Antonio Farias is one of three candidates for vice president of the office of diversity and inclusion.
COLLEGIATE TIMES: What background experience do you bring to this position?
ANTONIO FARIAS: I’ve been the chief diversity officer in the Coast Guard Academy for the last five years. Previous to that, I was an associate director for something called the McNair Scholars program, which is federally funded program that gets first generation (college attending) kids and minorities into PhD programs, primarily STEM, and before that I was an instructor in ethnic studies down in New York City, and before that I was one of these grad students, trying to find his way.
CT: Why did you decide to apply?
FARIAS: I wasn’t actively looking. I love what I do here at the Academy, and I think this is an incredible place.
In one 24-hour period I received three different people send me a suggestion that I might be interested in this. And it was sort of serendipitous, and at the same time, Virginia Tech’s always been on my radar, and I think the stuff that is going on down there is incredible, in terms of diversity. So I’d been of curious about what’s going on down there. And the Academy is a very STEM, engineering, and science focused place, and VT resonates that. A couple of things resonate, the STEM part resonates, and also the concept of service. The Academy is called on service to the whole nation and to humanity. And I love the motto, “That I may Serve,” and that just resonated with me that it might be something that I might be interested in pursuing.
CT: Describe how you would have the office interact with other campus groups and organizations?
FARIAS:Well the number one thing is listening. I believe in order to get trust and in order to get buy-in, you have to build up listening skills...
I listen to more than just what I want to hear. I have a certain rationale about diversity and what it means to me and what it means to the organization, but I’m really critical about myself in my own thinking in the sense of, “am I really getting the full picture?” So therefore, I’ll go to the people who are the nay-sayers, the people that are having concerns, the people that are raising issues, and really hear them out and get them to be part of the solution.
How I do that and how I’ve done that in the past is creating what I call cross-functional teams. Organizations like Virginia Tech or the Academy or higher education ... do some awesome things, they do them incredibly creatively, but they do it in their own sort of world. And sometimes that world can be conscious to the perimeter around your navel. So for anything as all-encompassing as diversity, which crosses all people’s lives here, and all these functions, it’s an academic issue, it’s a student, it’s a religious issue, it’s a community issue, because Blacksburg is part of this concept, believe it or not.
So it’s getting all of the team players involved, and then really cascading that down. So it’s creating a bureaucracy, but it’s a lot of getting people to say, “I’m comfortable with this,” or “I’m uncomfortable with this,” because unless people have the opportunity to voice, then they are going to feel like this is just not fair. And if this is really going to work and if this is really going to be about inventing the future of Virginia Tech and its culture, it’s going to be slow — because that’s the reality, nothing changes overnight — and we have to understand that the people who are going to do this are not necessarily going to be the leaders, it’s the people that are there for 20 or 30 years. If they are not part of the solution, if they are not given a voice, then we are not going to move forward. So a lot of it is going to depend on the creating those cross-functional teams which get information up to the top, and also on the top that push information back down to the stream.
CT: What do you feel is Tech’s biggest problem with diversity?
FARIAS: I don’t know yet. For me as an outsider, I’m doing a drive-by, and I see a really pretty window display. If you came by our organization, and you were to be introduced to us, you would see the same thing, the glossy, the beautiful. If I was really going to understand what is Tech’s biggest diversity problem, then it would take me probably the first hundred days, the first six months to really understand, to really get in and find out what’s going on.
CT: What do you think Tech’s biggest strength is in terms of diversity?
FARIAS: I would say that its biggest strength is that it looks like it has support from the very top of the organization. From what I’m reading in your strategy plans and in some of the internal dialogues is that your Board of Visitors is on board — that’s critical. Your president is on board, and he looks like he has a track record. The Principles of Community I think are huge, that that happened under his watch is critical. I think Virginia Tech has strived to really be innovative in its diversity. I think the flak that you received from some outside organizations about how diversity was going to be used in the faculty in terms of promotions — I think what happened is you went on the positive on that. Whatever happened in that dialogue, I wasn’t privy to it, but what it showed is that you were really willing to lean forward, as opposed to being very cautious and conservative about the way you moved ahead. You’re talking about increasing numbers very openly and that’s critical. Diversity is great but if at the end of the day you’re not also talking about numbers, then we’re just having a conversation that’s not going to go anywhere. I think it’s also critical that you have infrastructure.
You have this position, the chief diversity officer, that reports directly to the president — that’s absolutely vital, to have something like that. The fact that there’s already in different offices there’s an example in the student affairs, but also in academics in the provost’s office, you have different task forces on diversity, and I think that’s critical. That you have LGBT caucuses, Latino caucuses, African American caucuses, I think those are awesome. You have all the change agents on board right now. So that is definitely something I’m seeing — that you are moving very much in the right direction.
CT: How will you make diversity initiatives relevant to the students here?
FARIAS: Well first of all, I need to find out what the students need, what has been their experience. And it’s really about asking them. I went through the University of California, and that was 15 or 20 years ago. So my reality as a student is very different. I can look back and remember these were my important things. But this is generation Y. Your things are completely different than ours. So for me it’s listening. It goes back to the fact that in order to lead, you have to listen, and you have to allow yourself to be influenced by the people that are speaking to you. And then it’s about accountability. It’s to know what is going on on the ground. And I see consistency among different groups and what they need and how they haven’t been serviced, and it’s getting them to understand that I’m an advocate for them. At the end of the day, an administrator’s role is to serve the student. Everybody at Virginia Tech at the end of the day is there because of the students.
CT: What attracted you personally to a career in working with diversity? What made you interested in that?
FARIAS: Well, I didn’t start out thinking I wanted to be an administrator. I don’t think anyone really begins and says, “I want to be an administrator.” When I started I went to college at UC Berkeley and I did Comparative Literature as an undergrad. And I did Comp. Lit. because it allowed me to do Spanish literature, it allowed me to do English literature, and history, so I wasn’t pigeonholed into doing just one or the other. I found that a lot of things made sense and a lot of things didn’t make sense about my previous education.
Higher education expanded my mind, and it also made me question a lot of things about history and the way history is told to us as a nation. And I met a lot of professors who really sort of took me under their wing and helped me along, in terms of challenging me to really think things through. And they were really in the department of ethnic studies and African American studies. And from there, they really planted the seed in my mind that I might want to be a professor. And that’s where it all evolved. It wasn’t, “what is your concept of diversity?” but it was talking about the different culture in a nation. So for me personally, the question, which is never fully answered and can’t be, is “what does it mean to be Latino?” So if I go back to that one question that sparked everything, it was about identity, and belonging, and home.
What does it mean for me, as a Latino, at the beginning of the 21st century, to live in the United States and to be a citizen and to serve the nation? And now that I’m a dad, it’s even more critical, because it’s not just about me, it’s about my daughter. What does it mean for her? What’s the world that she’s going to inhabit in 10 years when she becomes a college student, and how am I preparing the way for her?
So that was the impetus and that is the drive. It’s not a job. It’s something that I feel and it’s also something that I feel an obligation to those that helped me get to where I am. For all of us that, for women, for people of color, for all of us that are outside the mainstream, we all owe a debt to the civil rights generation, because they broke a lot of barriers. And a lot of people lost their lives, and a lot of people lost careers and sacrificed a lot, in order for me to be where I am right now.
And this is my way for paying back and also paying forward.