A Letter from Dr. Jake Bucher
“Servingness by Any Other Name”
In this Hispanic Heritage Month, you all have seen the headlines about federal changes to HSI funding – redefinitions, re-weights or new application mechanics that have a real impact on budgets and timelines. There are risks to currently awarded grants (e.g. Biology) and threats to future and recently submitted grants, and we will analyze the details carefully, as we always do. But before we talk mechanics, I want to be clear about meaning: servingness is not a grant deliverable, it is a way of being.
If you strip away acronyms and allocations, our calling remains the same: to build an institution where Latine and all students thrive – not by accident, but by design. Funding formulas and federal designations may deny, resize or repackage, but much like Shakespeare’s renamed rose, the fragrance of the daily practice of servingness does not change.
Our identity as a Hispanic-Serving Jesuit Catholic Institution is rooted in people, place and purpose. It begins with who is in our community and extends to how we teach, advise, hire, design policies and measure success. Servingness is not enrollment alone; it’s belonging, learning, persistence, completion and post-graduation flourishing. Servingness is refusing deficit narratives. Our students bring multilingualism, bicultural fluency, family networks, work experience and resilience, assets we honor in pedagogy and policy. This is everyone’s job: faculty, staff, student leaders, alumni, trustees and partners.
Federal designations and ratios can name us, but only practices prove us. That practice comes in many forms, including our continued effort to expand course design that integrates community-responsive content, open educational resources and high-impact practices (student research, internships, service learning). We are increasing our ability to use disaggregated, program-level dashboards to spot friction early and act quickly. We will continue efforts to scale high-touch advising, peer mentorship and employer connections. And yes, we will watch and strategize around how to resource this work, but we will not abandon the work.
Some will ask, “With the shifts in federal definition and funding, are we still an HSI?” The answer is both simple and profound: we are an HSI because we serve. These recent changes challenge the ways in which we resource serving but only embolden us in the who and how we serve. Thank you for the ways you embody this – through redesigned courses, late-evening emails to worried students, patient walkthroughs of the FAFSA, creative assessment, bilingual outreach to families and the thousand unseen acts that constitute true servingness. Federal guidelines will fluctuate; our character must not.