Wednesday, Dec. 9, 1998 | 11:09 a.m.
When a young black woman walked to the podium to speak to the UNLV Faculty Senate about cultural diversity on Tuesday, she faced a panel made mostly of white faces.
She was there to ask them to vote in favor of adding multicultural and international studies course requirements to the university's undergraduate core curriculum.
But her presence in front of the panel, which postponed voting on the issue until Jan. 26, raised a larger question: Can UNLV instill in students tolerance for diverse cultures if the campus climate itself lacks multicultural maturity?
Can a student body that is made up of 35 percent ethnic minorities be taught multiculturalism by a faculty that is only 15 percent minority and 31 percent female?
"We need to create an environment that is more hospitable to all minorities, not just teach multiculturalism in classes -- although I definitely support the multi-cultural class requirement. It's all inter-related," said Ann Casados-Mueller, director of the UNLV Diversity Initiatives office, which was formed less than two years ago to teach university employees about tolerance and increase the number of minorities on campus.
"Most of the complaints about discrimination I get in my office are about incidents that could have been prevented with some cultural education," Mueller said.
Undergraduate multicultural class subjects include ethnic, sexual and religious minority issues, among other topics. The proposal before the senate would have required all undergraduates to take a multicultural course and an international studies course as part of their general education requirements.
UNLV offers a number of such courses -- but when the books are closed the university has more pervasive cultural diversity issues to address.
Two months ago, a UNLV police officer sent out a campus-wide e-mail disparaging homosexuals. Last fall, black patrons were frisked upon entering an event at Artemus Ham Hall on campus; white patrons at a similar event were not. And in the hallways and classrooms on campus -- particularly in specific colleges within the university -- women and minority faculty are vastly outnumbered by white males.
"We've got work to do, yes, but we are moving in the right direction," said Mueller, who has in her brief tenure raised the percentage of new minority faculty hires from 10 to 25 percent and has commissioned the university's first "cultural diversity audit" to determine what specific issues need to be addressed to improve the campus climate for minorities.
The audit, which was funded by a $25,000 university planning grant, is being conducted by an independent, Maryland-based consultant. After completing focus groups and surveys of university employees this year, a final report on the status of UNLV's minorities will be given to Mueller's office in May. From there, the university will begin work on making the campus more tolerant of minority cultures.
Although results of the audit aren't in yet, one issue likely to be cited is the demographics of faculty.
Only 31 percent of UNLV's instructional faculty are female, according to UNLV's fall 1997 statistics. The disparity is even greater in certain colleges within the university -- for example, only 14 of 83 professors in the College of Business are female, 5 of 44 in the College of Engineering, and 9 of 27 in the College of Hotel Administration, according to 1997 statistics compiled by the UNLV Office of Institutional Analysis and Planning.
"Women in some of those disciplines are not as readily available as males," Mueller said. "But it is our goal to recruit and retain more women and more minorities."
Along racial lines, the Colleges of Business and Fine Arts faculty are more than 90 percent caucasion.
UNLV improved its minority faculty recruitment significantly in the last several years -- in 1996, 10 percent of new faculty hires were minorities, in 1997, 19 percent, and in 1998, 25 percent were minorities.
But as Mueller pointed out in a summary of her grant proposal, "the success is bittersweet because of a revolving door pattern among minority faculty. The attrition level of minority faculty and staff meets or exceeds the hiring rate."
For example, in 1996-97, the hiring rate for minority faculty was 10 percent, but the separation rate also was 10 percent, said Mueller.
UNLV is not alone in its struggle to recruit minority faculty and create a multicultural campus that will make it possible to retain them.
A 1995-96 study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles found that nationwide, minority faculty members hold lower positions than their white counterparts and are twice as likely to identify campus discrimination as a source of stress.
"But Southern Nevada is becoming more and more racially and internationally diverse, so it is very important for UNLV to keep up with that," Mueller said.
In fact, Clark County's Hispanic population has grown by more than 85 percent since 1990; its Asian population by more than 75 percent; its black population by more than 47 percent -- all faster than the county's overall growth rate, which was about 40 percent as of 1996, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
While the university is working to diversify and educate its employees, it continues to recruit international and minority students: 35 percent of the student population is made up of ethnic minorities or foreign nationals.
"They're going to go somewhere else if we're not hospitable," Mueller said.
Several minority students told the Faculty Senate Tuesday that the multicultural course requirement would aid in creating a more tolerant campus.
In addition to the multicultural and international course requirements, the core curriculum proposal would add a "university colloquium"requirement for all undergraduate students -- an interdisciplinary course aimed at linking liberal arts and science subjects for students.
The proposal does not call for increasing the number of credits, but limits the flexibility students currently have in fulfilling liberal arts requirements.
Most faculty objections to the plan were related to the feasibility of staffing and funding the colloquium.
Some professors, such as those in the College of Engineering, worried that the multicultural and international requirements would unnecessarily burden the engineering student's already full academic plates.
"(Adding the multi-cultural requirement) might help students to be more understanding of other cultures some, but students' motivation is short-term with classes," said George Mauer, an engineering professor from Germany. "This type of thing, real change, takes more than classes."
Cohri Bruce, a 27-year-old UNLV senior from Japan, said that international students have difficulty integrating on campus because American students are afraid to engage in conversation.
"It is difficult to communicate, and (multi-cultural) classes would help," she said.
But critics have said that the proposal to require multi-cultural classes in the core curriculum shows a cow-towing to "political correctness."
"That's not what this is about. This is not something that comes down to faddism," said Michael Bowers, associate dean for the college of liberal arts who headed the ad hoc committee that developed the core curricula proposal.
"We are really dealing with a country that is changing -- it's not going to be the same as it was 10 or 20 years ago...We want our students to be prepared for that...It is very important that our students understand the consequences of living in this global environment."
The Faculty Senate is scheduled to address the core curriculum issue again on January 26, and if approved, the new curriculum would become effective in August, 2000.
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