AUSTIN, Texas

A record 2,300 attendees from community colleges across the nation descended on Austin, Texas, last week for the 29^th annual International Conference on Teaching and Leadership Excellence, held May 20-23. Hosted by the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas-Austin through its National Institute for Staff & Organizational Development (NISOD) outreach arm, the conference touched on a broad range of issues relating to enriching and enhancing two-year college leadership and faculty instruction.

A number of sessions touched on diversity issues as well, such as one titled, “Diversity Matters in the Community College,” which featured a number of minority leaders in the two-year college realm including Dr. Ana M. Guzmán, president of Palo Alto College in San Antonio; Dr. Rufus Glasper, chancellor of the Maricopa County (AZ) Community College District; and Dr. Gerardo E. de los Santos, president of the League for Innovation in the Community College.

De los Santos discussed a number of challenges community colleges will face as the coming wave of baby boomer retirements hits full force, and thousands of deans, chancellors, and presidents are expected to step down in coming years, creating hard-to-fill vacancies.

He also touched on the hot-button topic of immigration reform as it pertains to community colleges in a state like Arizona that is “not sympathetic” to diversity issues, as Glasper delicately put it - evidenced by the passage of Proposition 300, a ballot initiative denying illegal-immigrant students in-state tuition and financial aid at state colleges. “Serving the undocumented” is a critical task community college face, especially as these schools are forced to vet the immigration status of students who “don’t know any other country,” de los Santos added.

Another NISOD session touching on a number of diversity issues was titled, “From Failure in the ‘Hood’ to Success in the Academy,” which featured Lloyd Sheldon Johnson, chairman of the behavioral science department at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. Sheldon says that Bunker Hill has a very diverse student body, as 60 percent of students hail from around 90 countries spanning the globe. “But we do not have that diversity reflected in our teaching faculty. We do not have a lot of brown people teaching in our institution. It is something that is very important because students need to look at someone who looks like them that they can model after in some way.