The two-and-a-half years Jasmin Lino spent at Plymouth State University were difficult, and not just because Lino was working in college residential life during a pandemic.
She said white students on campus would scream racial slurs at her. Students of color regularly came to her with “horror stories” about how they had been treated in town or by campus police. People automatically assumed that she worked in the dining hall.
“That’s not to say that working in dining was a bad thing, but why would you assume I worked for dining? That’s frustrating as an entry-level professional,” Lino said. “It was hard, I’m not going to lie.”
Lino, who worked as a community director for Plymouth State, was one of the Black staff members on the school’s Black Lives Matter Task Force, which formed in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and developed a proposal for a new role dedicated to implementing diversity, equity and inclusion.
This week, Alberto Ramos will start as the school’s first chief diversity officer. Ramos will also head the school’s brand-new Center for Diversity, Equity and Social Justice in its own building at a central location on campus.
Current and former Plymouth students and staff of color welcome the new position and center, the result of nearly two years of planning, but say it is long overdue.
For some who pushed to make Plymouth’s campus more welcoming for Black people, the new initiatives come too late for them to reap the benefits. Amid the school’s recent racial reckoning, multiple students, staff and faculty said they felt unheard, tokenized, or pushed out. They hope Plymouth’s future will be more inclusive than its past.
In fall 2021, after the university announced two incidents involving racial bias, students of color wrote to the administration to ask the school to condemn the behavior in stronger terms and to release more information about investigations, including the names of suspects.
Interim Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Ann McClellan said last week that the university can’t always publicly release information from incidents because of Title IX restrictions or other confidentiality guidelines.
“Can we absolutely be better overall in our mission and value statements about what we value and what we condone? I think, absolutely,” she said.
Black Student Union President Eliana Jones was among the students that asked the university to make stronger statements against bigotry. Jones said she loves Plymouth State but that she has found it a difficult place to go to school.
Students of color make up 10.2% of the student body, with 79.9% of students reporting their race as white, according to university data from fall 2021.
Retention rates differ across race. In the fall 2020 cohort, only 53.6% of students of color were still enrolled the following fall, versus 65.7% of white students. In some years, that gap was larger.
“For most of my time here, a lot of my time here, especially in academic settings, I’ve been the only Black person in the room,” Jones said.
She has seen friends leave because they felt isolated. “It’s different to come here and be in a class and someone says something ignorant and you just have to take it because you don’t want to have to fight that battle alone,” Jones said.
To counter that, Jones planned a packed week of daily activities this year for Black History Month, including Black history trivia, a movie night, an evening with school administrators and a candlelight vigil honoring Black people killed by police, including Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.
Deborah Ashokeji, who graduated last May, was president of the Black Student Union before Jones.
In February 2021, Ashokeji planned events like a documentary watch party and made fliers for Black History Month. Faced with paying for the costs of advertising out of her own pocket, she asked a professor for help. She said the Black Student Union received $1,000 in funding last year, five times less than the Plymouth Gun Club.
“If you care about Black lives, why are there no programs for Black students?” Ashokeji said.”Why do I need to take money out of my pocket for Black History Month if you care about Black lives?”
Jones said she worked hard this year to make administrators understand why Black History programming mattered.
“I did get more support but not because anyone in the administration thought it was important,” she said. “I made them realize it was important.”
McClellan said the new center for diversity, equity and inclusion will provide a dedicated place at the university with a budget for activities like Black History Month programming. The new center will have funding this year to hire student workers, who could function as student ambassadors in a model similar to diversity programs at Keene State and the University of New Hampshire.
Ashokeji chose Plymouth, where she majored in criminology with a minor in pre-law, because of the merit-based scholarship the school offered. If she could go back in time, she said she would have spent more money to go to a historically Black college or university.
In a statement to the Monitor, Plymouth State University wrote the chief diversity officer position and new diversity center were a result of students’ tireless advocacy.
“We recognize that there have been times that students of color and others from marginalized backgrounds have not always found parts of our community welcoming, safe, and supportive. We are deeply committed to changing this,” Marlin Collingwood, Plymouth’s Interim Vice President for Communications, Enrollment & Student Life, said in a statement.
One thing Black students want is more professors who look like them.
Metasebia Woldemariam is a professor of communication and media studies and Plymouth’s only full-time Black faculty member. “We are bleeding faculty of color,” Woldemariam said. “We have a retention problem.”
She said Plymouth has changed for the better over the 20 years she has worked there, with a more diverse student body and a better commitment to principles of inclusion.
“Plymouth has not had a problem necessarily in recruiting students of color,” said Woldemariam. “We have an issue keeping them. And it’s the same with staff and faculty.”
Woldemariam sees attracting more students of color as vital to Plymouth’s continued enrollment, as New Hampshire cities like Nashua and Manchester become more racially diverse.
In 2020, the most recent year for which full data is available, Plymouth had just three full-time Black faculty members. In spring 2020, the university did not renew the contract for one of those professors, media and film lecturer Melissa McClinton. Another professor retired.
When students, including Ashokeji and Jones, discovered McClinton would be leaving, they organized a petition asking the university to reconsider.
McClellan said the university is committed to increasing the diversity of its staff and student body. She also said Plymouth often struggles to hire and retain faculty of color because it is forced to compete with schools in more urban or diverse locations.
“We are in a rural environment in New Hampshire, in a primarily white community at a primarily white institution,” McClellan said.
Yet, given the chance to retain McClinton, the school chose not to do so.
McClellan said that McClinton’s position was created a few years previously with the goal of creating a video production studio, a plan that was later scrapped because of “higher ed economics” and low student enrollment in film and video production classes.
McClinton, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism, enjoyed New Hampshire’s beauty and loved her Plymouth students.
Near the end of the 2020 spring semester, days after she learned she would receive the university’s annual Theo Kalikow Award, she was told her contract would not be renewed.
McClinton said she was held to a different standard than white colleagues. “It’s the ‘Negro Code,’ ” she said. “It’s policies they make up on the spot because you’re Black.”
Campus police questioned her while she worked late in her office, even though she had applied for permission to be on campus after hours. An administrative assistant told her incorrectly that she couldn’t receive mail on campus over the summer. She was accused of plagiarizing her PowerPoints.
“You’re always on edge, trying to prove yourself deserving,” McClinton said.
When Lino worked as a community director at Plymouth, she tried to stand up for students of color, who came to her with stories about racial bias they experienced.
“I wanted to do my job. I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to show up,” she said. “I wanted to be representation for students of color who needed the support, and I was unable to do my job without the support of the administration.”
Beginning in 2020, Lino participated in weekly meetings of the Black Lives Matter task force. She was frustrated with the school’s slowness to fund diversity initiatives, and after students shared vulnerable stories about bias in racial justice listening sessions, she felt the administration let them down by failing to take more action. She left the school in May for another opportunity.
When Tevis Bryant was hired as Director of Student Life in July 2019, he said his colleagues and the administration seemed excited to have a Black, gay man in a prominent student-facing role. Nonwhite students felt more comfortable coming to him, the only person of color in his department.
Bryant said he already had a full workload when he was told that creating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives was going to be added to his plate.
“If this was going to be the expectation of the person in this role, how come the last three individuals who were white, in this position, were not asked to fulfill the same requirements as well?” he said.
After George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin, Bryant was asked to contribute to the university’s statement. In the statement, a quote attributed to him, the phrase he had written, “Black Lives Matter,” was replaced with “issues of justice, truth and equality.”
Bryant served on the task force until he resigned in July 2021 to finish his dissertation.
“I felt like when I was leaving, I was leaving a piece of myself because my work wasn’t done,” Bryant said.
The proposal for the chief diversity officer came from the Black Lives Matter Task Force, which wanted the position to be at the higher level of vice president at the school.
Ramos, the new chief diversity officer, will advise on best practices for diversity across the institution, encompassing everything from student recruitment and support, diversity-focused student life programming, anti-bias training for faculty and staff and community partnerships, McClellan said. A diversity council will support his work.
The hiring process took time in part because the university faced competition from other schools that had similar moments of realization in 2020.
“We hit George Floyd’s death, and it ignited a lot of colleges and universities and people in the community to speak up and say, ‘We have to do better,’ ” McClellan said. “We were one of hundreds of colleges in 2020 and 2021 doing these kinds of searches.”
During the search, Plymouth State began implementing other diversity and inclusion initiatives, including events held in collaboration with Keene State College and the University of New Hampshire, which have positions similar to Plymouth’s new chief diversity officer. McClellan said Plymouth’s Open Lab for Teaching and Learning has held workshops and roundtables on issues like New Hampshire’s “divisive concepts” law and that the school has offered training to faculty and staff on reducing bias in higher education.
The university plans to conduct a formal campus climate survey next year. One measure of success for Ramos and the center will be whether there is an increase in students’ happiness and sense of belonging at Plymouth State.
During her time at Plymouth, Jones has started calling herself Ellie because Eliana proved too hard for others to pronounce. She hopes that her “babies,” the sophomores and freshmen she knows, will have it easier.
“I love Plymouth State; I’m glad I came here,” Jones said. “It’s hard to be here and be Black.”