Portland Magazine
October 21, 2020
HERBERT MEDINA, University of Portland’s Acting President/ Provost, has been on the Camino de Santiago de Compostella 12 times (eight on foot, three on bike, and one as a volunteer pilgrims hostel worker). The famous pilgrimage, which consists of a network of routes across Europe that ultimately meet at the tomb of Saint James in the northwest of Spain, has taken him anywhere from four to nine weeks. He has made the trek solo. He has made the trek with students. “All you have with you is your backpack,” he says. He values the simplicity, the balance of the spiritual and physical exercise, and he values the human interactions, meeting a person where they are at along the journey. One step, then the next, toward a collective destination.
At University of Portland, the destination is a revitalized curriculum, increased student retention and graduation rates, more opportunities for undergraduate research, and meaningful steps toward greater diversity and equity among students and faculty.
“I’m a first-generation immigrant and first-generation college student,” he says. He moved to Los Angeles from El Salvador with his family when he was eight years old. “Both of these aspects play a role in every day of my life. That experience of otherness has shaped my priorities, and I’m open about that.”
He is bringing his priorities to UP’s academic curriculum, one aspect of which is a new ethnic studies minor and major. “Students—and students of color in particular—are asking for context to understand their American experience. This is a priority and will continue to be a priority.”
He is also open to being challenged because he thinks it’s a way to create change.
“As dean I tried to listen to students. I encourage them to challenge us.” Using the language of mathematics, his academic discipline, he says, “Ask us why we are doing x and not doing y.”
And he has further encouragement for students. “Shoot from the hip. When you’re 18 to 20, you shouldn’t have a fully cogent argument. It’s part of the educational growth process. It’s important to ask: Why can’t we do that? Why can’t we do this? We need to meet students where they’re at. We have to. We can look back at history. A lot of young people ask for something that might have seemed ridiculous at the time, but they creatively challenged the status quo and sometimes changed an institution’s or society’s direction.”
Medina knows it’s the professors, not the deans or the provost, who are crucial to student retention. In the long term, students remember their professors, the courses taught by them, the engaging conversations with them, and the undergraduate research experiences they were able to explore with those professors. The classroom and interactions with faculty is where the magic happens. “I’m not the protagonist in that story,” he says. “It’s the faculty showing up to do the work.”
Before becoming dean of the College of Arts and Sciences here at University of Portland, he was associate dean and among the math faculty at Loyola Marymount University. Before that he was a student seeking the guidance of his own professors. In high school, he says, he “wasn’t a great math student,” but he got some encouragement and realized that he liked how mathematics could be used to describe complex phenomena and ideas.
Two examples: He received an email from the Census Bureau in 2010 that said someone was using one of his published papers to solve a problem. Medina’s paper was about using the arc tangent function to approximate a geometrical area, and approximating a geometrical area is something the Census needs to do.
And get this one: The next person to contact him about that same paper was applying his arc tangent approximation to fingerprint technology. Think about a fingerprint as a map, as a “geometrical object.” Better approximation of the angles and shapes of that fingerprint would mean greater accuracy for the technology.
Medina has written in Portland’s pages about math being the universal language of God, as he sees it. And he also expands: “Math is the language of nature, the language of God, the language of fingerprints.” His main goal as provost is to ensure that faculty are supported so that students have access to the many “languages” present at University of Portland.
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