Introduction

Though neither one of us realized it at the time, this book might have started during a conversation between Alejandra and David during her first year at Portland State University (PSU). She was an outstanding student in David’s Freshman Inquiry (FRINQ) course, and during one of our many interactions mentioned to him how much she had looked forward to connecting closely with professors at college and how disappointed she had been when, as she neared graduation, one of her high school teachers advised her that very few university professors were interested in spending time with undergraduates. Now that she was at PSU, she was sad to say that the teacher was right. No student had put this simple fact so bluntly to David before: the great majority of students want to be seen, to be known, to connect with faculty, and faculty indifference is deeply disappointing and discouraging.

About the Book

This is a book about relationships. The people we interviewed have a lot to say about connecting and not connecting with professors, students, and staff at Portland State University (PSU). The book is also a product of the authors’ relationships with the great majority of the more than 90 students that we interviewed. And the book is also a product of the relationship that the authors have forged with each other over the last five years, not just as student-professor but also as colleagues teaching a Freshman Inquiry (FRINQ) class together before we collaborated on this book.

Very different expectations between students and faculty about the nature of relationships are at the center of the clash of cultures that our book’s title points to. New Majority students–whom we define broadly to include students from low-income families, students from immigrant families, first-generation students, students of color, queer students, or students with a disability–told us time and time again that they hungered for human connection at PSU.

But academic culture, particularly at research universities such as PSU, rewards faculty who focus on scholarship ordinarily produced on one’s own, outside the classroom. PSU’s New Majority students crave faculty who see and acknowledge them, who care about them, but they encounter faculty who seldom have much training as teachers and who work in both a broad (academia) and a particular (PSU) system in which status and job security are associated with minimizing time with students, especially undergraduates. Those with the most job security in this system tend to be white males from comfortable backgrounds who were raised in highly individualistic families and cultures.

At its heart, Culture Clash is about the tragic encounter between students whose cultures, whose values and social structures, prioritize interpersonal connections and responsibilities and faculty socialized to and rewarded for seeking individual distinction.At its heart, Culture Clash is about the tragic encounter between students whose cultures, whose values and social structures, prioritize interpersonal connections and responsibilities and faculty socialized to and rewarded for seeking individual distinction. Indeed, the theme of connection, of meaningful relationships, has emerged as a crucial area for colleges to address, particularly those serving large numbers of New Majority students (Felten and Lambert).

Parallel experiences from very different positions or perspectives led the authors to this topic. In fall of 2017, David started teaching the Immigration, Migration, and Belonging (IMB) FRINQ, and for the first time, at age 60, had a classroom in which the great majority of students were from immigrant families. He soon switched from a pedagogy based largely on lecturing and content knowledge to a teaching style of listening and community, a shift which served to increase student attendance, engagement, and performance. Spending a lot of time reading students’ weekly reflections and listening to them in required one-to-one meetings soon made him realize how little he knew about New Majority students’ lives, and how their experience of college was profoundly different from what his own had been. It was also clear that most of the students were struggling to adapt to PSU, not just in figuring out puzzles such as Financial Aid, but in how to work with faculty who seemed disinterested in or unable to engage with them personally.

There was such a profound disconnect between PSU slogans such as “You Belong Here” and “Laser Focus on Student Success” and how students actually experienced PSU, and student voices of any sort, let alone New Majority voices, seemed to be under-represented or absent altogether in the places where decisions about PSU’s priorities were made, decisions that became all the more crucial as student enrollment fell and budgets shrank.

So it slowly dawned on David that it could be powerful and worthwhile to find a way to make the stories that the students were so eagerly sharing with him available to a much wider audience. His original idea was to create a conventional academic book that combined student interviews with the growing amount of research on the role of belonging in higher education, especially among New Majority students. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed peculiar and, well, wrong, for an old white man from a relatively privileged background to undertake such a project on his own.

Which is when David thought about inviting a student he had already worked very closely with into the project as a partner.

Alejandra Vazquez was a student in the FRINQ class in 2020-2021, and when David learned that she had become a peer mentor (an undergraduate who assists faculty who teach FRINQs), he lobbied as hard as he could for Alejandra to become the mentor for one of the two he taught. We both knew that the other would put our students first, and we developed a strong partnership.

Alejandra appreciated the time and care that David offered the thirty-five or so students in the classes, just as he had encouraged her during her first year at PSU, and David appreciated how devoted Alejandra was to the students, and how unafraid she was to challenge him to have more empathy or to be more firm when she thought he needed to. As a friend in settings such as La Casa Latina and mentor during her five years at PSU, she listened to hundreds of students vent–usually with less reserve and more expletives than when they shared with David–about their frustrations with professors who seemed so disinterested in them and in teaching. And she, too, wished that these voices could be heard by PSU faculty and staff.

It is perhaps fitting that we left PSU at the same time. June of 2025, Alejandra headed off to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University after winning PSU’s Presidential Award for Undergraduate service to the university and David to a somewhat premature retirement provoked by PSU’s budget crisis. This book is, for both of us, a sort of capstone of what may seem like an unlikely collaboration. At the heart of that collaboration has been a determination to listen closely to students, not simply because they deserve to be heard, but also because only through listening can we learn how to best help them to succeed.

The book is the product of our relationships with students, and that has of course shaped what sort of students appear in it. New Majority students often feel ill at ease if not unwelcome in college, and are therefore often reluctant to participate in voluntary research programs, particularly ones featuring older white professors. Many students have shared over the years with David that they were at first disappointed to learn that the professor teaching their first-year course on immigration was white.

Creating relationships in which these students felt comfortable talking or writing candidly about their lives usually required weeks or months of attentive listening on David’s part, and many of those relationships continued for many years after the class ended. Alejandra’s peer mentor sessions were smaller, and because her age and cultural identity approximated the students’ much more closely than David’s did, students trusted and confided in her much more readily. The trust that we had already established with so many students meant that he had a pool of about 400 students, nearly all of them New Majority students, who had already shared at length with David, and often Alejandra, about their lives. As discussed below, this meant that our interviewees were not a random or representative sample of New Majority students, but it also meant that that they were willing and often eager to share their memories in detail with us.

Indeed, 84 of the 94 students we interviewed had been members of one of David’s FRINQ classes, three as peer mentors. Without those students, this study would almost certainly be much, much smaller. We approached several organizations composed largely or wholly of New Majority students, and in only one case did those attempts lead to interviews. We also advertised with UNST faculty, which resulted in several visits to FRINQ courses, especially, but those trips only drew only seven interviewees. Drawing so deeply on alumni of David’s 13 FRINQ courses, 12 of which were on the subject of immigration, meant that, compared to the general population of New Majority undergraduates at PSU, our interviewees were much more likely to: be younger; have attended PSU right after high school; be from immigrant families; be people of color; and, especially, to have persisted at PSU.

Since examining how various immigrant cultures, especially, operate was such a large part of our IMB classes, the great majority of our interviewees had spent three terms reading, hearing, thinking, writing, and talking about cultural interactions operated both broadly and in their particular lives, especially their own experiences of trying to reconcile the collectivist cultures of their families and ethnic groups to the much more individualistic ethos of PSU. Indeed, the many hours spent listening to and reading so many accounts of this culture clash is what prompted David to undertake this project.

David’s seven years of teaching the IMB class meant that most of our interviewees have had a lot of experience at PSU. Only three were first-year students. The rest were more or less evenly distributed between sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduates, and several were in or graduated from graduate or law school. Only two who had not graduated from college were not attending college, and only a few had left PSU for another undergraduate college. Our study strongly over-represents New Majority students who have persisted at and been successful at PSU.

The study also of course over-represents students who had already established a trusting relationship with David and, often Alejandra. For this reason, we have shared only a small part of what students had to say about David, as of course they were likely to say positive things about a former professor who was part of the interview team. But we also believe that the trusting relationships that one or both of us had established with so many of our interviewees is what made the project possible, what enabled us to interview so many people who shared so freely about their experiences.But we also believe that the trusting relationships that one or both of us had established with so many of our interviewees is what made the project possible, what enabled us to interview so many people who shared so freely about their experiences.

The students identified many faculty who helped them to feel that they belonged at PSU, and we were able to interview eight of the twelve that more than one student identified and praised. We interviewed students from December 2024 to June 2025 and faculty and staff in May and June 2025. All but four of the interviews took place over Zoom.

The Interviews

We have taken pains to respect our interviewees’ privacy and wishes. Meeting the requirements of PSU’s Human Research Protection Program entailed developing research protocols and consent forms that its office reviewed and approved. All of the interviewees quoted or paraphrased in this book signed a consent form, and some of them chose the option to remain anonymous. These are the questions we selected from when interviewing the students:

1. Start off with a simple introduction, are you first generation, your name, pronouns, your major and how did you end up here at PSU?
2.  Did you always know you wanted to go to college?
3. Looking back to when you first started and to now, have your motives to seek a higher education changed?
4. How accessible and supportive do you find your professors and academic advisors as a New Majority student?
5. Can you share an example of a time when a faculty member or staff significantly impacted your academic experience? Either in a positive way or negative way.
6. Does the current university system work for students like you? What changes would you make?
7. How important is it for you to culturally connect with your professors?
8. How important is it for you to connect with your professor to succeed in class?
9. What challenges have you faced during your time at university, and how well do you feel the university has helped you address them?
10. As a New Majority student do you feel like you belong in a university? Why or why not?
11. Do you feel supported in your major?
12. Have you ever thought of changing your major due to the environment?
13. Do you find that your culture and experiences are valued at your university?
14. Have you found a sense of community or connection within your major or among your peers?
15. What does your ideal classroom look like and how does the professor act? Have you had this classroom before?

We shared with each interviewee a transcript of the interview quotations and summaries, and quite a few corrected or elaborated on their responses. We have also shared with each interviewee the material from the interviews that are used in this book to ensure that they are comfortable with how we have used that material, that evidence, and some made further edits, deletions, or additions to those texts.

This ebook is not a conventional academic book. Our primary goal has always been to co-create a collection of student experiences rather than a piece of original scholarship, vivid stories that are an end in and of themselves rather than grist or evidence supporting our own arguments. The great majority of the heart of the book, Chapters One to Four, consist almost entirely of student quotations and paraphrases. Whatever generalizations and suggestions we offer are, we hope, rooted in the students’ experiences and accounts.

Of course our collaboration has not been without challenges. Like so many New Majority students, Alejandra has juggled many more commitments, inside and outside of PSU, than David has. Although we were able to find a way to compensate her for most of her work on the project, she was making far less money than David, who was a full professor. There is of course a very large power gap between us. David was Alejandra’s professor for a year, her direct supervisor for two years, and has written several letters of reference or recommendations for her.

But we believe that our backgrounds have complemented each other. Alejandra has the lived experience of being a New Majority student. She wrote most of the questions that our students responded to and led the interviews, did most of the talking. David has completed many research projects over the past thirty years, including co-creating six publications with more than 100 former students, so is comfortable with the long slog of gathering evidence and stories and working with many people. But we want to emphasize that this book is very different from any of David’s six academic books. Alejandra has reminded David throughout our work together that the book is for the students, which is why David chose to collaborate with her in the first place, that her commitment to relationships, to caring deeply for others, would enrich this book in the same way that it has enriched the lives of so many of her students and mentees.

The Structure of the Book

The book has seven major chapters. Chapter 1, “‘Edge Walkers’: New Majority Students’ Arrival at University,” details the extensive and intensive family obligations that New Majority students arrive at PSU with and how they often struggle with feeling out of place (Imposter Syndrome) and with negotiating many of the mechanics of college, such as advising and financial aid.

“‘I’m on My Own’: Belonging and Not Belong at PSU” treats macro elements of how New Majority students experience PSU, including their encounters with students from more privileged backgrounds and other broad elements of classroom experiences, including the curriculum.

Chapter 3, “‘You’re Not Just a Teacher But a Home to Some of Us’: Connecting and Not Connecting with Faculty” is in some respects the heart of the book, where students share their experiences of interacting with PSU faculty. Students explain why PSU’s default of impersonal relationships between students and faculty is so discouraging, but there are also joyful exceptions.

“‘My Idea of College Is That’s Where You Make Your Connections’: Connecting and Surviving” details how New Majority students find and create community, through student and scholarship groups, but also from scratch, in particular classes and majors and otherwise.

The fifth chapter, “I Get Tired Every Day, but I Choose to Do This,” features advice and best practices from eight faculty whom students praised and insights from staff or programs popular with students. It also explores some scholarly research that helps to explain why the sort of student-centered pedagogy that our students and exemplary faculty favor is so difficult to achieve at colleges like PSU.

In Chapters 6 and 7 Alejandra and David share their very different experiences of academia, as a New Majority student hungry for connection and a white professor committed for most of his career to research and publication.

The “Summary” is the place to go if you only have a few minutes to devote to this book. Here we present the major points and key quotations from each chapter and include a list of particular steps faculty, departments, schools, and PSU as a whole could take in response to what our students have shared.