A Spectacular Surge
As Florida’s Hispanic student population continues to grow, Hispanic professors wonder why their numbers aren’t keeping up.
By Blair S. Walker

MIAMI

The enrollment of Hispanic students at Florida colleges and universities has ballooned spectacularly in recent years, prompting many Hispanic professors to question why their numbers aren’t growing at a corresponding pace.

Hispanic professors and administrators at Sunshine State institutions don’t agree why hiring hasn’t kept pace with the increase among the Hispanic student body, nor are they on the same page about how to address the situation.

Hispanic student attendance has increased at least 300 percent in the past 15 years at the University of Central Florida, the University of Florida, the University of South Florida and Florida Atlantic University, according to the state’s board of governors. Overall, Hispanic college attendance jumped 174 percent at Florida’s public universities from 1990 to 2005.

“What’s often missing is the will to give people a chance,” says Juan F. Perea, who became the University of Florida’s first Hispanic law professor in 1990. “I don’t think there’s any magic to it. Institutions do have to be pushed sometimes.”

The U.S. Census Bureau put Florida’s Hispanic population at 3.4 million in 2005, putting Hispanics’ percent of the population at 19.6 percent. Correspondingly, full-time freshmen enrollment at all Florida colleges increased 53 percent between 1996 and 2001, according the Pew Hispanic Center, the greatest surge in Hispanic students experienced by any state.

These statistics prompt Perea, part of a loose coalition of Hispanic professors around the state monitoring the situation, to question why only 3.8 percent of the full-time faculty at Florida’s flagship institution, the University of Florida, is Hispanic, considering Hispanics make up 10.8 percent of the student body. This is despite having hired 60 full-time Hispanic professors from 2000 to 2005, bringing the total to 167.