Becoming an HSI
The University of California, Davis will soon reach the enrollment threshold necessary to apply for designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) with the Department of Education. This will be a historic moment for UC Davis, one that will see the culmination of many years of hard and deliberate work.
UC Davis will be one of fewer than twenty R1 HSIs in the nation (four of which are within the UC system–Riverside, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Irvine). Further, we will be one of the highest enrollment universities for Hispanic-identifying undergraduates.
This project provides an important avenue to communicate about the past and promise of our journey to becoming an HSI. For decades, Chicanx/Latinx students, faculty, and staff at UC Davis have worked to make the campus more accessible and responsive to the needs of its historically marginalized members. It is imperative that we document that story, share it with the campus community, and use it to motivate further change.
Led by the Office of Academic Diversity and assisted by graduate and undergraduate students, and staff, as well as additional contributors that can be recruited from across campus, we will publish short online articles or produce audio/visual material on various related topics. This is a multi-year effort, our intention is to end up with a manuscript-length history and that will take time.
We invite you to visit this webpage often and follow us on our various social media channels to learn when future articles are posted.
If you are interested in contributing to this project, please take a look at the Suggested Article Topics (or propose your own) and review the Article Submission Guidelines and then submit your work here.
To get started, we invite you to read the first article in this series:
Writing Our History, An Introduction
Investing in Rising Scholars and Serving the State of California: What It Means for UC Davis to be a Hispanic Serving Institution
In June 2018 Chancellor May invited twenty-nine distinguished scholars, administrators, community members, and students to serve on a task force to help UC Davis define what success should mean for a research intensive, public land-grant, Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in California. The Task Force was charged with examining and making recommendations to continue to improve the success and well-being of all our students, including our Latinx and Chicanx students, and to identify the resources and reforms necessary to achieve these goals. The task force report was released in 2019.