Board wanting a push for diversity

Diversity of Palomar staff was thrown into question during a Feb. 9 governing board meeting

During the board meeting Trustee John Halcón, brought up concerns with the presence of diversity in new hires. This was based on the names approved for hiring during the board’s closed session.

“I can not believe that we can not find a person of color, a person diverse, who can teach English. I just can’t believe it,” Halcón said. “I’m not happy about this, show me the intent for diversity in these three hires.”

Specifically this issue was taken with new adjunct hires. Halcón claimed that we can expect to have a strong basis of diversity without making sure our bases are covered with the faculty.

Trustee, Paul McNamara, pushed for a clear presence of diversity in future Palomar hires, though he laid the blame on deans and administrators.

“It is dismaying. We talk about diversity up here a lot and now the administrators, deans, who are suppose to be checking this aren’t checking it. It kind of bothers me,” McNamara said.

Mike Popielski, interim vice president of human resources, shared Halcón and McNamara’s sentiment, although he doesn’t claim to know the diversity of the hires in question, but said, “there’s plans in place.”

In an attempt to appease Halcón during the meeting, Popielski pointed to action being taken by human resources to encourage diversity in Palomar’s future faculty. This would be done by informing hiring committees of Palomar’s diversity make up, as well as holding an adjunct and full-time recruitment summit in the spring and the fall specifically for the purpose of making Palomar a more inviting place for new faculty.

Halcón warned that if a push for diversity isn’t made in our faculty, we will be risking losing diversity in our students. He cited that 47 percent of the community is Latino and Palomar’s need to respond to that.

In reference to students leaving Halcón said, “They went somewhere else, they went somewhere they go into a class of english, or chemistry, or biology, or history, or geography and find someone that looks like them. That’s not all diversity, but that’s part of it.”