You're amazing. Thank you.

Dr. LaNitra Berger: Thank you. And it's been a pleasure to speak with both of you. And I just want to give a quick shout out to our president, Dr. Greg Washington. My friend, please give him my best.

Joe Sallustio: Love that. You go. Drs. Parham and Wood, presidents of Cal State Dominguez Hills and CSU Sacramento respectively, gentlemen, thank you for being on this podcast. Thank you very much for the insights that you provided and the expertise you brought to the table. It's been an honor and a privilege.

Dr. Thomas Parham: Thank you.

Dr. J. Luke Wood: Thank you.

Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you've just EdUp. Attention. It's time to register for Ellucian Live 2024, April 7 through 10 in San Antonio, Texas. Illuminate, innovate, inspire. Explore higher education's greatest opportunities with future ready ideas, solutions and best practices designed to drive transformation. Register now at elive.ellucian.com. This conference is going to be epic.