Dr. Thomas Parham - 11th President of California State University, Dominguez Hills

Ready for a masterclass in leadership that outlives the leader? We sit with Dr. Thomas A. Parham—licensed psychologist, author, and the 11th president of California State University Dominguez Hills—to unpack how spirit, mentorship, and uncompromising standards fueled a campus-wide transformation. From a childhood across South, East, and West LA to steering a $250M “small city,” Dr. Parham shares the moments that reshaped his path and the philosophies that guided every decision.

We trace his pivot from criminology to psychology through community work and a life-altering encounter with Dr. Joseph White, father of Black psychology. Parham explains why spirituality—distinct from religiosity—is essential to leadership, how ideas shape behavior, and why reading a room’s energy can change outcomes. He shows what it takes to shift culture at scale: raising expectations, aligning incentives, celebrating staff, and holding firm to Ma’at’s virtues—truth, justice, harmony, order, balance, propriety—so institutions become cultural comfort zones where dignity is nonnegotiable.

The receipts are real. CSUDH secured long-sought accreditations, upgraded facilities, and launched a student-funded health, wellness, and recreation center—an $86M investment born from a bold ask: What are you prepared to invest in your future? Parham’s leadership turned “we can’t” into “watch us,” proving that optimism plus structure can move an entire community. He talks succession with humility—principles over personality—and offers a simple nightly test: Did I fulfill or betray the legacy I was given?

If you care about higher education, social mobility, DEI, and leading with both rigor and heart, this conversation will reset your bar for what’s possible. Subscribe, share with a friend who leads teams or dreams big, and leave a review to help more people find the show.

Transcript

Introducing Dr. Thomas A. Parham

Narrator 1 0:00

Welcome to the California Leaders Podcast, where we dive deep into the stories of the visionaries shaping the future of our region. Hosted by Christopher Luna. This podcast brings you conversations with the movers and shakers, driving innovation, leadership, and community impact across California. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a community leader, or simply someone passionate about making the difference, this podcast is your gateway to the insides and inspiration you need to lead and succeed. Get ready to get inspired by the leaders, making waves in California and beyond.

Narrator 2 0:36

This conversation with Dr. Thomas Parham was recorded prior to his retirement at the end of 2025. While some references reflect that moment in time, the leadership lessons and value shared here remain timeless. In this episode, we welcome Dr. Thomas A. Parham. Dr. Thomas A. Parham is the 11th president of California State University Dominguez Hills, a diverse metropolitan campus serving Los Angeles County. A Southern California native, he resides there with his wife, Davida. Before CSUDH, Dr. Parham spent over three decades at the University of California, Irvine, where he served as Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs and Adjunct Faculty. A licensed psychologist with over 40 years of experience, his scholarly work centers on psychological negrescence, racial identity development, African psychology, and multicultural counseling. He has authored or co-authored six books and nearly 50 scholarly articles and chapters. Dr. Parham earned his BA in social ecology from UC Irvine, MA in Counseling Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis, and PhD in Counseling Psychology from Southern Illinois University at Carpenter. Renowned as a transformative and inspirational leader, Dr. Parham is known for championing diversity, equity, inclusion, and institutional change. He is also celebrated as a mentor and advocate for the power of higher education. Please welcome Dr. Thomas A. Parham.

Christopher Luna 2:12

Welcome to California leaders. Today we have Dr. Parham. It's incredible to be here with you today. I really do appreciate your time. I can't express that enough. Just thank you for being here. I know it's not easy to get you out of uh your wheelhouse.

Dr. Thomas Parham 2:26

No, my pleasure to be here and um always want to be available to be of service to the people and to the community, in this case to the whole state.

Christopher Luna 2:34

So part of the reason why I reached out to you is because you're that type of leader. I really do see that you're a servant leader. You're always trying to help the community, and you rarely talk about yourself. Um, and that's kind of what this platform is about. I really get inspired uh when I meet people like you because there's a story behind you. And I and there is parts of it out there already. You can search it on YouTube. There's a lot of uh videos out there of you speaking about your background. But what I try to capture here is what does that journey look like? Like what was that inspiration behind you? Um, and a lot of it starts with your childhood, a lot of it starts with your upbringing, um, because we all have a different upbringing. But I would love to kind of tap into that and kind of see, you know, what made you who you are, not so much your resume.

Childhood, Roots, And Early Influences

Dr. Thomas Parham 3:26

Well, it's a it's a good place to start. And so let me uh begin by saying thank you for the invitation uh to even talk about uh my life and my story. Um, you know, it's fascinating. I go through life and people say, Dr. Parham, this and that, and I try to tell folk, I ain't nothing but a regular umbrella from around the way. Uh it's interesting that we shoot right here in uh Los Angeles, where I grew up. I'm usually an LA homeboy. So uh my mother and father split and separated when I was three years old. So born in New York, relocated to California. So we've lived in South Central. We've lived in East LA in the Badio and the Estrata Courts. Back in the South Central, we lived in parts of West LA in the Fairfax, Wilshire District. Um, so I've been all over the city in lots of places. Uh, grew up here, nurtured here. So while I'm born in New York, my bones are nurtured in California. So I'm an LA snob. So uh that part's true. But I come from a family, uh single parent, where mama raised four kids by herself, uh, worked for the federal government for 32 years, never earned more than $18,000 a year. Wow. Four kids went to college, three finished BAs, two with PhDs, nobody on drugs, nobody in jail, nobody in the gang. So you talk about inspiration and where that comes from, come out of that kind of discipline and hard work and really perseverance through adversity that is there. Um a lot of people don't know my birthday is October 2nd. So I share a birthday with the famous Nat Turner. So who led one of the first slave rebellions. So if you want to know where my warrior spirit comes from, it comes from places like that. Um but I've also had a a uh a space in my life where I have my mother's heart and always caring about family and caring about other people. But a social justice conscience that has now manifest in the ways in which I do lots of work. Like I wrote my first essay and class project on Dr. King probably in the seventh or eighth grade in grammar school. So um, you know, that's that's what's part of my background, and that's who I am really at the core of my being.

Christopher Luna 6:04

And it it's incredible to see where you come from and how that influenced your train of thought. Um, but why choose education? What why that sector? Because you can create that impact and tell your story and and and motivate in so many different ways, but why in education?

Choosing Psychology Over Criminology

Dr. Thomas Parham 6:27

You know, that's an interesting question because education is the field that I decided to kind of lend my talents and and gifts. Uh, in some cases it chose me. Um, but I started out on these streets here, deciding that I wanted to be a police officer or an attorney. Interestingly enough. I grew up in LA when the Los Angeles Police Department was not a very friendly law enforcement agency. I've been up against the wall with a racial epithet thrown at me just for walking the street while black. So I know those kind of spaces, but in my ear is always echoing my mom's voice, who says, Son, you have no business complaining about anything unless you're willing to put something better in its place. So I decided that I would move into trying to do something that would impact the criminal justice system that was my my space. Um along the way, as I was thinking about either police officer or an attorney, started college as a criminology major. But the more I learned about the discipline, the more that I believed that the criminal justice system was not about helping people. I've always been that servant leader in my spirit. It required more ability to manipulate the system than it did to really help anybody. But fortunately, while I was in college and I started out, you know, here at Cal State Long Beach, they had the largest criminology department in the Western United States. But once I got kind of turned off to criminology, I happened to participate in what young people now we call service learning. Back then there were opportunities to be able to work in the community. And I thank uh Ruby Beale, who ran the EPIC program, Educational Participation in the Community, I think is what it was called back then, at Cal State University Long Beach. In one semester, I worked in a halfway house for so-called incorrigible and runaway interviews. The next semester I interned down at the community psychology clinic in downtown Long Beach. And that's where really my passion for psychology was born. So it was a mixture of the academic that I took in intro to psych and personality theory classes and the co-curricular where I had a chance to actually apply some of the things that I had learned and put my own spin on it for my own self. Part of figuring out what you want to do in life is not just stringing out what are you interested in, but also what are you good at. So I had parents talk to me, wow, my son has really, you know, uh grown and changed since he's been impacted by you in this halfway house. Or I had supervisors in the community psych clinic that said, Wow, you got a knack for this. You need to think about this as a career. So part of that affirmation and validation for what I was doing really launched my career to say, um, I need to make some changes. So one of the changes I made is I changed university. So I went from Cal State Long Beach to University of California, Irvine. Um, and the other is I switched from looking at criminal justice to really more psychology, which is where I was born. Oh Irvine's an interesting place. When you talk about the seeds of possibility and the places that they grow. Um I stylized a piece of African wisdom in my life. It says, Life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. Let me say that again. Life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. It means sometimes your greatest strength can be your greatest weakness, sometimes your greatest weakness, your greatest strength. My greatest strength is I was bright, and I was born and blessed that way. My greatest weakness is I was bright because it made me a lazy student. So even when I was at Long Beach, I'm getting, you know, a couple A's, mostly B's, mostly C's. Even when I was in high school, same way. Like most black kids, Latino kids, who are very, you know, connected to people, I was a uh a student who, if the faculty member or the instructor cared about you, you performed real well. If the person showed almost no interest and didn't matter whether you were in their class or not, I didn't perform very well. I was a relational child. So I knew that piece coming in out of high school, and and as I began to be more in touch with who I am at the core of my being, that's what really happened. Well, while I was at Irvine, I took a class that changed my life. And it was a course in African-American psychology. It was taught by the great Joe White. Dr. Joseph White was first PhD in clinical psych out of Michigan State in 1961, as my memory. But he was the father of the whole black psychology movement. Well, he was a professor there and took his class, did well in his class, got an A, I think an A plus actually out of him, which is hard to do. And maybe two months after class had finished, I'm walking down the walkway at Irvine, and he's walking the other way, I guess about lunchtime, so he must have been coming from lunch. And I ran into him like most students would do. I said, Hey Dr. White, how you doing? Nice to see you. He simply walked up to Chris and he said something just. He put his arm around me. He called me young brother. He said, Young brother, you have too much talent and you were too brilliant to be running around here playing basketball chasing women. Come follow me. Last person I heard say, Come follow me, was walking on water in the Bible. Now he hadn't quite walked on water yet, but he was pretty close. And over the course of the next several weeks and months, he diagrammed my whole future up on a chalkboard. Now they use dry race board. He had a chalkboard right by his desk. And he's we're gonna tighten up on your grades and we're gonna do this, and then you've mastered my class already. So I'm gonna make you my teaching assistant as an undergrad. Your job is to help students master the course in the way that you did. Then we're gonna see you to grad school and you're gonna get a master's and you're gonna get a PhD. And the more he's talking, the bigger my eyes are getting. All right? Because here's somebody who's believing in me, but also he's echoing in stereo in the other ear, what my mother had placed in it before. Because I would come home and bring report cards home and other stuff. She says, son, you get grades like this and you do very little work. If you just did a little bit of work, you'd be brilliant. And of course, I'm like most kids, oh mom, where it goes in one air and out the other, but it stuck. And that's what made the big difference. So as it comes in stereo, this is a professor who is acclaimed, who's believing in me and can see things in me I can't quite see in myself. And from there, my trajectory in life, right, was just changed. And I owe so much to both he as well as subsequent mentors that I've had who have all been influential in my life in different ways. But that's where it all started that my trajectory changed.

Christopher Luna 14:26

So when you're given the opportunity to be a president of a university like yours, you're doing the same with all your students. I'm assuming I'm sure you're closer to more than others, but you're you're giving them vision, you're giving them hope, you're inspiring them to do well in life, right? But why higher education? Why not like early education? Because I mean, a lot they say the first five years of your life is kind of where you build that character, right? Comes from home. So when you get them younger, they're kind of they're easier to motivate, I would assume. So why not in early education?

Dr. Thomas Parham 15:03

So for me, I think it was uh it was just a good fit. Um truly, I think there's no greater blessing in life next to being a parent than being entrusted with the personal and intellectual growth and development of students or young people. But I found a way to traverse the landscape of education and just do it in different tiers. When Joe White sent me to grad school, he said, I'm not sending you there just to be clinically good as a psychologist. He said, I want you to be clinical good, research good, academic good, because you never know where the options will be available for you, right, in terms of job possibilities. I want you trained across all of those uh subcategories. The consultation, the administration stuff will come after that. So when I came out and I'm doing research and I'm doing my clinical work and I'm doing my academic instruction, those were places where they were more aligned with what was happening in higher education, particularly being a scholar and doing my research and writing the books and whatever. I don't have that many. I only have, I don't know, six, seven books or something, but uh I've probably most of the stuff I write is in journal articles, referee journal articles. I probably have 55, 60, 65 of those. Um but and I've done most of that on an administrative track. But high red was just a better fit. But when I've engaged with community organizations, the 100 Black Men used to design a program for college battle. Um, those are the places where we've been able to work with youth, and I've designed curriculum designed to formulate the thinking of young people. Only because I understand that ideas are the substance of behavior. If you want to know why people behave the way they do, just get up in the head and look at what they think. So our job in the community is to be able to help socialize this new generation of young people coming after us and to help them successfully navigate those pathways to productivity and success. So higher ed was a deliberate choice because it was a natural fit for the kind of things that I wanted to do. As a clinician, I love seeing adolescents and adults, harder to do it with really young kids. As a professor, I think for me, my sweet spot is teaching right in university, both undergrad and graduate students, but I spent a fair amount of time in schools being invited down into those spaces where I talk to high school kids about, you know, their things. And you talk a lot about faith and spirit.

Christopher Luna 17:38

Yeah. Um I'm born and raised Catholic. I can't say I was truly active my whole life. Um, but with my kids now, I I I rope them in, they're in a you know, a Catholic or not a Catholic school, but they're Lutheran school, and I try to tie them, tie them to religion quite a bit. Because I feel like when you have that purpose um and that moral, just kind of that guidebook, right? Where we're kind of living to be better human beings. Can you tell me a little bit about how you're teaching in in spirit? Because you you tap into that quite a bit.

The Joe White Mentorship Turning Point

Dr. Thomas Parham 18:14

So for me, spirituality differs from religiosity. Because what a lot of people talk about is religion. Some basic religion is a set of organized rituals that people engage in that both provide a recognition that there's a force and a power greater than yourself in the universe, and that our role and responsibility is to both contribute to humankind in a way that respects the dignity and humanity of other members of the human family. So, like you, I was raised Catholic. Um was an altar boy in the church, was at St. Gregory's Grammar School, where who then was Bishop Manning became Cardinal Manning, ultimately uh of Los Angeles. Um, so had an interesting experience with the church then. Uh never had to suffer abuse or any of that kind of stuff I used to hear about. But going through Catholic school in terms of the academic curriculum, I had a difficult time, which is when I kind of fell out with the church, because there was such a profound incongruence between what they preached and what they practiced. And what they practiced, particularly when it came to African-American children, I thought was just profoundly different. Um, and it happened in grade school and it happened in high school. So I thought, mm-hmm, that wasn't for me. The nice thing is that I never lost my belief in the Creator. I never lost my belief in God and that space, but I knew that my relationship had to be nurtured in a place that was more beholden to me. So I'm still considering myself a Christian. But I spend most of the time either in a Baptist church or in an AME Episcopal church because it happens to fit the cultural and the flavor for me. And I don't see as quite as much incongruence between what the Catholic Church preached and what they practiced in real life. But your question also had to do with the notion of spirituality. This belief in psychology, particularly in African psychology, that whatever is is in the first place spirit. There's a spiritual essence that permeates everything that exists on the planet. So that was even a little different from me being a psychologist because we're taught, even as we do clinical exams, we look at the intellectual, we look at the emotional, and we look at the behavioral. But what's missing, particularly in that African psychology space, was the spiritual. And in Eurocentric psychology, one of the challenges is they believe if you can't measure it, then it doesn't exist. And it's difficult to measure spirit, so they never mention it. Go back and look at all the different psych books. They're now starting to do it because of the infusion of that cultural flavor that elders before me, people like me, and others behind me, are now starting to infuse into the curriculum. But spirit is ever present, spirit is very important, and spirit is that energy and life force that gives humans their being best. So you have to be able to tap into that spirit, whether you're in the classroom teaching, whether you are in the clinic, you know, seeing patients, whether you are uh writing where I'm trying to write ways that will kind of appeal to people's sensibilities in that uh space, or if I'm out consulting or even administrating relative to policy, I'm never too far away. From that whole spiritual essence of my spirituality.

Christopher Luna 22:04

My mom was uh talking with my son the other day, and she had mentioned the force of spirit. And I don't know why I'm thinking of her right now because you're mentioning that, but she's very positive. My mom has such a grace to her. Um, and she doesn't, you know, she's gone through a lot in her lifetime, but she's always found a way to really, and and and maybe that's why she hasn't been fully active. Like my parents weren't the parents that would take us to church every Sunday. We grew up with the religion, obviously. Um, you know, we did our catechism. Well, actually, I didn't do my catechism until I got married, but you know, that we're that type of family, but she's very spiritual, like you. She'll go to Buddhist temples, she'll she'll when she goes to, you know, when she visits all these countries like Hong Kong, she'll go make sure she'll go to the Buddhist temple or whatever the the religion is, she just believes in the the higher being and the spirit behind it all. And that's kind of tapping into what you're you're telling me. But how do you not teach that, but how do you influence that in your leadership roles? Like, because it's hard to talk about that or be, I mean, maybe not for you, but I would assume in in your leadership meetings, running a campus like yours, like how do you portray that? How does that come off? How do you inspire your staff to work in that capacity?

Dr. Thomas Parham 23:31

I mean, part of it is understanding, first of all, that spirit exists. Secondly, is understanding that if it's that energy and life force, I can try to read a room and understand whether the energy is high and it's a lot of positive, whether the energy is more low and you know, people are more flowing with a half-empty glass. So some of what I try to do, even as I articulate policy and practice that I want to embrace as the leader of an institution, is taps into that kind of spiritual being. For example, if you talk to any members of my team, they'll tell you that President Parham is never interested in eight out of ten reasons why something cannot be done. He's only interested in two out of ten why it can. So we try to push in that place. I often tell folk, even in trying to transform my campus over the last um seven and a half years, that the only limit is the limit of our imagination. How are we going to push ourselves to think broadly about that and not get so, you know, stuck into the muck of the mire about what isn't working and what doesn't quite go? So part of that is tapping into the energy that allows them to see possibility instead of just settling for the way things have always been. So some of that is the way you work it in policy. Some of it I can read people is I read people. And I can tell whether somebody is feeling depressed, whether somebody's feeling anxious, whether somebody's feeling, you know, whatever. Even for folk who have minor setbacks, right? It can be, you know, this wasn't available on time, somebody had to mix up, somebody, whatever. Even just a word that you speak into somebody's ear, that then says, it's gonna be alright. You know, I learned to contextualize struggle. Whenever something goes wrong in life, lots happens to people who are of African descent. It it oftentimes will derail folk from their current trajectory. But one of the things I have in my office at the university is I have a picture of Martin and Malcolm on one end of the wall, and on the other corner are the ancestors in the slave dungeons in Elmina Cape Coast and Ghana, Africa. And those things always remind me to contextualize struggle. So whenever I think I'm having a bad day or something's not going right, or this is like terrible. Always remember that. And I'm like, if the ancestors can get through that, I can get through this a little bit of whatever. We look at the current administration. This is not the first person we've had in the White House who thinks like that. You know, there's a lot of anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-immigrant, anti-watever coming out of that administration in lots of places. But they are not the first, they will not be the last. So people have always risen to be able to rise through that persevering and keep on keeping up. You know, in church, you go on Sunday morning, they'll let you know it may be dark as Sunday night, but when the morning comes, everything's gonna be all right. So you just keep on keeping up. That's what we do.

Christopher Luna 26:49

And I love that because when you're talking about the tasks, for example, it's our response as employees where we say, okay, not so much why can't we do things, but how can we do that? And and there's always a perception of how we uh attack these issues head on. And and it comes down to positivity, though. It comes down to how you respond from that moment because when you're in a room and 80% of that room is negative, um, it's gonna come off on on those projects. So you always want to make sure you have positive people around you. You surround yourself with people like you that are inspiring because you know that's where these uh these impossible projects come to life, you know.

Why Higher Ed Became The Fit

Dr. Thomas Parham 27:35

And that's and that's very true. What I understand as a psychologist is that the way you think influences how you feel and ultimately how you respond to your reality. So if I want to change the way people respond, I just have to get up in the head and figure out what are you thinking? What are the assumptions you make about this piece that we need to either validate or interrogate and challenge? And once I can figure that out, then sometimes you got to provide a prescription for people to think a little differently than they've been thinking in order to change the behavior that they have to manifest. But how do you teach this in higher education? How do you teach this through a book? You teach it in courses, you teach it in I mean, there are whole theories of this kind of stuff that you can teach and lay out. You teach it through mentoring. One of the great opportunities I had in my life was to be mentored by Joe White, and then Horace Mitchell when I was at Washington University of St. Louis, and then Janet Helms when I was in Illinois, came back, and then administrative uh uh mentor was Michael Drake, the current uh just retired president of the University of California system, who I worked with when he was Chancellor at Irvine, uh before I became president at uh uh Domingo Sills. So some of the teaching that goes on, some of it you can do in a book as you write it, some of it you can do in a one-to-one or one-to-group patient interaction, some of it you can do in an academic classroom where you're teaching, some of it you can do in small seminars, some of it you can do in community programs where you're teaching folk to um navigate their space with a different mindset than what they had before.

Christopher Luna 29:22

But that just shows me how much of a giver you are, right? There's a lot of people who have the same belief, but they're not willing to give that information so easily, or they don't take the time to do it, right? Um maybe they'll do it with their kids, but you have such a stage. And I don't think I've I don't want to say a lot of presidents, but when I think of a university president, I'm thinking of all the administrative things you have to handle, right? We're talking about this construction projects, and there's so many dynamics that you have to do. It's it's running a business, right? Um, how many staff members, for an example, what's your faculty account?

Dr. Thomas Parham 29:59

So our faculty account, we probably have 800 faculty plus or minus. We've got uh a little more than that staff. There's probably a couple thousand people on campus. I can't imagine running an organization. It's a small city. It's a $250 million corporation. Uh you have academic affairs and curriculum, you have student affairs with students, you have uh information technology that runs the whole space, you have admin and finance that have everything from human resources to accounting to law enforcement to parking to local law. You've got facilities, groundskeepers, maintenance workers. You have um a whole division for university advancement, where we're not only advancing university but also doing the fundraising. You have a DEIJ, Diversity Equity Inclusion, and Justice Division. So you've got to navigate all those spaces. But in truth, if we're, you know, leaders are honest with themselves, a leader is only as good as the work produced by the people who work with and for them. The best thing I do, the secret to my success, is I surround myself with good people. Provide them with a little bit of strategic vision, be available for consultation when they need it, get the hell up out that wing and let them do what they do. You're trying to give them almost an intellectual or administrative permission slip. Just go be the best them they can be. I don't need them to replicate me. I need them to be the best they can be that exists within the confines of a current mission, a vision about where we're trying to go. But there are degrees of freedom in that that people can exercise.

Christopher Luna 31:36

So I love that because a lot of a lot of leaders are or CEOs are hired to maintain a PL, and that's it. And and you're a visionary, you're a true leader. That's why when I reached out to you and I hear I hear you speak in the past, I'm like, wow, like you are so inspiring. Um, and to get this time with you, again, it's incredible. So, what I'm trying to do with this platform is how do we amplify that a little bit more? Because there's only so many people you can touch within your organization. But how do we, and I guess you're doing it now through your students, right? They're they're kind of getting that taste of how you are staff, your community folk you touch space with.

Spirituality’s Role In Leadership

Dr. Thomas Parham 32:20

Any place where you have a a blessing to occupy is always, I think, an important space. You know, in my career, I used to have colleagues who work in in the prison industrial complex. I would go and invite to talk to folk on lockdown. Or I'm loving the fact that we have a project rebound program on campus where we have formerly incarcerated folk who've done their time or out now, and we invite them to come finish their college degrees to try to cut down some of the recidivism rate that is so pronounced in the world. And we've graduated some of our first folk who've come through that. I mean, you never know where you have a chance to be in that space. And we try to impart those same kind of blessings on some of everybody that's there. But here's also where the passion comes from. There's a difference between what I'll call personality and principle. Personalities come and go, but principles and truth, I remind folk of like those chewy tootsie rolls, they last a long time. What I understand and I owe to the ancient comedic people, right, my ancestors and elders, is they had a principle of Ma'at. Ma'at was like a code of conduct and a standard of aspiration for the ancient African people. And it was characterized by seven cardinal virtues: truth, justice, righteousness, harmony, order, balance, and propriety. So part of the challenge is to look at those principles to make sure that they're aligned with the way in which I live my life. But Maud also helped to define the five dimensions of African character. And one of those dimensions happened to be teachability. You were asking about why do you impart the knowledge? Because what teachability says that each of us has the capacity to know and understand knowledge. Not period, comma, and the responsibility to share that knowledge with other people. That's a principle that was then reinforced by a mentor. I remember us taking the great Joe White, my mentor, to dinner before we left for graduate school. And I've come home every six months and we kind of check in and you know, continue to be nurture the mentor. But we said, thank you so much. How do we thank you appropriately? He said, I appreciate your thanks, but don't eat it. What I do expect, however, is that you do for other people what I do for you. He was the original pay it forward. So part of what I do is understand, like the great Algerian Franz Fanon said, the psychiatrist, he said, each generation out of relative obscurity must reach out and seek to fulfill its legacy or betray it. So every day I get up, I look myself in the mirror. When I go to bed at night, I look in the mirror and say, have I fulfilled or betrayed the legacy that I've been blessed to inherit? And I'm hoping when all is said and done, that I have fulfilled rather than betray that legacy that the ancestors have left me. That's why we do the work we do. That's why I'm into can't stop, won't stop. That's why I'm into trying to help transform lives that will ultimately transform America work.

Christopher Luna 35:44

Yeah, it's um you're you're leaving the campus, and I can't imagine what's next for you. You have so much to give. You're such a giver, but it's selfish of us too, right? I'm sure so many people want more of you. Um, and I'm sure there's time that you need time for yourself and your family. You're you're you're retiring from from the president role. I mean, what is next for you? I mean, how how can we ask you to continue to give your knowledge and support, but without being selfish either? Because, you know, there there comes a time in your life where, you know, you've you've done so much already.

Dr. Thomas Parham 36:24

Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that how much or how little I've been able to do, you know, is all taken in context because sometimes you never know the impact of the difference that you've made in people's lives, you know, until much later. But um ways I could answer that is the same way that uh James Brown said when they asked James what you gonna play. He said, Bobby, I don't know. I don't know what I'm gonna do. What I think I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hang out with my wife and just be, you know, keep being in love and doing what we do. I'm gonna find time to do some work. I'll play some tennis and golf and do those things. Um I got another book, maybe two in me. I'll consult a little bit, may serve on a couple boards. Uh I'll be involved in the community in ways that are there. So the only way I know is how to give, but it's now time to kind of allow someone else to take the reins of the presidency at Cal State University, Megas Hills. Uh, much like the I wrote in my uh letter to the campus when I announced my retirement, that when the ancients built the pyramids, when they built the temples and the tombs in ancient Egypt, what we call Khemet, they didn't expect to get it all done in one administration or one dynasty. But building for eternity allowed them to have excellent preparation and construction on one hand, and an aspiration to harmonize with divine intent on the other. But when they built, they built in a way that they would do their best, and then the next pharaoh or leader would come along and they would carve their initials in it and add to whatever it is they did. What I've done is taken the legacy that I was blessed to inherit at Dominguez, added to it, in some cases transformed it. And now it'll be time for the next leader to come by and be able to do that. And so hopefully, if I've done my job well, nobody looks back and says, well, what are we going to do without Parham? Parham's personality that comes and goes. But if the principle of excellence stays, if the principle of nurturing stays, if the principle of creating a cultural comfort zone in the midst of what looks like a sea of cultural sterility that is so pronounced on university campuses around the country, if we can create a space where we affirm the dignity and humanity of everybody who's a member of the human family, then those are principles that should endure, irrespective of whether the personality is there or not.

Christopher Luna 39:05

The values are still there, the spirit's still there, the inspiration's still there through your faculty, through the students. I mean, you've created such a legacy. Um and like I said, you just said it right now, you don't know what the impact you've done until you're gone or out of that space. But from afar, right? I think I've only interacted with you three times. And those three times I interacted with you, and not even directly, I just felt something. And it's rare to have someone like that next to you. Um, and I think that's the the inspiration that I had just reaching out to you. It's like, how do I have that time and that moment and share it with an audience um that can kind of learn off of you? And I'm looking forward to what's next. I mean, obviously take your time, but um, if there is a book, I would love to read it and sit down with you again. I don't want to take uh a lot of your time today because I know you're you're quite busy, but I really do appreciate your time. Um, is there anything else that um in regards to I know you guys are having a gala coming up soon. Uh, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Mindset, Positivity, And Change

Dr. Thomas Parham 40:11

Sure. So one of the rankings we are excited about is not just the social justice nature and the roots of the campus, but also the social mobility rankings that we get. We're now rated in money magazines looking at the um best value for the dollar. You know, we're in those rankings. We are in places we never dreamed about Dominguez Hills being in. And now people are looking at that, going, yeah, there's something going on at that campus. When I came to the campus back in 2018, I said among the four goals, I wanted to look at their strategic plan focus on student success. But the third and fourth goals were particular. I wanted to change the image that this external community, including Chambers, including other folk, corporations, community interests had of Cal State University Dominguez Hills, to expect a different level of excellence than what they anticipate. And the fourth goal, which is more internal, I said I want to provide a key that helps my campus unlock what I call the shackles of conceptual incarceration that kept them locked in the way things had always been rather than the way things might be if they just dreamed about what was possible and stopped settling for what was traditional. And I promised the C issue system as well as the state of California. I would not come and ask them for anything until we had exhausted all of our means and possibility, even though we're a resource-constrained campus. Well, but I've also got some Malcolm and Martin in me, I've got some Marcus Garvey in me as well, who argued that chance never satisfies the hope of a suffering people. It's only through hard work, persistence, and self-reliance by which the oppressed ever realize the light of their own freedom. So I've tried to go out and be more self-determined and being able to say, if you don't want to provide it for me, I'll go find it myself. So I've had lots of support and strategy from Brotherhood Crusade, from LA Sentinel and Bakewell Media. I've had lots of support from uh Urban Leagues, I've had lots of support from the California Legislative Black Caucus and the Steve Bradfords of the world, the Mike Gibson, the Mia Bantas, the those folk in the world. Keila Weber, who now chairs that group, because they have been really the support behind us that has helped the university garn enough resources because they believed in the vision of this president. And now it begins to look like we've transformed the campus. But it didn't happen just because of Parham. I had the vision. I've tried to push for that. But we just allowed ourselves to unlock that shackle of incarceration that said, oh, well, this is just Dominguez Hills. No, it don't have to be. So I affectionately joke with people nowadays. This is not your grandmother's Dominguez Hills any longer. It's a whole different space. Yeah, you took it to another level. To a different level. And I'm hoping that even as I interact with people in the community, as I interact with students, there's rarely a week on my calendar, even as busy as I am as a president, even as much as I'm out of time going to different places that I don't have students on my calendar. Every right week, several times a week, meeting with students to mentor them, give them advice, give them consultation, give them something. Because I want to be there for the people I try to manage by walking around. Sometimes I'll just keep my head. You're not just another face. Just another face. I try to walk the campus. One of the first things I do is I go have lunch with my facilities first. And I asked him when I got there. When's the last time you seen the president? Never. Just to have lunch. How y'all doing? What can I do? I try to remind them when I came on campus, the perimeter of the campus, and some of even the campus grounds didn't look as clean and manicured as I like them. And I tried to remind them some of that old African wisdom that says it is the outer garment that best adorns the inner beauty of the person. So if we want to have people look to Dominguez Hills and the excellence that already exists inside, then we've got to have a better position. Look at that campus now, it looks very pristine. Looks people take a lot of pride in being in the space. That's changing that mindset about what that was. We had a business school that was not accredited when I arrived in 2018. And I looked at a report and I said to uh the dean and the provost, we went over there to meet with the whole factory. 50-60 strong. And I said, this report has some good parts and bad parts. Part of the bad part is an indictment of all of you. Academic freedom allows you to do what you want to do. I can't make you do the work. But if you don't want to do this work, I'm gonna sweep the resources out of the school. I'm gonna put them in someplace else for someone who wants to produce the excellence that I expect. So now I'm not trying to bring my Ivy League arrogance up in here. I was an Ivy League professor before. Nor am I trying to bring my University of California Erickson here. It's a research one institution. But I know what excellence looks like, and this ain't it. From the very front of the room, several senior faculty. Actually it was one in particular, but two really were there. What more resource are you gonna give us, Mr. President, to do this work? And just it snapped in me. And I just quickly turned in a knee-jerk reaction and said, I ain't gonna give you a doggone thing. And the whole room jumped up. I said, Everything you need to be successful, this school already has, this college already has. You just have to reposition it and wait to do the work. And from the very back of the room, I remember it like it was just the youngest assistant professors, they were brand new. Mr. President, we got this. From the middle of the room, then came the early newly tenured professors. Dr. P, which is what they call me, we got this. Then the other folk in the front said, Oh yeah, we got this. So it marginalized these voices. And doggone it if a year later, when the accreditation team came back to look at all the things they've done, we got full AACSB accreditation for the first time in 27 years. And we just, by the way, got renewed again, right? On that five-year circulation, just like this past summer, we can now talk about it because we got the letter. But that also sent a ripple effect, like this president ain't joking, across the entire campus. So now we have more discipline-specific accreditations. So that right now, California State University of Dominguez Hills has more accreditations than it's ever had in the history of that campus. Um right, because they've been they've decided to do the work. We've had a cultural change, a cultural change on campus that's as exciting with all the infrastructure we were talking about earlier. I've got a new housing project coming in, a new dining commons coming in. I've got the power grid when we built the INI building where the businesses were out of power to be able to sustain more growth. So we're putting in a new power grid that should be done probably this month. We have orthotics and prosthetics uh uh unit that is the only uh unit that is off-site in Los Alamitos that are moving back on campus. We have a Merv Diameley Center, the great Merv Dimley, right? The congressman and state assembly and senator from California. We have an institute dedicated to him that's on my campus, so they're building a new building there. We got Dallas and Caucus for that. And the thing that's the biggest uh culture change is we're building a health, wellness, recreation center. So what happened several years ago, you remember COVID was here. The biggest victims of COVID, you remember who they were? Black, poor Asian, poor white. COVID didn't come around the corner and say, uh, if somebody black or Latino, there's a poor white person, let me go get them. These populations were already vulnerable to obesity, heart disease, pulmonary disorders, hypertension, and the big one diabetes, made them all vulnerable. My argument was the time to teach a people how to be healthy is not when they're 50 struggling with a pandemic. It's when they're 17 to 25 to 30 on my campus. So when I went to the legislative black call, because they're like, Dr. Parhamy, right? They came down and saw, they gave me the first down payment, $20 million for that building.

unknown 49:12

Wow.

Dr. Thomas Parham 49:12

But then I took it and I went to the students. I said, since I've been here, the only thing I've heard about, we can't ask the students for anything because they're poor. And I reminded them about the story where we began. I grew up poor. Mama raised four kids by herself, never earned more than $18,000 a year, and everybody went to college. Nobody on drugs, in jail, any gang. I know poor. But I don't want to hear a thing about how poor you are. What I want to know is what are you prepared to invest in your future? Some of these buildings you use right now were anchored in the spirits of prior generations of students who knew they wouldn't even get to use them when they built them. But they taxed themselves in order to make sure you could have a future in a present day right now that you utilize these buildings, you gotta be able to do the same thing for yourself and other people. So they put together a referendum. Jonathan Malia Mancio was the president. And unlike the other presidents before them that I'd given the same kind of speech to, he just gravitated toward it. Ran a referendum, the students voted, because we can't tell them how to vote, we just encourage them to vote. You can say yes or no. You want to tax yourself $215 every semester, $438 a year, to build this wreck center. And the students voted, right? The majority said yes. Wow. So I was able to sign that off. That is a culture change. That money times my population gives us the other $66 million that we are now using to build the $86 million health and wellness center that will be state of the art. It's incredible. You know, but that's the kind of culture change that we've had on campus that the infrastructure is there. It'll be a showpiece for the campus. It's why people want to come and get some of what Dominguez Hills is offering. But that's the kind of culture change that we've had on campus where we've unlocked another one of those shackles that kept us in the way things were rather in the way things might be if we just dreamed about what was possible. So I love the journey. Still love it. But it's just time for me to step back and say, it's been real.

Christopher Luna 51:26

Well, and and that's another part of leadership is knowing when to pass a torch and giving someone else the opportunity to follow. Um, you know, it's incredible the the stories and the journey that you have, and we just very touch touch the surf uh surface here. Um thank you again for your time. I I can't say that enough. Hopefully we can have a part two and we can tour your campus before you go or something, and I can take a camera crew over there. But I really do appreciate your visionary, your leadership, your support, your your your willingness to give to the community, really give your time and your life to the community. Um, it really does show the type of person you are, and I I look up to it quite a bit. Um, from a distance, obviously we don't know each other quite quite much, but I really do appreciate um your time being here today.

Dr. Thomas Parham 52:13

I thank you. I appreciate it. And again, thank you for the invitation. You're always welcome. Again, I'm the president, but I'm just that regular brother from around the way. So you don't need an excuse to come knock off the doors. You'd like to come. And if we want to do part two before I leave, come on down to the campus. Let's set it up and we'll get it done. Thank you.

Christopher Luna 52:31

Thank you. Well, thank you for joining us today's episode. I'll put um the link to your gala on there. Um, any information about Cal State Dominguez Hills and any information about California leaders, we are expanding um from Los Angeles to California because there's such a great amount of leaders here in the state. And I look forward to uh having more conversations like this. So thank you for your time.

Dr. Thomas Parham 52:52

We should also mention the folk because you asked about the gala. The gala is November 14. Perfect. It is at 5:30, starts the reception down at the beautiful JW Merritt Hotel right in LA Live in downtown LA. And we will be looking forward to both celebrating a legacy, but also raising needed scholarship dollars for our students. We hope lots of folks.

Christopher Luna 53:13

Uh I'm I'm here to support. And then if you need uh someone to chair your fundraising uh team, I'm I'm here to help. So thank you again for your time. Yeah, thank you for being with us.

Narrator 1 53:24

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the California Leaders Podcast, hosted by Christopher Luna. We hope you find our conversation as inspiring as we did. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback help us bring more of the content you love. And be sure to follow us on social media for updates, behind the scene content, and to join the conversation. Until next time, keep leading, keep innovating, and keep making a difference.