Michael Tobin and Oakland Community College: An Overview
This article provides an overview of Michael Tobin's involvement with Oakland Community College, drawing upon available information.
Michael Tobin's Candidacy for the Oakland Community College Board of Trustees
Michael Tobin ran for election to the Oakland Community College Board of Trustees At-large in Michigan. The General election for Oakland Community College Board of Trustees At-large (2 seats) was held on November 5, 2024.
Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey
Michael Tobin did not complete Ballotpedia's 2024 Candidate Connection survey. Any candidate running for elected office, at any level, can complete Ballotpedia's Candidate Survey. Completing the survey updates the candidate's Ballotpedia profile, letting voters know who they are and what they stand for. More than 25,000 candidates have taken Ballotpedia's candidate survey since it was launched in 2015.
The Importance of Addressing Inequities
Health inequity arises from social, economic, environmental, and structural disparities that contribute to intergroup differences in health outcomes both within and between societies. It is important to understand the underlying causes and conditions of health inequities to inform equally complex and effective interventions to promote health equity.
Health inequities are systematic differences in the opportunities groups have to achieve optimal health, leading to unfair and avoidable differences in health outcomes. Structural inequities are the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic drivers-such as, racism, sexism, classism, able-ism, xenophobia, and homophobia-that make those identities salient to the fair distribution of health opportunities and outcomes. The social, environmental, economic, and cultural determinants of health are the terrain on which structural inequities produce health inequities.
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The effect of interpersonal, institutional, and systemic biases in policies and practices (structural inequities) is the “sorting” of people into resource-rich or resource-poor neighborhoods and K-12 schools (education itself being a key determinant of health) largely on the basis of race and socioeconomic status. Because the quality of neighborhoods and schools significantly shapes the life trajectory and the health of the adults and children, race- and class-differentiated access to clean, safe, resource-rich neighborhoods and schools is an important factor in producing health inequity.
For many people, the challenges that structural inequities pose limit the scope of opportunities they have for reaching their full health potential. The health of communities is dependent on the determinants of health.
Structural inequities encompass policy, law, governance, and culture and refer to race, ethnicity, gender or gender identity, class, sexual orientation, and other domains. These inequities produce systematic disadvantages, which lead to inequitable experiences of the social determinants of health and ultimately shape health outcomes.
Historical Perspective and Contemporary Perceptions
Whether with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, class, or other markers of human difference, the prevailing American narrative often draws a sharp line between the United States' “past” and its “present,” with the 1960s and 1970s marking a crucial before-and-after moment in that narrative. history was shaped by the impacts of past slavery, Indian removal, lack of rights for women, Jim Crow segregation, periods of nativist restrictions on immigration and waves of mass deportation of Hispanic immigrants, eugenics, the internment of Japanese Americans, the Chinese exclusion policies, the criminalization of “homosexual acts,” and more. White women and people of color were effectively barred from many occupations and could not vote, serve on juries, or run for office. People with disabilities suffered widespread discrimination, institutionalization, and social exclusion.
Civil rights, women's liberation, gay rights, and disability rights movements and their aftermaths may contribute to a narrative that social, political, and cultural institutions have made progress toward equity, diversity, or inclusion. Highlights of progress include the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and, most recently, the Supreme Court case that legalized marriage equality in the United States. With a few notable exceptions-undocumented immigrants and Muslims, for example-these advances in law and policy have been mirrored by the liberalization of attitudes toward previously marginalized identity groups.
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Today, polls and surveys indicate that most Americans believe that interpersonal and societal bias on the basis of identity no longer shapes individual or group social outcomes. For example, 6 in 10 respondents to a recent national poll said they thought the country has struck a “reasonable balance” or even gone “too far” in “accepting transgender people”. In 2015, 72 percent of respondents, including 81 percent of whites, said they believe that “blacks have as good a chance as white people in your community to get any kind of job for which they are qualified”. In another poll, a total of 72 percent agreed that “women and men have equal trouble finding good-paying jobs” (64 percent) or that men have more trouble (8 percent). However, when broken down by racial and ethnic categories, the polls tell a different narrative. A recent survey revealed that 70 percent of African Americans, compared with 36 percent of whites, believe that racial discrimination is a major reason that African Americans have a harder time getting ahead than whites. Furthermore, African Americans (66 percent) and Hispanics (64 percent) are more likely than whites (43 percent) to say that racism is a big problem. Here, perceptions among African Americans and whites have not changed substantially; however, Hispanics are much more likely to now say that racism is a big problem (46 percent in 1995 versus 64 percent).
Perceptions are confirmed by the persistence of disparities along the lines of socioeconomic position, gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, geography, and the like has been well documented. Why? For one, historical inequities continue to ramify into the present. To understand how historical patterns continue to affect life chances for certain groups, historians and economists have attempted to calculate the amount of wealth transmitted from one generation to the next. They find that the baseline inequities contribute to intergenerational transfers of disadvantage and advantage for African Americans and whites, respectively. The inequities also reproduce the conditions in which disparities develop.
Racism and its Impact
Though inequities may occur on the basis of socioeconomic status, gender, and other factors, we illustrate these points through the lens of racism, in part because disparities based on race and ethnicity remain the most persistent and difficult to address. Racial factors play an important role in structuring socioeconomic disparities; therefore, addressing socioeconomic factors without addressing racism is unlikely to remedy these inequities.
Racism is an umbrella concept that encompasses specific mechanisms that operate at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels of a socioecological framework. Because it is not possible to enumerate all of the mechanisms here, several are described below to illustrate racism mechanisms at different socioecological levels. Stereotype threat, for example, is an intrapersonal mechanism. It “refers to the risk of confirming negative stereotypes about an individual's racial, ethnic, gender, or cultural group”. Stereotype threat manifests as self-doubt that can lead the individual to perform worse than she or he might otherwise be expected to-in the context of test-taking, for example. Implicit biases-unconscious cognitive biases that shape both attitudes and behaviors-operate interpersonally (discussed in further detail below). Racial profiling often operates at the institutional level, as with the well-documented institutionalization of stop-and-frisk practices on Hispanic and African American individuals by the New York City Police Department.
Finally, systemic mechanisms, which may operate at the community level or higher (e.g., through policy), are those whose effects are interactive, rather than singular, in nature. For example, racial segregation of neighborhoods might well be due in part to personal preferences and behavior of landlords, renters, buyers, and sellers. However, historically, segregation was created by legislation, which was reinforced by the policies and practices of economic institutions and housing agencies (e.g., discriminatory banking practices and redlining), as well as enforced by the judicial system and legitimized by churches and other cultural institutions. In other words, segregation was, and remains, an interaction and cumulative “product,” one not easily located in any one actor or institution. Residential segregation remains a root cause of racial disparities in health today.
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PCAOB Scholars Program
Colleges and universities have been selected to receive a scholarship for the 2024-2025 academic year, up from 369 scholarship awards in 2023 and 250 in 2022. In addition, for the first time ever, each PCAOB Scholar will receive a $15,000 award this year, up from $10,000 previously. The Board has made it a priority to expand the PCAOB’s support for students choosing to pursue careers in accounting and investor protection, including expansion of the PCAOB Scholars program.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 provides that funds from the collection of PCAOB monetary penalties must be used to fund a merit scholarship program for students in accredited accounting degree programs. Scholarship recipients are nominated by their respective institutions, which participate in the PCAOB Scholars Program based on their accreditation and the number of students they graduate with accounting degrees each year. Since the program’s inception in 2011, the PCAOB has awarded $32.56 million in scholarships to 2,918 recipients. Thanks to an increase in the number of institutions eligible to participate in the program, as well as an expansion of efforts aimed at community college transfer students, this year’s group of 676 PCAOB Scholars is the largest in PCAOB history. The total amount awarded in 2024 is over $10 million.
The Scholars Program’s overarching goals are to (1) benefit outstanding students who are likely to become auditors and (2) make a difference to eligible students who might otherwise pursue a different career path. The PCAOB encourages participating colleges and universities to give special consideration to students from populations that have been historically underrepresented in the accounting profession. The PCAOB has also expanded its outreach to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and 12 HBCUs are represented among the 2024 Scholars.
Academic Work of Arthur Scarritt
Arthur Scarritt, along with Michael Kreiter, explored the impact of inclusive liberal policies associated with the New Democrats and the rise in white supremacist extremism during this time in their NSF funded research project titled “Inclusive Policies and Political Extremism”.
Arthur Scarritt has contributed to academic discourse through publications such as:
- “High Tuition, Low Quality Education, and Racism: the spiral eroding academic integrity,” in: Eaton, S.E.(eds) Handbook of Academic Integrity.
- “‘Boatloads of Money’ in the Great Equalizer: How Diversity Furthers Inequality in the Neoliberal University,” in Challenging the Status Quo: Diversity, Democracy and Equality in the 21 st Century, David G.Embrick, Sharon Collins, and Michelle S.
- “Better Together: Connecting with Other Disciplines Builds Students’ Own Skills and Professional Identity,” Proceedings of the 2016 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition (co-authored with Donna Llewelyn, Patricia Pyke, Sharon Paterson, Eric Landrum, Jocelyn Cullers, and Don Warner).
- “Liderazgo Evangélico y el Espíritu de Comunidad,” in P. del Pino and C. Yezer eds.
- “Indigenous Peoples, Latin America,” in Richard T. Schaefer ed.
- “Peru,” in Richard T. Schaefer ed. Republished in: Joel Quirk and Julia O’Connell Davidson (eds.) Race, Ethnicity, and Belonging: Beyond Trafficking andSlavery.
Scarritt has also lectured on Social Problems for Distance Education at Utah State University and served as a Teaching Assistant for Statistics for Sociologists III (graduate level) under Charles Halaby.
tags: #Michael #Tobin #Oakland #Community #College #biography
