Laid off: Another hurdle for faculty of color
By Amy Díaz-Infante
Getting a layoff notice from my job as an art professor at City College of San Francisco last spring was a surprise. And also, not a surprise.
Surprising because, along with hundreds of other faculty members, I got a formal notice in the mail with no acknowledgement of our contributions to the college or how this would impact our lives, and no time to plan around this possibility; just a stock form and professors’ names listed in order of seniority.
What would I do for income? Would I skip a summer of making art — which I need to stay current in my field — and instead teach the one summer drawing class potentially available to me, for what little income that would give me? Even then, it would not be enough to cover my rent over those months. Would I have to leave San Francisco, and if so, where to? San Francisco is notoriously expensive, but so is the broader Bay Area and other locations commutable to the area.
On the other hand, the announcement was not a surprise. City College has been financially unstable for some time. Semester after semester, in the three short years I’d been full-time faculty, I’d already seen so many classes cut and faculty laid off, often at the very last minute.
What would I do for income? … Would I have to leave San Francisco, and if so, where to?
In the fall of 2019 there was a “midnight massacre” where hundreds of class sections were cut from the spring schedule one day before registration opened. This left departments no choices in how to curate their programming to best suit students’ needs with a diminished budget, no time for instructors to try to secure other teaching positions, and severely reduced offerings for students who were depending on these classes to continue their studies. It also eliminated over 90 percent of the older adults program.
Now I was facing this cut. I was in a cohort of faculty who were most recently hired, so we were the first in line to go. As it happens, the faculty of color at City College are disproportionately among the newer faculty, so we were disproportionately impacted by these cuts.
The good news is that my faculty union, AFT Local 2121, negotiated with administrators to restore all 663 jobs that were eliminated, and I and many of my colleagues were able to keep our jobs. But the arrangement is only a Band-Aid on a larger problem. In order to rescue those positions, we all had to take pay cuts. Our salaries were already not on par with similar institutions in the Bay Area before these cuts. In a city like San Francisco, where we already struggle to meet high housing prices and cost of living, many of us wonder how much longer we can hang on.
It’s also about representation
One of the aspects of the planned layoffs that troubles me most is that they happened disproportionately to faculty of color. These are the faculty who are most underrepresented yet are most needed to adequately reflect our student body.
City College of San Francisco has been recognized as a Hispanic-serving institution, and we know that students succeed most when they can see themselves reflected in the curriculum they study and in the institution they are a part of. If I had left my position, the art department would have had no full-time Latinx faculty. In fact, it would have had no full-time faculty of color at all. This at a school that prides itself on serving a diverse student body.
I have students who come to me specifically because I’m the only Latinx faculty member. I share with many students the experience of being a first-generation college student, being in spaces where you are made to feel you don’t belong, and carrying the weight of family and community responsibilities. With some students I also share cultural and linguistic heritages that are not reflected equitably within the institution. Other faculty of color I know acknowledge the importance, but also the added responsibility, of this mentorship role and the support that many students of color come to us for.
If I had left my position, the art department would have had no full-time Latinx faculty.
For faculty of color there is also additional emotional and intellectual labor involved when facing institutionalized racism. There are the micro-aggressions we face individually, and also what we might call macro-aggressions — actions such the proposed dissolution of ethnic studies programs. The layoff notices that were sent out last spring would have eliminated Philippine studies (the first such program in the nation), as well as women’s and gender studies, aircraft maintenance, fashion and dance. There has also been an ongoing struggle for support of our African American studies program and professors.
Another example of challenges specific to faculty of color is the structure of committee work. When committees are required to be “diverse” but there are few faculty of color, Black, Latinx, Indigenous Asian American and Pacific Islander faculty members are constantly asked to disproportionately join multiple groups. This additional work is not compensated and also reduces equity to checking a box. These are some of the things that make it difficult to recruit and retain faculty of color.
We need more of us
We do the work anyway, because it is so important to our students. As a Mexican American woman who attended schools where I did not see my stories or my community represented, I understand this personally.
I was the first in my family to go to college, but I still didn’t think college spaces belonged to me. Institutional racism has created barriers for us to enter these spaces, and those very real barriers also create psychological barriers. The feeling that you don’t belong (because we don’t see ourselves represented within the faculty body, curriculum or campus environment) is a huge factor in students of color not completing their studies.
There are also so many people — particularly first-generation students, working students, students of color and students with immigrant backgrounds — who use community colleges as an entry point to higher education. Others use the flexibility and accessibility of community college to access classes they would not otherwise be able to take. Like my mother: She worked full time, sometimes taking on extra work, while raising five children. But she found enough time to take one class a semester until she got her degree. It’s this kind of access to education and personal development for the broadest population possible that makes the mission of community college so necessary.
I was the first in my family to go to college, but I still didn’t think college spaces belonged to me.
I started my college studies at Yale (which felt very surreal as a first-generation student from California), but it was the summer after my freshman year, when I took a photography class at my local community college back home, that I began to feel agency over my own education. That’s what led me on my path in the arts, completing my degree at Yale, then the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University.
I was drawn to academia because I love asking big questions. In my drawing classes, I tell my students, “use your eyeballs.” This is because we tend to default to the images, ideas and expectations already programmed in our heads.
There is so much we take for granted because it is the only way we’ve known something to be, because it seems too hard to untangle, or because we forget that it was people who designed the structures we live our lives by.
And if people designed it, we can redesign it.
Amy Díaz-Infante is a visual artist, a full-time faculty member in printmaking, drawing, and design at City College of San Francisco and a member of AFT 2121. Community engagement has been a key component of her arts practice, and as an educator and administrator she has been active in the fields of youth arts and youth leadership development.
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