Cultivating an Inclusive Campus Roadmap to Servingness: The Emergence of a Hispanic-Minority Serving Institution in the Northeastern United States

In this chapter, the authors explore the institutional conundrum that Salem State University, a medium-sized, regional, public university in the Northeastern United States, faced during its evolution into a Hispanic-Minority Serving Institution (HSI). Leveraging the concept of “servingness,” the authors detail institutional efforts from acknowledging existing barriers for transformation to intentionally centering the diversity and heterogeneity of New England’s Hispanic and Latine students and their intersectional identities. The authors illustrate how Salem State University’s community members and leaders embraced and employed a pláticas-testimonios framework to co-construct and develop an HSI-MSI roadmap to servingness to enhance educational equity and support for Hispanic-Latine students and all students. The chapter outlines key pre-roadmap-to-servingness actions and initiatives that required investing in university employees’ professional development, convening a campus-wide HSI-MSI working group, building trust, and fostering shared campus community buy-in, among other activities. By actively engaging various institutional stakeholders, including students, alumni, staff, faculty, administrators, board of trustees, as well as internal and external campus community partners, Salem State’s roadmap to servingness provides a model and implementation strategies for other two- and four-year institutions aspiring to achieve HSI-MSI status and demonstrates how critical it is for institutions to intentionally cultivate a servingness HSI organizational identity.