If administrators were wondering what diversity looks like, now they know.
More than 600 students marched from the Nyumburu Cultural Center to the steps of the Main Administration Building yesterday afternoon, calling for the reinstatement of Associate Provost for Equity and Diversity Cordell Black, a 30-year faculty member and diversity administrator, who was told earlier this week he was being removed from his administrative position.
“This is what diversity looks like!” chanted students of all colors and class standings, majors and religions, sexual orientations and gender identities. They marched up the steps of the administration building carrying signs and banners, demanding to be heard.
The demonstration came on the coattails of a meeting Wednesday night during which students drafted three demands — Black’s reinstatement, the release of all the university’s budget and diversity records, and a moratorium on further layoffs and reorganizations until students, faculty and staff are given a say.
“Without a full examination of all budget documents and records … we cannot correctly weigh the consequences of particular cuts,” the document reads. “We cannot plan for diversity if we don’t know where we’re starting.”
In an interview after the protest, University President Dan Mote insisted the decision to remove Black from his position was strictly budgetary.
“We’re losing a lot of staff on this campus,” Mote said. “There’s a lot of people losing their jobs — we aren’t walking away from diversity. Would you prefer we put money into a high-level administrator than diversity programs? We shouldn’t be hanging our diversity plan on one person.”
Money the department will save from cutting Black’s position to a part-time job will go to other diversity programs, Mote said.
But student leaders who met with Provost Nariman Farvardin this afternoon said the provost told them if Black chose to stay on as a tenured French literature professor, there would be no net savings for the university — the expense of Black’s salary would merely be transferred to the foreign langauge department from the Office of Diversity and Equity.
Neither Black nor Farvardin attended the rally, but waves of faculty, alumni and a handful of university officials did.
“There’s lots of energy here,” Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs Warren Kelley said. “We’ll see how it all pans out.”
Protest attendees were given brightly colored pieces of paper to write their feelings on.
“Invest in people, not research,” one sign read.
“Without diversity, there can be no equality,” read another.
As students marched up the steps of the administration building, they shouted “no justice, no peace,” to officials looking on through the windows. They then taped their colorful complaints onto pillars and walls as University Police officers stood in front of the locked front doors, mostly in silence.
“Having the police out here shows their insecurity,” Graduate Student Government President Anupama Kothari said. “I’m here for me and for what I believe in. One black or brown face in a sea of white faces — that’s not diversity. That’s a joke.”
The rally, which lasted for about two hours, attracted passerby sympathetic to the cause.
“The diversity of this campus is part of the reason I came here,” said sophomore biochemistry major Russell Valle.
Valle said he had no idea the rally was happening until he came upon it. After standing for a minute, considering the scene and listening to hundreds of voices cry, “Whose school? Our school,” he smiled.
“This is the reason I came here,” he said.
Before the march began, Mark Conway, the president of this university’s chapter of the NAACP, and Student Government Association President Steve Glickman met with Farvardin to discuss their demands. During the rally, University Police escorted Black Student Union President Amber Simmons, student activist Malcolm Harris and Community Roots Co-President Jazz Lewis to the meeting in the Administration Building.
“We [went] in there with the attitude, ‘You need to meet these demands or things are going to escalate,'” Glickman said.
The provost told the students his decision to remove Black was final.
“[Farvardin] said he has the autonomy to make his own team,” Glickman said in an interview after the meeting. “He said it was a personnel issue,”
But in an interview yesterday, Farvardin said Black’s removal was solely based on numbers, prompting skepticism from Harris, who helped organize the march and also writes a column for The Diamondback.
“What else that isn’t a budgetary issue is being pitched as a budgetary issue?” Harris asked.
A follow-up meeting to yesterday’s march will be held Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Nyumburu, student leaders said, to plan the next step for students and campus activists from Students Taking Action to Reclaim our Education (S.T.A.R.E.), a new coalition of student organizaitons dedicated to acting against the university’s attempts to cut student services.
The march was only step one, student protesters said.
“We gonna fight till we can’t fight no more,” senior women’s studies major Liz Cerezo said.
“What happens if we don’t?” senior sociology major Chris Roberts asked the pulsing crowd. “What’s gonna happen if we don’t fight? Who’s gonna fight for you?”
hampton at umdbk dot com, mlang at umdbk dot com
