Publication Date
2024
Document Type
Contribution to a Book
Publication Title
Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices
Editor
Kathryn M. Houk, Jordan Nielsen, and Jenny Wong-Welch
First Page
255
Last Page
266
Abstract
San José State University (SJSU) is located in downtown San José, a city of over one million residents in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. Established in 1857, SJSU is the oldest public university on the west coast of the United States. It is also the founding campus of the California State University (CSU) system that comprises twenty-three campuses, making it the largest four-year public university system in the country. SJSU has nine colleges and sixty-seven departments, which offer bachelor’s, master’s, and a growing number of doctoral degree programs. It enrolls over 36,000 students and employs more than 2,100 faculty members. The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, also known as the SJSU King Library, is the only SJSU library that serves the campus. It is a joint library, partnering with the San José Public Library to serve the Bay Area community.
Like most universities, SJSU has a mixed record when it comes to social justice. In the 1950s–1960s, Jim Crow practices prevented the campus from providing campus housing and scholarships to Black athletes even though the campus actively recruited Black students. The university also had a history of minority student movements in the 1970s and 1980s as well as more contemporary racist events that have caused it to rethink its approach to social justice, human rights, and community service. Much has changed in fifty-plus years due to the challenges from students, faculty, staff, and community members and the university to address the value of supporting and retaining its diverse population as a crucial part of its mission to strive for social justice and equality. Consequently, it invested in establishing an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and different student success, identity, and cultural centers on campus, as well as the SJSU Black Leadership and Opportunity Center, Chicanx/Latinx Student Success Center, Native American Indigenous Student Success Center; PRIDE Center, and UndocuSpar- tan Student Resource Center. In the library, the Africana, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American Studies Center (AAACNA) is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the diversity of the campus. Although the creation of AAACNA was complicated, it is a center that is now continually supported by students, faculty, and the community.
At SJSU, librarians are unionized faculty members and have ranks parallel to faculty in SJSU’s other academic departments. California is one of eight states that have banned the consideration of race in its employment of state workers (Calif. Const. art. I § 31), and statistics make plain that SJSU’s student body continues to be more diverse than SJSU’s faculty in terms of race and ethnicity (Institutional Research and Strategic Analytics, n.d.). However, SJSU faculty are called on to serve as mediators and educators to students from a range of backgrounds (Wong, 2017), and research shows that student-faculty racial and ethnic matches can have an impact on student learning and graduation rates (Fryar & Hawes, 2011; Llamas, Nguyen, & Tran, 2021; Lowe, 2005; Stout et al., 2018). In addition, SJSU’s 2020 campus climate survey revealed that “racial identity, ethnicity, gender/gender identity, position status, and nepotism/cronyism were the top perceived bases for many of the reported discriminatory employment practices” (Rankin & Associates, 2020, p. 281).
The university realized that it was time to reflect on its institutional value of social justice and be proactive in overcoming the influences of larger systemic oppression. In order to intentionally address bias at the organizational level, SJSU created initiatives that were tailored for specific activities, operations, and populations. One such initiative was to adopt new strategies for the faculty hiring and faculty retention, tenure, and promotion processes and to implement increased faculty mentoring opportunities (Office of the President, 2021). The strategies involve collaboration between various campus units such as University Personnel; Faculty Success; Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Library Administration; and library faculty search committees. This chapter will discuss how the University Library implemented—and enhanced— these new strategies.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Library; Information
Recommended Citation
Adriana Poo, Anamika Megwalu, Nick Szydlowski, Kathryn Blackmer Reyes, Peggy Cabrera, and Ann Agee. "Chapter 17. Approaches to Inclusive Recruitment: Practical and Hopeful" Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices (2024): 255-266.
