Cover, Author Bios, and Acknowledgements

Cover

The cover is created by Tina Lam Vuong, a senior in Graphic Design at Portland State University. Learn more about Tina’s work at: @ttzero_ on Instagram. The cover art is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Author Biographies         .

David Peterson del Mar retired from PSU in 2025. The author of six academic books, he shifted his focus to teaching in 2017 and collaborated with some 100 of his FRINQ students in several publications on New Majority students in higher education. His most recent solitary publication is: “How Giving Up Tenure Made Me a Less Distinguished and More Influential Professor.”

Alejandra Vazquez is a graduate student in the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She graduated from PSU in 2025 after receiving the Presidential Award for Undergraduate Service to the university. She was a peer mentor for Freshman Inquiry for four years and worked and volunteered extensively with La Casa Latina and other Latine organizations at PSU.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to our four readers for their feedback on the manuscript: Yves Labissiere; Emili Ortiz Villanueva; Andrea Vega-Zamora; and Julissa Villalobos. And big thanks to Julia Stone at the PSU Library and Scott Robison with PSU’s Office of Academic Innovation for their help with the publication process, as well as Leah Polhemus and Kora Rolbinson for their assistance with the research protocols. Of course none of the above bear any responsibility for the points of view contained in this publication.

We owe so much to the PSU students, present and past, as well as the faculty and staff who donated their time, their experiences, and their insights to this project. And our lives have been forever enriched by the thousands of PSU students we had the honor of knowing and working with over the years. Thank you!