[B]URLINGTON — University of Vermont students walked out of classes and flooded the halls of Waterman, the university’s main administrative building Monday, as part of sustained protests against what they say is a climate of racial injustice at the school.
The campus protests have been ongoing since last week. They were sparked by the appearance of signs associated with white supremacists. The signs, with slogans like “innocent lives matter, not guilty ones,” and “white privelaged [sic] and proud of it,” were found taped to a display case containing information about the university’s Mosaic Center for Students of Color.
The Burlington Police Department last week released the results of its investigation into where the signs came from. Police also issued a tentative warning to students protesters who blocked a main road during a rally last Thursday.
Police said they have identified those responsible for the signs as an members of an out-of-state group and a Vermonter from elsewhere in the state, but declined to name them or take legal action because the acts were not criminal.
Monday’s protests started around noon, as nearly 300 students activists filled the Waterman building, vowing to stay for hours.
As students chanted — and continued their calls for the resignation of UVM President Tom Sullivan, Provost David Rosowsky and Vice Provost for Student Affairs Annie Stevens — leaders of the protest group NoNames for Justice emerged from a meeting with Sullivan, held in his offices in the building’s South wing, and announced that meditation would begin Monday at 5 p.m.
“We’re asking them to bring in a professional mediator and all that fun stuff, so we can start this mediation process for real,” said Harmony Edosomwan, a UVM sophomore and a protest leader.
Earlier Monday, emails from deans and one from Sullivan hit inboxes around campus. In an email from Sullivan, the president said he had met with university deans over the weekend and together they had started to develop new plans to advance university diversity.
Faculty who teach specialized diversity courses, a requirement for UVM students, will undergo training to help them facilitate classroom conversations, he said.
The school also will create two new positions: one dedicated to managing a diversity related curriculum, and a recruiter to help colleges locate diverse faculty and funding and resources to help recruit, hire and retain diverse faculty.
“Our university embraces racial equality, diversity, and justice as core values that inspire our lives. By uniting in our collective resolve, we have the opportunity to become a national model,” Sullivan wrote to UVM students, staff and faculty.
Student protesters also said they’d met Monday morning with College of Arts and Sciences Dean William Falls. The dean signed a document created by NoNames for Justice calling for diversity training for all faculty in the college and increasing recruitment and retention of faculty of color.
Monday’s protests turned into an hours-long sit-in, with protest organizers instructing students to assemble into groups by college. Each group descended on their respective college dean’s office and demanded that officials sign the students’ demands.
The groups later said their efforts had been unsuccessful. As of Monday afternoon, protest organizers said they believed Falls to be the only dean to sign the student document. Falls did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Protest organizers also are asking for better diversity courses, mandatory training for Greek life, more funding for diversity initiatives and the renaming of some campus buildings, including the Bailey/Howe library, which the activists say has ties to Vermont’s eugenics movement.
Max Tracy, a Burlington City Councilor and assistant director of international admissions at UVM, was watching with students Monday. He said the recent protests are the largest in recent memory.
“This is the largest and most vibrant student movement the University of Vermont has seen in over a decade,” Tracy said.
As a student in spring 2009, Tracy was at the forefront of a student movement to protest staff cuts made after the Great Recession. The recent protests are different, Tracy said, because students are demanding justice for themselves — not other people.
“It’s also important to situate this particular movement in the context of students who, for generations, have been struggling to make this a more just and inclusive university,” Tracy said.
Protesters have been galvanized over the past several days by John Mejia, the assistant director of off-campus services at UVM’s Office of Student and Community Relations. Mejia started a hunger strike Friday with a list of demands similar to those made by the students.
Mejia called off the hunger strike on the 7th day last Friday, saying in a statement that administrators were happy to “let me die,” and that by continuing the strike he’d merely harm the community.
In a statement, the university said it is “glad to see that John Mejia has chosen to end the hunger strike” and that it “had been reaching out to John to offer medical support and to try to establish a conversation.”
Protests started last Tuesday, and continued throughout the week; students blocked Main Street and demanded to speak with Sullivan last Thursday, and Sullivan later addressed students during a rally in Waterman on Friday.
This is not the first time racially offensive posters have appeared on the campus. Last November, signs saying “It’s OK to be white” appeared on campus, and in January posters depicting people of color who were also suspects in local criminal cases read, “Stop importing problems, start importing solutions.”
