By Liliana Anguiano
Corina Soto embarked on her professional career 32 years ago determined to bring more people of color into leadership positions.
Now she is one of the leaders.
In November Chula Vista’s District 4 voters swept Soto into elective office for the first time after more than three decades as a professor, counselor and union activist. She said it almost feels like coming full circle.
“The majority of people of color who get their Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctorate degrees get their start in community colleges,” she said. “So I (wanted) to go work in the community college system because that’s where our gente are. Not just our gente but all people of color and low-income white people, this where they are.”
As an employee Soto was an outspoken member of the Southwestern College community who was a consistent advocate for underdogs and the underrepresented.
“I strive to be a voice that’s oriented toward equity and justice as well as transparency and accountability,” she said.
She was not afraid to speak truth to power, she said, which frequently got her in hot water with college leadership. She served as a union grievance chair, where she was trained in due process and conflict resolution.
“It’s been my commitment that people have due process rights, so when I saw a consistent pattern of the administrators violating the due process rights of campus employees and students I was not going to put up with that,” she said. “For our system of democracy to matter we must be guided by rule of law and due process.”
Soto earned a Bachelor’s degree from UC Riverside in Chicano and Administrative Studies, then a Master’s from SDSU in education and with an emphasis in multicultural counseling and social justice. Her education and her professional experiences have given her an unwavering commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, she said.
Southwestern College has slowly climbed on the EDI train, she said, and has much more work to do to become a productive institution of higher education that honors and elevates its students and community. Soto said she would like to see the college combine personal development classes with ethnic studies and history classes.
“The ethnic studies and history classes are to learn about who we are in a society and what contributions our peoples have made and what contributions others have made,” she said. “(When we understand) others we can be more respectful and we can value other people more,” she said. “That’s how we create a more inclusive society.”
Soto represents Southwestern Community College District Area 4, the largest of the five. It includes most of eastern Chula Vista, parts of San Ysidro and borderlands San Diego. It is the district in which the main campus resides. She said the new district elections made it possible for a person on a teacher’s salary to consider elective office.
“District elections made running for the board more plausible and more affordable,” she said. “I don’t think I could have been competitive in the district-wide elections we used to have. It was just too big and too hard to get your message to enough voters.”
SC is an important hub of the South Bay that does great work for the community, Soto said, but she also said the college should not rest on its laurels.
“One of the things I want to do is educate the community (about) the things that we are doing and more of the things we are capable of doing because Southwestern is capable of doing more,” she said.
Soto said the college has “secret gems” called learning communities that are very successful at elevating students, but too small to reach enough students. SC’s best known learning communities are Puente, which supports Latinos, Bayan, tailored for Filipinos, Umoja, created to help Black students and CHEL, for students who identify as LGBTQ. Although each of these support communities have demonstrated great success over the years, SC administrators have in the past dismissed them as “boutique programs” that are too expensive to expand or clone. Soto said she rejects those excuses.
“We need more learning communities because those have the highest rate of students graduating and transferring,” Soto said. “That’s our mission, verdad? If we have a program that works and we cannot offer to every student, we need to look at ways to replicate their success.”
SC’s shuttered Woman’s Resource Center needs to be reestablished, Soto said, because it was effective and there is great need.
“Women are about 57 percent of all college and university students now, but they face many of the same problems they did 20-30 years ago,” she said. “Once upon a time we had an outstanding Women’s Resource Center that helped a lot of women and their families. We seem to have plenty of money for other projects and for more administrators, but we need to reinvest in our students.”
A demographic SC ignores are gifted students and high achieving students in the community who have vast promise but lack the resources to attend tony universities right out of high school. Soto said she would like to see SC court students who have taken AP and IB classes at feeder high schools.
“We do a lot for other students, but we don’t necessarily do anything for those gifted students,” she said. “A lot of our community’s best students are underserved and do not live up to their potential. We need to capture more students (who have taken AP classes) because they have the highest likelihood of going on to get that Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctorate degrees,” she said. “Nothing succeeds like success.”
Students stay at SC for too long, Soto said. Programs designed for two years frequently take 4-6 years because students have to work or struggle with basic skills. She would like to help more students to transfer in two years by taking 15 units a semester instead of 9-12.
One of SC’s most troubling problems, Soto said, is its treatment of part-time adjunct teaching staff.
“The majority of the (adjunct) faculty, around 700 of them, have Master’s degrees and some even have Doctorates but they are lucky to make $24,000 a year at Southwestern College,” she said. “I think that’s inappropriate. Adjuncts teach most of our classes. We could not run the college without them.”
Soto said colleges should be bastions of free speech and critical thinking that encourage creativity, problem solving and the advancement of humanity.
“That’s why we’re here, right?” she said. “We should think big and have lofty, audacious dreams and visions. That’s what will make Southwestern College an even better place for our community. I am eager to do my part to help get us there.”
