This essay was written by eight of the students who occupied the president´s office in May 1991: Karl Jagbanhandsingh, Christiana Keith, David Kim, John Kusakabe, Lynn Pono, Lisa Razo, Allen Urgent, and Josh Mitsuo Weiner.
"The main purpose of a university has always been, must always be, to stimulate the creative powers of the students and its faculty. As an institution, it deals in ideas, not only old and accepted ones, but new ones that may be full of explosive power. If they are explosive, they are bound to be disconcerting, even painful, to some on the campus and to many beyond its borders.Inevitably, they will be called dangerous by the timid and short-sighted, but to those who really believe in the fruitfulness of human thought, the real danger would appear only if the flow of such ideas should cease. For them, indeed, sterility would have taken over our campus. Students would leave our campus accustomed only to the commonplace, satisfied with the mediocre, ignorant and afraid of ideas which catch fire."
(University of Vermont Faculty Handbook, Section 212)
On April 22, seventeen African-, Latin-, Native-, Asian-American students took over the president´s office at the University of Vermont to demand the end of oppression and marginalization of people of color.
The action we initiated was made necessary by the rampancy of institutional racism at this university. After similar protests in 1969, 1971, and 1988, the university signed commitments to "cultural diversity" on campus.
The student protest of 1988 ended when President Lattie Coor signed a document that became known as the Waterman Agreement. Over the course of the following two years, the President´s Panel on Cultural Diversity met with Coor and later with interim president John Hennessey. During these meetings, false information and stalling techniques were employed to curtail progress. For example, Coor denied his intention to leave UVM, and, thus, his leaving severely retarded the implementation of the agreements. Hennessey acclaimed the hiring of twenty-one faculty of color, while neglecting to mention the departure of fourteen faculty of color.
Last fall, George Davis became president of UVM. The panel urged Davis to re-sign the Waterman Agreement. He refused. Instead, he agreed to sign a pledge of his "commitment to the underlying values" of the agreement. This signing was to be held at a ceremony on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. After the students returned for the spring semester, Davis reneged on signing this pledge without warning and with no explanation. About this time, Davis stopped attending biweekly meetings with the students.
Both the Environmental Studies program and the Woman´s Studies program took less than two years to implement. These programs are far from complete and need further expansion and development, but it is curious to note that the struggle for an Ethnic Studies Department still has produced no results after twenty years.
Our forced police removal has resulted in charges being brought at the state and university levels. The university judicial system mirrors that of a prison system in its fascist nature. The laws are created by the administration. The administration acts as judge and jury at the proceedings, ensuring a top-heavy program of injustice. The highest appeals officer is a university vice president.
Our aim is to create a free, comprehensive educational system on our campus. The diverse composition of the United States must be taken into consideration in devising an all-encompassing curriculum. To achieve a truly global perspective, however, we must replace an external, Eurocentric point of view with and internal, authentic point of view. In such an educational process, Columbus is not seen as the discoverer, but as the invader of the Americas, thus giving an objective perspective that does not delegitimize the experiences of the Native Americans.
We have been participating in a coalition of faculty, staff, and students to work toward the implementation of an anti-racist agenda. There have been no meetings as of this writing between this coalition and Davis.
The university administration continues to twist the issues and to form innocuous committees. The university is not addressing the repeatedly articulated vision of an anti-discriminatory agenda in education, an agenda that would make UVM a model institution where all people, irrespective of their race, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or degree of mental or physical ability, have the opportunity to fulfill their potential with the academic community.
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