The Role of Institutional Agents in Providing Institutional Support to Latinx Students in STEM

Estela Mara Bensimon et al.

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Abstract: Case study results featuring four Latinx stem faculty members illustrate the forms of institutional support professors can provide to increase the number of Latinx students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) fields. The findings highlight three areas of university faculty agency to integrate Latinx students into the cultural and discursive world of stem: recruitment, admissions, and program development; professional networking; and brokering support for Latinx within the university and across systems. Recommendations are provided for faculty who wish to act as institutional agents and the need for future research into the institutional culture of Hispanic Serving Institutions is identified.

In initiatives to strengthen postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) education in the United States, racially, linguistically, and ethnically minoritized populations are considered the “largest untapped stem talent pools”. To successfully involve talented students in stem, federal panels composed of leading scientists, engineers, stem educators, and researchers have called for changes in the culture and climate of stem postsecondary education. Cultural change differs from structural change (e.g., change in curriculum) and programmatic change (e.g., change in student services), which are discrete institutions of cultural practices. Despite decades of structural and programmatic investments to broaden participation in stem, progress has fallen far short of equity goals. To address a deep-seated cultural challenge in stem, research needs to go beyond the “promising practices” paradigm and consider the role of faculty members in changing the “culture of attrition” that has contributed to the underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and Native Americans in stem. One of the gaps identified in the literature on minoritized student participation in stem is the limited number of studies that examine institutional capacity building as a strategy to address the broadening participation challenge. Our study responds to this gap in the literature by focusing on faculty who take on the role of “institutional agents” in relation to Latinx students. We use the term institutional agent, a sociological term introduced by Stanton Salazar (1997, 2001, 2011), to describe individuals who deploy their resources, networks, and positional authority to promote Latinx student success.

The dominant approach to increase stem access and success among minoritized students has been through the establishment of programs (e.g., summer bridge, mentoring) to remediate or compensate for inferior educational experiences, or through the implementation of practices that gain the imprimatur of “best practice” or “high impact practices.” Our study moves beyond a focus on programmatic solutions to bring attention to what faculty as institutional agents actually do, what motivates them to assume such a role, and the actions they take to broaden participation in stem. Having a more complete portrait of the attributes, experiences, and actions of reform-oriented faculty infuses concreteness into the aspirational calls for greater inclusiveness in stem.

The term minoritized is used to amplify the fact that certain groups acquire minority status through the beliefs and social processes enacted by other groups who place them in a position of the “minority” (Harper, 2012; Dowd & Bensimon, 2015). From this point of view, the status of minoritized groups is defined by their lack of power and more limited access to economic and social assets, rather than by numerical underrepresentation in society or educational institutions (Gillborn, 2005).

Dr. Stanton-Salazar is an educator, sociologist, and student advocate in the field of urban education. He is the author of Manufacturing Hope and Despair: The School and Kin Support Networks of U.S.-Mexican Youth (Teachers College Press, 2001). Dr. Stanton-Salazar served as Associate Professor of Education in the Rossier School of Education, at the University of Southern California from 2000 to 2011. He served as Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego from 1990 to 2000. He has published in the Harvard Educational Review, the Sociology of Education Journal, Youth & Society, The Urban Review, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, and the Social Psychology of Education journal.

Brianne Dávila is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Psychology and Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of sociology of education, Latina/o sociology, and social inequality. Dr. Dávila has research experience with the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California. She earned her doctorate in Sociology and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has a master's from the same program and earned a bachelor's in Sociology from Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.

The National Science Foundation (Grant No. 0653280) provided funding for this study. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Purpose of Study

The term institutional agent has been applied by others to examine the role of faculty, administrators, and staff as mediators of minoritized student success in Hispanic Serving Institutions, community colleges and predominantly white institutions. Institutional agents are individuals who, having experienced or developed an understanding of institutionalized oppressive ness, use their knowledge to support minoritized student success. They do so by attempting to transform institutional contexts such that they function as well for minoritized students as they do for white students. In this context, progress towards racial equity is fostered, first, by an institution's willingness and growing capacity to provide equal academic experiences, recognitions, and outcomes for members of different racial and ethnic groups.

Institutional agents create that capacity by countering the assumptions of individuals who implicitly associate science identity with white males, overlooking the “scientist” in minoritized male and female students. The four male Latinx professors featured in this case study took on a variety of institutional agent roles to counteract the detrimental consequences of “identity invisibility” experienced by Latinx students who strive for stem careers but do not present the stereotypical features that gain them recognition as an aspiring scientist. The four professors that are the focus of this study were in positions of power and influence based on rank, reputation, national standing, formal roles within their own institutions, and control of resources. What is distinctive about these professors is their intentional use of status and power, influence, and resources to assist Latinx students in becoming scientists.

Much of what institutional agents do involves mentoring. However, in addition to providing the direct relational support to students that characterizes mentoring relationships, institutional agents also take actions to transform structures and practices that create inequality in opportunity and success in stem (and higher education). In other words, as we show in this study, they support the success of Latinx students not only by introducing them to the prevailing cultural practices of predominantly white departments, but also by working to adapt stem departments to be responsive to Latinx students as well as other minoritized groups.

The institutional-agent role performance of the four stem Latinx faculty members featured in this article was consequential for Latinx students. As professors in stem departments that (despite being located in Hispanic Serving Institutions) were “racialized” as white —meaning that white people, cultural practices, and assumptions about Latinx student preparedness and interest in science were accepted as the norm and members of other groups were viewed as diverse others—they questioned the ways that the “normal” standard operating procedures of recruitment, admissions, and selection for participation in faculty research excluded many talented aspiring Latinx scientists. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to document the role of institutional agents 1) in promoting Latinx students' educational aspirations and attainment in stem fields, and 2) in changing the factors that create a “culture of attrition” in stem. In the next section we provide a review of literature that makes the case for the importance of institutional agents.

$ ^{2} $The term Latinx is a gender neutral term used as a means of being more inclusive and moving away from the gendered terms Latino and Latina. For a thorough description of the Latinx term as used in higher education, see Salinas and Lozano (2017).

The Role of Faculty as Mediators of Latinx Success in stem

The rationale for increased research attention to the role of faculty members as mediators of Latinx success in stem fields emerges clearly from recent studies showing the importance of faculty members in identifying and training minoritized students. These studies show that faculty help students develop science self-efficacy and feel a sense of belonging in a scientific community; they provide instrumental mentoring and include Latinx who might otherwise be overlooked in research apprenticeships. While these studies draw attention to the importance of faculty members in facilitating the success of minoritized students in stem fields, they rely on student perceptions of faculty members. Our study contributes the perspective of faculty members by featuring four Latinx professors who take on the roles that identify them as institutional agents.

Supportive (and Unsupportive) Faculty-Student Interactions

Many studies have established the significance of faculty-student interaction in the academic success of minoritized students in stem. The findings from a mixed methods study by Hurtado et al. (2011) is particularly relevant to our focus on institutional agents. Hurtado et al. (2011) found that doing research with faculty increased minoritized students' interaction with faculty; however, they also found that faculty-student interaction declined in highly selective institutions, and it also declined when students perceived that faculty treated them"like numbers in a book" (p. 569). Interacting frequently with high school teachers, perceiving professors as caring beyond the academic realm, and participating in academic enrichment programs for minority students were also associated with increased faculty interaction by minoritized students. Students who struggled academically during their first year reported greater faculty contact, which suggests that there may be a qualitative difference in interactions that happen through joint engagement in research projects or mentoring and interactions that are prompted by poor academic performance. The latter kind of interactions may contribute to feelings of embarrassment and lack of efficacy, even if the faculty member is attempting to be supportive. Those who are not sensitive to the ways that offers of help motivated by"care as pity" can create a"subtractive schooling" environment and place a"cultural taxation" on minoritized students (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015) may diminish a student's motivation to achieve academically in that setting.

Recent studies that take race into account have shown that having own-race instructors in introductory stem courses increases African Americans' persistence in stem majors and that high levels of academic motivation among African American students are moderated by their perceptions of faculty members as student-centered. Faculty are viewed as student-centered when African American students perceive them as going"above and beyond" and creating"a web of support that goes well beyond being culturally sensitive, understanding, or sympathetic to their needs". Students are also sensitive to"accessibility cues" that signal the openness of faculty to establish academically supportive relationships outside of the classroom. These studies highlight that students' perceptions of faculty as student-centered are influenced by faculty actions, language, and non-verbal gestures. Hurtado et al. (2011) report that minoritized students in research intensive universities were aware that approachability is not incorporated into the reward structure. As a result, students interpreted the routine practice of listing office hours in the syllabus as a strategy used by faculty to limit their availability. Departmental practices such as large lecture classes and reliance on teaching assistants were viewed as lack of caring. The perception of lack of departmental caring was also mentioned by students at one of the Hispanic Serving campuses.

Research also shows that stem faculty believe they and their departments function in accordance to the principles of meritocracy and objectivity and as such may be blind to the ways in which race and racial outcomes are integral to definitions of merit, who is found to be meritorious, and how merit is accrued. Very few studies have investigated if and how faculty consciously mediate Black, Latinx, and Native American participation and achievement in academic settings defined by the cultural practices rooted in the ideology of “universalism,” which maintains that the personal characteristics of researchers such as race and gender are irrelevant to the pursuit of objective and impersonal science. Cultural practices become dominant and racializing when merit is equated strictly with traditional measures of academic achievement such as high stakes test scores.

Studies that examine institutional cultural practices from the perspective of African American, Latinx, American Indians, and underserved Asian American groups (see, for example, Bustillos & Rueda, Cejda, Casparis, Rhodes & Seal-Nyman, Harper, Patton, & Wooden, McGee & Martin, Museus, Museus & Maramba, Museus et al., Museus & Quaye, Stage & Hubbard, 2009; and, for an earlier study focused on institutional climate, Hurtado, 1993) have documented persuasively the ways in which institutional factors are implicated in the chronic racial gap that characterizes the participation and outcomes of African Americans, Latinx, American Indians, and underserved Asian American groups in just about any type of college, regardless of selectivity, mission, curriculum, size, or the racial and ethnic composition of the student body. In particular these studies call attention to the unexamined and unconscious racial cues emitted by faculty members, graduate assistants, and peers that result in some students being advantaged and others disadvantaged.

Studies that consider race as a structural characteristic that shapes the culture of stem leave little doubt that faculty are arguably the most influential factor in the creation of racially hospitable departments, free of stereotype threat. Yet, while we know a great deal about what causes inhospitable departments based on student perceptions, bringing about cultural change will require a better understanding of the motivation, values, and actions of faculty members who students describe as “student centered,” take the responsibility for developing Latinx into scientists, and act to change the culture of stem.

Institutional Agents

“Institutional agents,” as defined by Stanton-Salazar (1997, 2001, & 2011) are individuals, outside of the young person's family, who hold relatively high-status positions within society or institutions, and are in the position to provide students with key forms of social and institutional support. These high-status individuals take on the role of institutional agent when they use their position, status, and authority to act on behalf of young people to advocate for institutional support to be directed towards their education. Institutional support comes in the form of highly valued resources, opportunities, privileges, and services.

Institutional agents can include faculty members, deans and chairs, as well as counselors and advisors. First generation, low income, Latinx college students can benefit from having a network of institutional agents who can provide “privileges, institutional resources, opportunities for career mobility, wealth creation, political empowerment, and school achievement”.

In a review of the mentoring literature, Crisp and Cruz (2009) found that while there is little agreement around a definition of mentoring or the standard characteristics of a mentor, mentors typically provide students with the following types of support: academic, psychosocial, interpersonal, and career development. Like mentors, institutional agents use their insider knowledge about academic culture to help Latinx perform successfully within existing structures and expectations, but at the same time they work to make these structures more responsive and successful for minoritized students. A key characteristic of an institutional agent that distinguishes their role from that of a mentor is possession of a “critical consciousness.” The concept of critical consciousness is based on Freire's (1993) notion of conscientizacao and defined as “the ability to perceive and interrogate the social, political, and economic forms of oppression that shape one's life and to take collective action against such elements of society (or social structure) ”. For an institutional agent, a critical consciousness includes a critical awareness about societal structures, institutional policies and practices, and environmental conditions that obstruct students' efforts to achieve their goals, such as successfully transitioning from high school to college. Institutional agents are not only aware of inequalities, they also utilize their status, position, and networks to advocate for opportunities and resources to be directed toward low-income and racialized students..

Following the literature on social workers, Stanton-Salazar (2011) classified the multiple institutional agent role types into four groupings of roles that can be enacted by an individual: 1. direct support, 2. integrative support, 3. system developer, and 4. system linkage and networking support. The various roles that individuals play are organized into these groups according to the kind of support that institutional agents provide to minoritized students. The “direct support” group includes roles that involve institutional agents providing support directly to students or advocating on behalf of particular students.

Direct support to students is provided through multiple roles: by providing personal and institutional resources (resource agent), advising students academically and conveying knowledge about the educational system (knowledge agent and advisor), advocating on behalf of students' needs (advocate), and helping students learn to network (networking coach). When enacting the direct support role types, the institutional agent acts in ways similar to that of a mentor or academic advisor.

The other three groups include roles that involve institutional agents in activities where they interact not only with students but with others at the institutional, system, or community level to gather resources and support for racialized students within the institution and the community. Examples include the role of recruiter, in which faculty or administrators recruit students through communications with students, but also take steps at their own institution or in collaboration across institutions to ensure that Latinx are included in the recruitment pool. At times, institutional agents enact the roles in these three groups without interacting with students at all. An example is the role of program developer, in which the agent develops programs that will embed students—some of whom the individual will never meet—in a system of agents, resources, and opportunities.

These support and advocacy roles, when enacted at the systems level rather than in direct support to students, are representative of the distinguishing characteristics of an institutional agent in contrast to (or above and beyond) the roles of mentor and role model. In addition, institutional agents who act at a systems and structural level tend to articulate an explicit agenda to use resources and support structures within their areas of authority to increase the educational opportunities of racialized students and reduce inequities in educational participation and outcomes.

Methodology

This article features four male Latinx stem professors at two public universities who enacted a variety of institutional agent roles. They were selected for focused analysis and presentation in the results of this article through a multi-step sampling process—first at the institutional level and then at the individual level—designed to identify exemplary cases of practice in the support of racialized students in stem at H.S.I's.

Purposeful Sampling of Institutions

Institutional sampling involved three steps. First, institutions that were graduating greater numbers of Latinx students with stem bachelor's degree than would be expected based on their enrollment size and proportion of Latinx students (deemed in subsequent steps as “overperformers”) were identified through ordinary least squares regression analysis of the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data (academic year 2005 to 06). The IPEDS data analysis was limited to public institutions (n=260) in six states with large Hispanic populations (Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, New York, and Texas).

Second, ten institutions were selected from among the “overperformers” sample for further review as potential exemplars of practice through an institutional web-based scan and document analysis. A protocol guided a structured review in search of programs, practices, and institutional policies that evidenced relatively high levels of institutional support for Latinx students, for example through special programs, targeted scholarships, and undergraduate research initiatives. At this step, only institutions with the federal designation of Hispanic Serving Institutions (H.S.I's) were included in order to enhance our chances of identifying the enacted behaviors of institutional agent roles performed with respect to a Latinx student body.

Finally, we selected two four-year institutions from the subsample of ten potential exemplars—State University and Flagship University (pseudonyms assigned to protect confidentiality and anonymity)—for inclusion in this case study, with Flagship being a larger institution enrolling approximately 30,000 students, and State a much smaller one, with approximately 7,000 enrolled at the time of the site visit. Both institutions had Latinx enrollments in the range of 35 to 40% of the student body.

$ ^{3} $The data in this article draws on a larger case study of two-year public colleges and four-year universities who were identified as institutional pairs with relationships designed to facilitate student transfer to STEM bachelor's degrees.

$ ^{4} $Variation in the proportion of Latinx receiving undergraduate degrees in STEM fields at four-year U.S. institutions was regressed on IPEDS variables indicating total undergraduate and the percentage of Hispanic enrollment, the total number of undergraduate STEM majors, institutional selectivity and institutional control. Cases with standardized residual scores above a cut point established at +1.5 were then examined as potential “overperformers,” producing more than their expected share of Latinx STEM baccalaureates. See Dowd, Malcom, & Bensimon, 2009, for the full regression model).

$ ^{5} $All institutions in the “overperformers” group enrolled a greater proportion of Hispanic students than the 25% enrollment required for HSI designation. The proportion of Hispanic enrollment at the twenty-five “overperforming” institutions in these six states ranged from 26% to 90%. The proportion of Latinx enrollment in STEM fields varied from 20% to 92%. The number of degrees awarded, as reported in the IPEDS 2005–06 data, was as few as five and as great as 613. See Dowd, Cheslock, and Melguizo (2008), for the list of institutions identified as overperformers.

$ ^{6} $Private universities and liberal arts colleges were excluded due to our interest in transfer from community colleges as a critical pathway to Latinx participation in STEM and to

Purposeful Sampling of Individuals

To conduct purposeful sampling of individual cases nested within the selected institutions, prior to campus site visits we worked closely with a person at each institution acting, by appointment of the Office of the President, as site liaison. Pre-site-visit phone calls with the liaison requested information about individuals in positions (e.g., faculty member, advising center director, recruiter) that provide opportunities to enact institutional agent roles. Liaisons were asked a series of questions that invited them to conduct a broad mental scan of key offices and influential individuals on their campus, such as “Who is most likely to look out for the interests of Latina/o students? Who is knowledgeable about their characteristics and how to support them?" On both campuses, the faculty members featured in the results sections were identified prior to the site visit by the liaison and during interviews with others during the site visit. The triangulation of these responses strengthened our sense that the four featured individuals in our results were central actors in the two university's efforts to increase Latinx student access to stem bachelor's degrees.

bachelor's degree completion (See Dowd et al., 2009; Pak, Bensimon, Malcom, Marquez, & Park, 2006). While private universities and liberal arts colleges do enroll transfer students, the majority of community college transfers enroll in public universities. Students of low socioeconomic status are even less likely than more affluent peers to transfer to private universities or liberal arts colleges (Dowd, Cheslock, & Melguizo, 2008; Dowd & Melguizo, 2008).

$ ^{7} $The most prevalent programs uncovered through the web scan provided undergraduate research opportunities, scholarships and academic support, and for racialized students and information or mentoring to increase applications to graduate school. A few institutions had transfer programs and relationships with community college feeder institutions. These include prominent federal programs such as TRIO, the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP), Student Preparation for Academic Research Careers (SPARC) and Minority Access to Research Careers Undergraduate Training in Academic Research (MARC*USTAR). State-funded programs were less prevalent.

Campus Site Visits

A team of two senior researchers and four research assistants spent a day at each of the purposefully sampled “exemplar” universities to conduct interviews, observe teaching, learning, and advising centers as well as public campus spaces, and collect documents such as advising brochures and flyers announcing scholarship and undergraduate research opportunities. ^{8} The research team members varied in age, visible racial and ethnic characteristics, and multi-or bi-lingual capacity, enabling us to gain a sense of campus climate and cultural practices in different settings from structured and unstructured interactions with diverse respondents on campus.

Stanton-Salazar's (1997, 2001, 2011) conceptual framework on institutional agents framed our expectations of the ways that faculty, staff, and administrators recruited Latinx students to stem, provided them with the knowledge and navigational skills to function successfully in college, created social networks to support their educational progress, and advocated for admissions and other policies that would be inclusive of Latinx. The research instruments for the site visits, which included separate interview protocols for students, faculty, staff, and administrators at two-and four-year institutions, were developed based on previous studies we had conducted using the institutional agents conceptual framework.

We interviewed stem faculty members, administrators, and student and academic affairs personnel at the four-year institution and its community college partner. A total of 41 interviews were conducted during the site visits to State and Flagship Universities, including 19 interviews with stem faculty members, all of whom were males. The only female faculty member identified as a potential institutional agent was in the psychology department at State University. Six of the faculty interviewed were at State University and 13 were at Flagship University. Interviews of approximately one hour were conducted by research team members in the offices of the faculty, staff, and administrators. After administration of informed consent, each interview was conducted by a primary interviewer while the second ary interviewer audio-recorded and heavily annotated the questions asked and the responses. We sought to learn from the informants about practices, structures, and policies that create pathways into stem and toward stem degree completion for Latinx students. The semi-structured nature of the interview guides allowed expected and unexpected descriptions of practices, structures, and policies to emerge.

Through data analysis steps described in the next section, four professors, three from Flagship University and one from State University, were selected for inclusion in the narrative results presented in this article. As implied by the pseudonyms, one of these institutions was a flagship university and one was not. The departments represented by these four cases included biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and mathematics.

$ ^{8} $A second day was spent during each of these visits at a local community college that annually sent large numbers of transfer students to the nearby university.

Data Analysis

Initial data analysis involved each researcher writing analytical reports from field notes immediately following interviews. Through narrative description and use of details from the field notes (which were later supplemented with quotations from the transcripts), we created a case profile of each respondent. These initial profiles began the work of categorizing the institutional agent roles the respondent appeared to play. Then through cross-case discussion and comparison of the case profile reports in research team meetings, we identified those faculty who demonstrated beliefs and behaviors associated with one or more institutional agent role types.

The interview transcripts of these cases (n=10) were then analyzed using method of domain analysis to interpret how these individuals enacted the roles of an institutional agent on behalf of Latinx stem students. The initial open-coding process produced examples from the transcripts of specific actions that the professors took to support Latinx stem students. Quotations expressing the attitudes and beliefs that motivated their effort to provide increased support for Latinx students were also identified and coded.

Although the concept of “institutional agent” is a concept that was adopted from the sociological literature to guide our investigation, Spradley's ethnographic methodology permitted us to see beyond the expected categorizations of role types. Much of the cultural behavior, knowledge, and forms of consciousness of any community are tacit, taken for granted, and outside people's awareness. Thus, folk terms do not exist to describe many behaviors that are nonetheless culturally significant. To deductively and inductively interpret cultural significance, Spradley's (1979) method of domain analysis organizes the elements of cultural practice and activity into cultural domains using “semantic relationships.” As shown in Table 1, cultural domains are categories that hold meaning derived from patterned expressions of relationship related to a cultural practice of interest.

Table 1: Columns: Relationship/Form, Domain. Row 1. Relationship/Form: Strict inclusion (X is a kind of Y). Domain: Kinds of Institutional Agent Roles Kinds of Institutional Support and Resources provided by Institutional Agents Kinds of Knowledge Funds Kinds of (social psychological) Obstacles that Prevent Students from Connecting with Faculty as Institutional Agents. Row 2. Relationship/Form: Attribution (X is an attribute of Y). Domain: Motivational (Ideological) Attributes of IA Initiatory Dynamics Underlying Relations Between Students & Faculty Characteristics of Organizational Competence Attributes of an Institutional Agent Attributes of an Administrator/Faculty who does not Manifest Full Potential as an Institutional Agent Attributes of a Resource Agent. Row 3. Relationship/Form: Means-end (X is a way to do Y). Domain: Ways of Promoting Student's Career Ways of Recruiting Students Ways of Manifesting the Role of Institutional Broker Ways of Manifesting the Role of Resource Agent Ways of Building Trust in Developing Faculty-Students Relationships Ways of Attracting Students to the Profession Ways of Retaining Faculty. Row 4. Relationship/Form: Location (X is a place for doing Y). Domain: Key Contexts or Settings Where Relations between Students and Faculty Develop Key Contexts or Settings that Enable Students to Optimally Learn STEM Subject Matter. Row 5. Relationship/Form: Cause and Effect (X is a cause of Y). Domain: Initiatory Dynamics Underlying Relations Between Students & Faculty.

For example, coding using the semantic relationship of “strict inclusion” (X is a kind of Y) enabled us to identify the distinctive kinds of institutional agent roles emerging in our data and the specialized kinds of cultural knowledge institutional agents draw on to provide support to Latinx students. Further coding and interpretation ensued using the semantic relationships such as “attribution” (X is an attribute of Y), “means-end” (X is a way to do Y), “location” (X is a place for doing Y), and “cause and effect” (X is a cause of Y). (Table 1 provides examples of domain coding).

Four professors—given the pseudonyms Manual Diaz, Luis Martinez, David Ramirez, and Juan Tovar—emerged through this analysis as rich cases that we have elected to feature. These four each enacted multiple institutional agent role types. Collectively, they demonstrated actions and roles illustrative of the range of behaviors of an institutional agent. The attributions and means-end characterizations of these four cases were more strongly characterized than others through their expressions of critical consciousness.

Further analysis involving researcher triangulation and the writing and revising of narrative descriptions was conducted on the data collected from these four informants. The purpose was to better understand and portray the specific ways that faculty carry out the role of institutional agent when acting from a critical consciousness, and the ways in which they are hampered by others or inhibited from doing so.

$ ^{9} $Spradley identifies nine semantic relationships useful in classifying and analyzing the cultural system of a particular cultural community (1979). The five relationships identified in Table 1 were most utilized in our coding.

Limitations

This study was designed to identify institutional agents who supported Latinx student success in stem and to study how they enacted their roles. The purpose was to enable the work that institutional agents do to become recognizable to others, including those who might seek to emulate their behaviors or foster it among colleagues. The sequential process of purposeful sampling described above lends credence to our interpretation that the four faculty members featured in this article stood out among other stem faculty due to the ways they acquired and utilized resources, advocated for programmatic changes, and recruited, advised, and guided Latinx students.

At the same time, this sampling process produced limitations that constrain our interpretations of our findings. Three of the four cases featured were at the same institution and one was associate dean, a position from which he may have been instrumental in creating a supportive environment for institutional agency by his colleagues. Although respondents did cross-reference each other's work during interviews, we did not focus on the potential role of factors such as collaboration, political organization, or collective motivation in sustaining an individual's willingness to act as a change agent.

In addition, our initial interviews with campus liaisons, in which we asked them to identify knowledgeable and influential individuals, may have unintentionally evoked a mental image of a heroic change agent whose efforts were highly individualized (and stereotypically male), thus diminishing opportunities to learn about the ways that male faculty members may have been substantially aided in their work by female colleagues or administrative staff members. A potential limitation of this study, therefore, is that the four featured cases are all male. While female faculty can also play a role as institutional agents in stem, the featured cases also reflect the underrepresentation of females among faculty in fields such as chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Latina faculty are underrepresented in most academic roles in U.S. institutions and severely so in stem.

Results

Although we illustrate and delineate various institutional agent roles in this section, it is important to note that the various roles are neither enacted separately nor does an institutional agent view such agency as a role distinct from their professional identity as a professor and scientist. The role-set of institutional agent is interwoven with the institutional agent's personal identity and core professional duties.

The Latinx faculty members in this study who enacted the roles of institutional agents included three at Flagship University—Luis Martinez, Manuel Diaz, and David Ramirez, professors of biology, biochemistry, and mathematics, respectively—and one at State University, Juan Tovar, a professor of chemistry. All but one of these individuals (Manuel Diaz) also played an administrative role as a department chair or assistant dean. Each of these men drew on their identity as a professor and as a Latino, an identity they expressed variously as Chicano or Mexican American or, without taking on any particular identity label, as a son of Puerto Rican parents.

Four Latinx stem Faculty Who Enacted Institutional Agent Roles

As Assistant Dean of Special Programs, Professor Luis Martinez, a Chicano biology professor at Flagship University, was very active in creating programs and leading initiatives to support students from diverse backgrounds. Although he earned his Ph.D. at an elite, private university, Professor Martinez's educational trajectory to academia was bumpy:

I was not one of those who sailed through college smoothly. I abandoned the idea of a biology major after one year of studies and was pursuing an anthropology degree instead. After attending a private selective university for two years I dropped out.

What started off as an expectation to only leave college for a year, quickly became six. A lot happened during this period. I married, worked every day at a factory, and was active in social justice issues like rights for undocumented students, unionization, and educational opportunity.

I do not feel that my time away from school was wasted. These experiences are part of who I am. And besides, I believe that had I finished in a regular fashion, I would never have returned to complete a degree in biology. I don't think it's likely that I'd be as happy at some other career as I am as a biology professor.

Professor Martinez's circuitous route to academic and social justice activism informed the way he interacted with Latinx students. As Martinez explained, his one-on-one interactions were shaped by a broader social consciousness:

As a professor, I encourage my students to pursue anything they are passionate about. This is a message underrepresented students tend to not receive as often as they should and one that I hope to communicate through my work as Dean of Special Programs. In my students, I see the possibility of changing the world and increasing the diversity among faculty, specifically in field of biology.

Similarly Dr. Martinez' colleague, mathematics professor David Ramirez, who was born to Puerto Rican parents, played an administrative role as chair of the mathematics department. Having been at Flagship for over fifteen years, his experience as a professor there ran the gamut from teaching undergraduates, providing administrative services for the department, and running several stem-focused programs designed to help Latinx students excel. Their colleague Manuel Diaz, a Mexican American biochemistry professor who had been at Flagship for almost twenty years, did not play a formal administrative role, yet he too directed a variety of programs to support Latinx students in stem majors and viewed himself as a "role model."

Professor Tovar, the chemistry professor at State University, was department chair and also had a long-term tenure at his university, having been on the faculty at State for about twenty years. He was born in Mexico and, like many of his students, started his education at a community college before transferring to a selective public research university and then enrolling in a Ph.D. program. He described his experience as a transfer student at a major research university as “horrendous,” “alienating,” an “unpleasant experience,” “feeling like a fish out of water,” and “always afraid of flunking out.” These negative experiences made him into a self-described “softie,” always welcoming students to share their personal stories and connecting to students in a more “familiar” way, for example, asking about their family background, where they are from in Mexico, and sharing about his own family. “Students come and talk to me like an uncle…they feel a connection.”

Broadening Latinx Participation through Recruitment and Admissions

In the institutional agent role of recruiter, Professor Martinez actively recruits students to the university and into specific stem programs, departments, and professions. The recruiter role goes beyond reaching out to students with all the evident academic qualifications. It involves assessing student talent and acknowledging preparation for serious study in stem fields, even if a student's trajectory has not been “predictable, linear, or smooth,” as Professor Martinez himself experienced. Possibly as a result of his own educational trajectory, Professor Martinez has a knack for noticing students who “normally are passed up.” The case of Alexis, as Professor Martinez related it, illustrates this point:

Alexis took my Biology I and I.I and struggled here and there, but did a very credible job. And she's the kind of student that I think that normally are passed up. I think most of the coursework she did average or above average. And some students, I think, that do average or above average in coursework have excellent potential. But often what happens is they don't understand how hard they have to work in order to be competitive at the university level.... And so this young lady, I think, struggled very hard and did a very credible job on the—her last exam was a standardized exam and she did very well on it.

Professor Martinez exhibits the characteristics of an institutional agent by taking action on behalf of students like Alexis, who do not meet an idealized image of the academically successful stem student. For example, he recruited a student named Julia who “at first reading” might have been viewed as ineligible for admissions into the Ph.D. program, where she proved herself to be well qualified:

I went to a southern university to meet folks, which I've been trying to do, and to establish connections that would lead to pipelines of students into Flagship University. And one of the connections I have recommended Julia to come here, and so she's here conducting her studies. Mostly what she's been involved with is not research, but finishing her coursework that's required for a Ph.D. So typically for biology, the coursework is a year and a half of courses, and then they focus on the research component, and so she's in the early part of her program. And she's now going to a very prestigious and big conference in Germany with a bunch of Nobel Prize winners and other folks. And actually, at first, on first reading, she wasn't eligible, but we put in an application for her, and she got in.

The institutional agent role of recruiter is exemplified through Professor Martinez' account of his identification of what might otherwise have remained the hidden talents of Alexis and Julia, talent that may have gone unnoticed by someone who was not aware of the specific actions that need to be taken to make the espousal of diversity in stem actionable. By going beyond the impressions of a "first reading" of Alexis' and Julia's credentials, Professor Martinez kept these two successful Latinas from being passed over as eligible candidates for admission, as they might have been if he had relied solely on traditional measures of merit. Professor Martinez' personal experience enabled him to identify talent where others might overlook it. Moreover, he continued to cultivate that talent, as indicated by his effort to "put in an application" for Julia to participate in an international conference, even though she lacked some of the requirements. Professor Martinez' language, particularly when he uses the term "we," underscores his willingness to create opportunities for students.

Professor Martinez's role as recruiter extends to community college students, another group who might be overlooked as potential research assistants due to their non-traditional trajectory and the relatively small proportion of transfer students who ever manage to earn stem bachelor's degrees (Dowd, Malcom, & Macias, 2010). Due to his efforts, a number of transfer students can be found in Martinez's lab. "From my point of view, if you want to get students into the profession, put 'em in a research laboratory," he said. "That's where the interesting stuff happens to capture students. So that's one of the things that we've done." In stem fields, the research lab is an all-important place for highly productive relationships to emerge—whether between scientists, or between professor and students. In Martinez's own words, "I train students in my laboratory. … I think the students that I have the most impact with are the ones that are in my laboratory."

Like Professor Martinez, Professor Manuel Diaz similarly enacts the institutional agent role of a recruiter of Latinx into graduate study and undergraduate stem majors. On graduate admissions committees, he counteracts the “antagonistic” views of his colleagues towards the recruitment of Latinx, explaining that “because they see other students, international students, that have higher grades” they discount the potential of Latinx applicants, without giving them the consideration he felt they deserved. Given the greater proportion of Latinx in community colleges in comparison to the entering university student population, Professor Diaz also recruits community college transfer students into stem majors. He utilized his research laboratory as a resource to introduce Latinx undergraduates to the possibilities of graduate study, making his lab a place where students could experience a sense of belonging.

I've had several students that transferred from the community colleges and came into my lab —like Alicia Contreras is an example. She started off at some community college then she came to my lab, she graduated then she went to dental school and was doing a clinical degree but she decided just to do the Ph.D. She's graduating this semester. But that was a successful thing having her transfer from a junior college and then having her come to the lab, get mentored and then give her a step to move on to a higher degree.

In much of this work, Professor Diaz was acting independently because he feels that “there's no culture here that's sensitive to rectifying social inequalities.” Lacking strong administrative support, he uses his position as director of a stem access program to situate himself as a recruiter, personally reaching out to and connecting with high school and community college administrators to expand his recruitment networks. He developed a summer research apprenticeship program for high school students, which increased opportunities for Latinx to conduct laboratory research and experience what it is like to be a scientist, thereby increasing pre-college interest in stem fields. In describing the apprenticeship program, Professor Diaz said, “Because I was the director, I could target students from certain areas. So that was pretty successful in bringing students in here and introducing them to the university and letting them see what college life is like.” In these ways, Professor Diaz used what might have been a run-of-the-mill administrative position to empower himself and to direct resources in what he viewed as a socially just manner.

Developing Programs for Skill-Building

Professor Ramirez provides an example of an institutional agent who enacted the role of program developer in support of his Latinx students. He was well aware of the skills students needed to be successful in a research laboratory. As a result, Professor Ramirez developed a summer program to expose students to the “lab culture” and provide them with hands-on experiences.

One problem that we observe is that students, when they get into a lab, they don't really have the skills to work in the lab. So the faculty gets frustrated because they have to spend a lot of time teaching those students. What we are doing is called Summer Boot Camp. For three weeks, students are going to be taking classes ... they're going to be exposed to computer science, to biology, to chemistry and to physics....Three weeks. So it's a boot camp, and they're going to have a lab, they're going to be in the lab, and they're going to learn how to do cells, understand the cells, they'll have people from the different programs—from the different departments—working with them to better their skills.

As seen above, Professor Diaz developed the summer undergraduate research program and recruited students to participate. Professor Ramirez developed the “boot camp” and looked to attract those students who showed “intensity” to do professional science. Professors Diaz and Ramirez cultivate the success of Latinx students by noticing the signs of their academic talents and potential that might be invisible to faculty members more inclined to identify with students who demonstrate the normative profile of the future scientist. Aware that their colleagues get “frustrated” with Latinx students who are not ready-made scientists, Professors Diaz and Ramirez seek to preempt their colleagues' frustrations by taking on extra responsibilities of preparing Latinx students, especially those admitted through non-normative pathways to stem degrees, such as community college transfers.

Integrating Latinx Students into stem Academic and Professional Networks

An integrative agent incorporates Latinx students into collegial interactions, including professional associations, faculty members' own professional networks, and cadre of graduate students. Integration translates into facilitated access to a range of highly-valued institutional resources, within and beyond the student's own university.

As an integrative agent, Professor Ramirez organized informal gatherings at his house, where newer Latinx stem students could meet older ones who were experiencing early career success. He knew that for those who did not know or interact with scientists besides himself, students could be inspired and motivated by a growing sense of belonging to a community of Latinx scientists. Describing an upcoming gathering, he said: “40 of them—will come to my house, and we're going to have dinner. I'm cooking for them, and in that way, we develop—the community. I invited former students who got their Ph.D., so that they undergraduates can see it is possible to earn a bachelor's degree and go on to a Ph.D. and into different careers.” Professor Ramirez realizes that when newer students hear directly from Latinx like themselves about academic struggles that are followed by eventual career success, it can have a profound effect on students' aspirations and their expectations of fulfilling them.

Professor Martinez was also intentional in developing his professional networks to create educational opportunities for Latinx students in stem fields, even students outside his own university. He described his efforts to integrate his students to sacnas, an important professional association long known for promoting Latinx and Native American scholars and scientists:

I hope that the connection with Julia having access to me and connecting with three other students in sacnas is going to have a significant influence on them in terms of feeling welcome in the profession, but also establishing networks of folks that can help them advance their research and their careers.

Professor Juan Tovar, the Chemistry professor and Department Chair from State University, also acted as an integrative agent for Latinx students. He assisted them in reaching out to faculty for support when it was time to apply to a research-based scholarship program for minoritized students in stem majors. In order to qualify for this scholarship, students needed to make contact with a current stem faculty member at the university and ask them to be their advisor. Professor Tovar recognized that a process whose outcome was so dependent on relational networks and having the self-confidence to persuade a faculty member to accept them as an advisee could be overwhelming for Latinx students. Cognizant that help-seeking is often enacted easily by those who feel entitled to educational resources and that Latinx students may have been taught that some very essential forms of help-seeking are inappropriate, Professor Tovar intervened to facilitate necessary connections and make specific requests of colleagues.

Some students feel threatened to approach a faculty member. This is when I talk to the faculty member, “Will you please take this person for a week or two in your lab, see how it goes?”… But for example, if she was interested in chemistry, then I would talk to somebody in the chemistry department and they might say no, right? But usually they say, “We'll give her a try.”

Professor Tovar was strategic in formulating his requests with specificity—for example limiting the initial commitment to only a week or two. He recognized the tremendous value of creating opportunities for laboratory experiences for his students, where they could engage in hands-on research with their peers and interact directly with faculty besides himself.

The work of integrative agent occurs not only in interaction with students, but with colleagues as well. As an integrative agent, Professor Tovar created opportunities for his colleagues to interact with Latinx students and observe their potential: “It's a way for the faculty to get to know the students.” Professor Tovar understood that his colleagues might be blind to the potential of Latinx students unless they had a chance to counter implicit bias and stereotypes through their own direct experiences. He savvily created a process that facilitated the integration of Latinx students into stem research, which also enabled his colleagues to get to know the students as scientists.

In that it redirects the use of resources such as faculty time and laboratory space, the work of integrative agent can provoke resistance. Professor Tovar often faced challenges from within his own institution, particularly when he directed financial resources towards the creation of research laboratory opportunities for Latinx students. Professor Tovar explained,

Now, talking again as a chair, some people think that this is a waste of resources and their best rationale is “Nobody else does it. Why do you do it? So talking about best practices, this research laboratory placement is very good. This is very good for the students. The students get to know the professor.

Professor Tovar was also advocating for increased hiring of Latinx faculty, but had not yet been successful. After suggesting to one of his colleagues that being “Latino” should be considered as a qualification or attribute worthy of consideration given the student population the university served, his colleague stopped talking to him. Similarly, Professor Ramirez felt that the positive supports put in place through access and skill-building programs could only go so far. He views changes in faculty hiring as essential to transform stem into a more responsive and inclusive field. With considerable frustration, he observed,

There are things that we can do to recruit minority faculty that we Flagship University don't do. For example, I think we ought to be connecting nationally with candidates who have the accomplishments that we'd like to see in a very systematic and deliberate way. So I've been pushing for us to have a big presence at this next sacnas meeting, but I think there are other things we could do as well. I think that the departments could leverage the collegial networks of all of their faculty, network contacts at different universities in the region who could identify very promising minority graduate students, and we could keep track of them and make a long-term faculty recruitment plan.

The conscientizacao institutional agents bring to their decisions are not necessarily shared by their colleagues who are not familiar with inequities in the educational system and who feel the system of talent identification, assessment, and selection is meritocratic.

$ ^{10} $SACNAS is a society of scientists dedicated to fostering the success of Hispanic/Chicano and Native American scientists—from college students to professionals—in attaining advanced degrees, careers, and positions of leadership.

Brokering Support for Latinx Students within the University and

Across Systems

Institutional agents not only work directly with students and colleagues in their own departments, they function as institutional brokers, negotiating agreements between organizational units and institutions for the purpose of engineering the systematic recruitment and academic success of Latinx students in stem fields. For example, Professor Ramirez supported the development and implementation of a collaborative agreement between the university and the local community college to facilitate the transfer of community college students to the four-year university.

When they go to the junior college and they say, “I want to do two years here, and I'm going to transfer to Flagship University.” It's called Two-Plus-Two. There is an articulation agreement with the junior college that the courses that they take there, all of them are going to transfer here. That helps students to look at Flagship University as a place that they can transfer. So what we do is we try to facilitate seamless transfer. There shouldn't be any issues of course and credit acceptance when the students come here.

While many four-year universities have established general education articulation agreements with their local community colleges, students often face obstacles in transferring into majors that have additional requirements and prerequisites, as many stem majors do. Professor Ramirez utilized his authority and position as Chair to establish articulation agreements that went beyond alignment of general education courses, making it possible for students from the neighboring Hispanic Serving community college to transfer directly into majors offered in Flagship's Science Department.

Similarly, Professor Tovar also negotiated partnerships between institutions as a means to increase the number of Latinx enrolling in stem majors. Professor Tovar enacted the role of an institutional broker by coordinating transfer articulation with the neighboring community college and facilitating direct transfer into stem without the loss of credits. Relatedly, Professor Tovar convened 23 physics, geology, chemistry faculty members from State University and the local community college for working luncheon meetings. He asked the participants to break into groups to create curricular road maps. and negotiate the acceptance of community college courses that previously had not been accepted by State University. Prior to Tovar's efforts (which were encouraged and supported by the dean), the community college stem faculty had a negative view of State University. Professor Tovar felt that his success as an institutional broker had to do with being “able to get along with everyone” and “to get faculty to do things,” which reflected his cultivation of relationships as a resource to enact his institutional agent roles.

Discussion

Empowerment agents, according to Stanton-Salazar (2011), work from a political stance of anti-stratification motivated by their interest in providing high-status resources to low-income and minoritized youth. Relatedly, scholars of institutional entrepreneurship posit that the willingness of an organizationally embedded actor to engage in divergent change within that organization depends on an individual's interest, social position, and access to resources.

The social position of the four Latinx faculty members featured in this study—all had tenure and all were full professors—gave them power to circumvent and subvert routine organizational logics and routines, such as recruitment, admissions, and advising, that stratify access to higher education and have led to the chronic underrepresentation of Latinx in stem. Their positions gave them access to a variety of resources and their personal experiences of racialization motivated them to put those resources to use on behalf of Latinx students. Our findings highlight three main forms of resource utilization among institutional agents who seek to empower racially minoritized students. They show, first, that these professors, whose trajectory from students to faculty members took place in predominantly white environments, drew on the resource of personal experience of struggle. Their personal experiences enabled them to envision Latinx students on an academic pathway, like their own, to a successful career as a scientist.

Second, these professors effectively utilized network resources with Latinx scientists and others to expand their students' access to social capital. In the competitive stem context, it is often assumed by faculty and administrators that students will be self-directed, contact faculty for support, and seek out special opportunities, such as the chance to do research in a professor's laboratory. These professors understood that many Latinx students, especially those who are first-generation college students, do not know the process or the protocol to request individualized opportunities from faculty. Therefore, to mitigate the risk that their Latinx advisees might miss out on vital experiences that could dramatically increase their likelihood of persisting in stem majors, they engaged in network-integration activities to connect their students with scientists in other universities.

Third, the faculty featured in this study utilized the resource of first-hand knowledge of their faculty colleagues who were not Latinx. Through program development and institutional brokering activities, they used this knowledge to provide Latinx students with opportunities for academic skill-building. In this way, they sought to reduce the bias exhibited when their colleagues' stereotypes of Latinx were brought to the fore, whether through frustration or discomfort with departures from established departmental practices.

Studies such as this one that investigate the motivation, roles, and behaviors of university stem faculty who work with minoritized students, Latinx in particular, are important because faculty have the power to promote or constrain the opportunities available for students. Faculty, it has been pointed out “play a key role in the identification and training of the next generation of scientific talent”. If Latinx are to reach proportional representation in the “next generation of scientific talent” the role of faculty members is essential. Faculty members create opportunities for students when they notice students' talent for scientific work. However, “talent” is often measured in terms of S.A.T scores, Advanced Placement course and exam completion, extracurricular research, and stem hobbies. This is problematic because these means of demonstrating science interest and talent are not equally available to Latinx students, who often attend secondary schools with few stem resources.

The four professors in two Hispanic Serving Institutions selected as potential exemplars of effective practice for Latinx described their practices in terms consistent with the behaviors and commitments of an institutional agent. They noticed the talents and struggles of Latinx students because they identified with them. Even though all four were Latinx, we do not believe that Latinx have a unique predisposition to be institutional agents.

Nor do we believe that faculty members of other racial or ethnic backgrounds (e.g., white, Asian, African American) cannot take on the role of institutional agents for Latinx or other underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. As we have demonstrated in this paper, being an institutional agent entails having access to resources and networks as well as the cultural and political know-how to intentionally mobilize those resources on behalf of racial and ethnic groups who have the greatest needs. All faculty members, albeit to varying degrees, have the power to create opportunities for their students, but not all professors are conscious of how they use their power or who benefits from the opportunities they create.

While it is not essential for institutional agents to be of the same race or ethnicity as their students, having a shared culture, language, and life experience can assist faculty in seeing themselves in their students and knowing how to assist them. For many institutional agents in higher education, the ideological motivation to provide supports and resources to their underserved students originates from similar personal experiences of hardships or discrimination in education. In many ways, institutional agents of color are personally and professionally invested in helping Latinx and other minoritized students succeed in college. Therefore, it is necessary to build a critical mass of institutional agents in stem fields.

Like mentors, institutional agents generally support the academic, psychosocial, or vocational needs of students and help to socialize or acculturate them to existing stem cultures and norms. However, they also work at the systemic and policy levels to change institutional practices to become more responsive to racial and ethnic groups whose academic and social circumstances have limited their opportunities. The faculty respondents were willing to invest their time and professional status in the effort of countering Latinx students' underpreparation (an instructional role that other faculty viewed as frustrating). Their efforts reflect what called conscientizacao—an awareness of and ideological motivation to counter structural racism and inequities in the distribution of education. They were willing to question prevailing norms and judge educational quality against the criterion of social and educational equity among racial/ethnic groups.

Recommendations for Faculty to Enact Institutional Agent Roles

Professors Diaz, Martinez, Ramirez, and Tovar were able to imagine Latinx students as future scientists because they saw their own past selves in these students. Motivated by concern for the underrepresentation of Latinx students in stem, these four Latinx faculty members utilized a set of practices that give meaning to the sociological concept of “institutional agent.” These practices serve as examples for faculty members who wish to facilitate the success of minoritized students.

Our findings illustrate how Latinx faculty who take on administrative roles accrue the power to direct resources towards special programs that are intentionally inclusive of Latinx students. From these administrative positions, professors are also able to lobby for further resources and create initiatives to develop networks that would support the academic progress and careers of their Latinx stem students. Therefore, our first recommendation is that faculty members who wish to act as institutional agents on behalf of Latinx and other marginalized groups take on administrative roles as program directors, department chairs, and deans and create a clear agenda of transformation. This study shows that the actions of institutional agents are not accidental, they arise from a recognition that stem fields are not organized for the success of students who do not arrive with the experiences and predispositions expected of fully-formed future scientists. Aspirations for greater inclusivity and diversity in stem are voiced insistently by faculty, policymakers, leaders, and philanthropic organizations. Our findings suggest that the transformation of aspirations into concrete and measurable results requires structural reforms in the appointments, hiring, and promotion processes. Since it is unlikely that all stem departments will have the good fortune of having leaders like Ramirez, Martinez, Diaz, and Tovar, changes must be made in the criteria to assess candidates for faculty and leadership positions. Rather than leave it up to chance that a new faculty member or department chair will turn out to be an institutional agent, the characteristics of institutional agents can be incorporated into the artifacts that support hiring.

For example, as part of desirable characteristics include that interested candidates must show examples of interventions they engaged in to support Latinx students; in the interview process ask candidates to discuss how they go about selecting students to serve as research and lab assistants. The individuals featured in this study are Latinx first-generation male scientists, they are very much in the minority among stem faculty members, hence the aspiration for increasing Latinx (and other minoritized groups) in stem will be simply an aspiration if institutional agent characteristics do not become normalized as essential competence for all faculty.

Our second recommendation is that faculty who wish to act as institutional agents serve on admissions committees and be willing to take on related functions like reviewing recruitment materials, reviewing scholarship criteria and applications, and hosting students during campus visits or tours. In these capacities, faculty can encourage admissions staff and faculty colleagues to question the legitimacy of conventional admissions criteria which may be having a disproportionate negative impact on Latinx students. Faculty can press to find out if it is known, and how, whether particular admissions criteria are associated with greater student success. It may be that some criteria continue in use due to tradition rather than being associated with higher student performance in stem fields or careers. Highlighting the lack of predictive validity can motivate questioning and reform. Similarly, faculty involved in these activities can ask whether recruitment resources are equitably distributed to recruit Latinx students, including potential transfers from community colleges, to stem fields. They should assert the importance of the equitable use of recruitment resources when this is not the case.

We recommend that faculty actively seek out other institutional agents in a variety of educational settings, both internal and external to their own institution, and develop a longer term vision, plan, or strategy for aligning the resources and policies of their institutions to create effective institutional supports for an educational pipeline that will be inclusive of Latinx in stem. This will involve taking a systemic, K-20 perspective. Admittedly, professors have many demands on their time that fragment their attention. Such a systemic view requires developing knowledge of educational policies and practices at one's own institution or educational unit and at a collaborator's organization. For example, to improve transfer access requires knowledge of the requirements for course placement, enrollment, successful credit accumulation, and degree completion at a community college and the receiving institution. These requirements are governed by formal institutional and state policies in public systems as well as by informal rules that are not apparent without some focused study on the part of a motivated faculty member whose “job description” does not really require such effort. Further, systemic change is painstaking and the intractability of structural reforms as well as the indifference of colleagues can be discouraging.

Given this, we recommend that faculty choose a starting point and become knowledgeable about one particular entry point, whether freshman admissions, transfer, summer special programs, honors programs, federal trio or N.S.F-funded stem programs, and set out to influence the recruitment and admissions of Latinx students over time by pressing for changes in the educational systems. The ability to effect such changes will depend on the faculty member's relationships within and outside their own unit. By being knowledgeable about the inequitable impacts of existing policies and practices, a faculty member will be better positioned to serve as a system developer and institutional broker.

Their knowledge will bring them persuasive power and credibility when they push for changes because they will be able to increase stakeholders' understanding of the institutional barriers to Latinx student achievement. They will be able to explain the parts of the current system that are broken and in need of repair, as well as offer constructive suggestions as to more equitable, feasible alternatives. Such brokering activities are essential to build partnerships capable of overcoming the structural obstacles (e.g., lack of curriculum alignment) that limit the pathways to stem for students who start out in community colleges.

Once faculty members who wish to act as system developers and institutional brokers learn "the system," their focus and reach can and should expand.

For Future Research: Does an H.S.I Identity Enable Divergent Change?

Theories of organizational change posit that “divergent change” is most likely to occur in lower-status institutions and to be carried out by individuals who have less at stake in preserving existing institutional arrangements. This theoretical perspective suggests that Hispanic Serving Institutions (H.S.I's) hold potential as sites of divergent change and that Latinx faculty such as Professors Diaz, Martinez, Ramirez, and Tovar, who do not belong to the white dominant group, would be particularly empowered within these institutions to create cultural practices that diverge from the status quo. Hispanic Serving Institutions (H.S.I's) can be characterized as lower status institutions because they are not wealthy relative to elite research universities, the majority are community colleges or open-access universities, and their students are predominantly from lower income families and the first in their families to attend college.

However, many H.S.I's do not make their identity known in mission statements, strategic plans, job announcements, and other artifacts that communicate institutional aspirations, which reflects a reluctance to highlight institutional characteristics perceived as having low status. Such institutional reluctance to embrace a Hispanic-serving mission has been critiqued as a “closeted identity,” which keeps H.S.I's from developing Latinx-focused educational strategies that could produce equitable outcomes for Latinx students.

Garcia and Ramirez have argued that institutional agents “have the social capital and power necessary” to change Hispanic “enrolling” institutions into institutions that are intentionally. While we agree that the capacity of H.S.I's to increase college-educated Latinx generally and in stem fields more specifically depends on the pervasiveness of institutional agents, the results of this study highlight organizational obstacles that need to be overcome for institutional agents to emerge and carry out such a transformative role.

The institutional agents in our study were affiliated with institutions designated as Hispanic Serving. In addition to being H.S.I's, Flagship and State Universities were identified through our sampling process as potential over-performers in graduating Latinx stem bachelor's degree holders. The four male, tenured, full professors in stem fields featured in this study were arguably among the highest status Latinx faculty to be found at H.S.I's. Theoretically, as lower status organizations H.S.I's should be more open to entrepreneurial social justice change and willing to take up an agenda that challenges academic traditions and norms that they have inherited from predominantly white institutions. Contrary to this expectation, the kinds of changes the four professors engaged in at Flagship and State Universities made them outliers.

Professors Diaz, Martinez, Ramirez, and Tovar did not receive institutional support that would distinguish their universities as Hispanic-or Latinx-serving. None of them mentioned that their efforts were encouraged, noticed, or rewarded by their institutions. We found no evidence that Flagship and State universities had an active and collective effort to forge a distinctly Latinx-serving identity, at the institutional level or within stem fields specifically. Our findings do not provide evidence that the stem departments in which these four institutional agents were housed experienced any significant transformation of values, practices, and structures that would be characteristic of divergent change from dominant norms. We speculate that the possibility for divergent and transformative change towards racial equity in Latinx participation in stem was dampened by institutional aspirations to achieve a higher institutional status. At the time of our site visits, Flagship University aimed to move up into the Carnegie Classification category “Research University Higher Research Activity,” and State University was working toward approval to offer doctoral degrees. In all likelihood, these efforts to gain greater institutional status countered and constrained the change efforts of the institutional agents who were seeking to enroll greater numbers of Latinx students in stem.

In 2015 to 16, there were 472 Hispanic Serving Institutions (including those in Puerto Rico). Of those, 323 institutions were classified as emerging H.S.I's, a category that includes institutions with 15 to 24% undergraduate full-time equivalent Latinx enrollment. H.S.I's represent the fastest growing sector in higher education and because they enroll 64% of Latinx undergraduates, they hold the key to increasing college-educated Latinx. To achieve an authentic and measurable mission as Latinx graduating institutions, H.S.I's will need to divest themselves of structural and policy traditions that represent their past as predominantly white institutions. A necessary and important focus of future research is understanding the conditions that enable H.S.I's to overcome the pressures of academic conformity and reimagine accountability, quality, and productivity, and academic success for Latinx students.

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