Nearly a year after a string of racist incidents touched off a firestorm of criticism from the University of New Hampshire’s students of color, a panel convened to help improve campus climate at the school has quietly released a list of recommendations.
The 61-page document, issued last week by the UNH Presidential Task Force on Campus, includes a list of 15 action items, key among them that a permanent task force be created to monitor progress going forward. Forty people sat on the panel, including students, faculty and community members.
“While we have participated in, and have witnessed, some meaningful change and progress, we understand that there are UNH community members who continue to have negative, hurtful and harmful experiences and suffer day-to-day indignities,” the report states.
The report also highlighted work that was already done or underway. Nearly 2,000 UNH employees have undergone diversity training, including school police. The Office for Multicultural Affairs has hosted community dialogues and trainings that have involved nearly 1,000 students.
And a social media policy, which specifically states that “students may not use social media to commit discriminatory harassment by creating a hostile environment for another,” has been included in the school’s student code of conduct.
The report takes a look at the retention and recruitment of both students and faculty of color. It noted that white students graduate at much higher rates – 78 percent – than other ethnicities. There was a 10-point gap between white students and Hispanic students, and a 14-point gap between white and black students.
Minorities also only made up only 14 percent of all tenured or tenure-track positions at UNH in 2017, according to the report. That’s despite candidates from underrepresented groups making up about 40 percent of all applicants for such positions between 2014 and 2017. The report found that candidates from underrepresented groups were far less likely to progress through to the final round during hiring.
The report also addressed a list of 15 demands released by the school’s Black Student Union last year. The report found five of the requests to be “not reasonably attainable.” Several of the demands had to do with expelling students who had posted racist images on social media; school officials said that while these students had been disciplined, the university could not specifically disclose their conduct record. The other 10 demands were either met or in the process of being addressed, the report said.
Seacoast NAACP president Rogers Johnson sat on the 40-member task force. He criticized the report as “an academic exercise” that would do little improve feelings of safety for students of color.
He carved out an exception for UNH police, though, saying that police Chief Paul Dean had been proactive about working with students and getting diversity training for officers.
“The police department knows that if anything happens on campus, they’re going to be in the middle of it,” Johnson said.
Johnson said the main problem is that people feel empowered to say things on social media that can eventually translate to in-person aggression. The university needs to be more forceful about sanctioning students for what they say online, he argued.
“It doesn’t matter that someone has freedom of speech. You don’t get to stay on campus if you violate those rules,” he said.
Johnson also said he was hopeful incoming UNH president James Dean, who previously served as vice chancellor and provost at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which has a much more diverse student population than UNH, would be better at handling racism on campus.
“He will address this issue in a very forceful and forthright manner,” he said.
(Lola Duffort can be reached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)