The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 prompted a wave of national outcry against systemic racism in the United States that echoed across the University of Colorado Boulder campus.
Students demanded accountability and change from campus leaders, and in June 2020 Chancellor Phil DiStefano sent a campus-wide message acknowledging “that we have failed to foster a fully anti-racist, diverse, inclusive and welcoming culture for everyone in our campus community” and announcing eight immediate action steps for change.
In the 16 months since, the campus has navigated tumultuous waters caused by the coronavirus pandemic and budget cuts while also addressing diversity issues with new urgency.
CU Boulder has seen significant changes since DiStefano’s June announcement, though those changes have not been without growing pains. Campus community members, from senior administrators to students, say they recognize there is more work to be done, and that progress takes time.
“The most important point here is that we’re trying to change the culture and to build some place where everyone feels welcome, feels valued and that they can thrive,” said Robert Boswell, vice chancellor for diversity, equity and community engagement. “It takes a lot of different efforts, small and large, to be able to address those issues.”
Putting plans into action
While efforts to increase diversity on campus have been ongoing for much longer than the past few years, CU Boulder students, faculty and staff say Floyd’s murder and the resulting outcry put a spotlight on those efforts.
Campus leaders have worked on developing a diversity plan since 2015, said Provost Russell Moore, which led to the Inclusion, Diversity and Excellence in Academics Plan, or IDEA Plan.
“It’s really symbolic of what the whole community writ large decided to come up with,” Moore said. “George Floyd’s murder amped up the intensity and urgency of those conversations.”
The plan was approved in 2019 and includes recommendations that range from expanding current diversity programs, improving health care coverage and increasing recruitment and retention efforts for diverse students, faculty and staff.
Immediately implementing the plan was one of DiStefano’s eight action steps.
Lisa Flores, associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion in the College of Media, Communication and Information, and Teresa Hernandez, diversity, equity and inclusion recruitment program manager, are co-chairs of the IDEA Council, the campus body charged with implementing the plan.
The council’s first step is to prioritize the IDEA Plan’s 36 recommendations and many subrecommendations and create a map to navigate them.
“It’s a messy process because we will be working with each of the offices on campus that are assigned pieces of the plan,” Flores said. “We assume those (recommendations) that will impact students are going to have the most support, but we really have to think about all the pieces of what’s already on campus, what’s most urgent and why and what’s most possible and why.”
The council and other campus community members are trying to balance the need for tangible, immediate change with the reality that unraveling centuries of injustice takes time, Flores and Hernandez said.
“We know that small changes, like gender-neutral bathrooms, make a difference for people in their everyday experience on campus,” Flores said. “We don’t expect we can erase all the pieces that underlie the way all higher education institutions work, but we have to hold on to the kinds of changes that are in our capacity to do.”
The campus response to the IDEA Plan and the council has been positive, Hernandez said, and people are eager to talk about how to implement change.
“That’s where we have to remind ourselves it’s going to take time,” Hernandez said.
“Sometimes we talk about — 400 years as a nation, 150 years as an institution; we need more than 12 months,” Flores added. “Give us a little bit of time.”
Students push for change
As CU Boulder officials have wrestled with how to take on systemic racism and discrimination, students have continued to demand accountability and change from campus leaders.
CU Boulder graduate Olivia Gardner and senior Ruth Woldemichael wrote a petition in June 2020 demanding that the campus cut ties with the Boulder Police Department, Colorado Department of Corrections and Colorado Correctional Industries; that the campus reinvest 1% of its endowment into supporting businesses and initiatives run by formerly incarcerated people; and that campus leaders continue developing anti-racism and deescalation training for staff, faculty and campus police.
The petition garnered thousands of signatures, and some of the demands were addressed in DiStefano’s action steps and have taken place, such as implementing mandatory bystander training, examining the campus’ relationship with state prisons, developing an anti-racism module for students and engaging with the campus police department and students on law enforcement transparency and accountability.
Students have staged demonstrations on campus, including an art installation of silhouettes of “the missing (Black, Indigenous and people of color) BIPOC of CU Boulder.” Campus groups, including Radical BIPOC Womxn/Femme Collective, created the silhouettes and set them up outside Norlin Library every day for a week during the fall 2020 semester to raise awareness for the demand that campus leaders divest from the campus police department to invest in BIPOC students.
UMAS y MECHA and other students also demanded that the campus make permanent a mosaic tribute to Los Seis de Boulder, the six current, former and prospective CU Boulder students killed in car bombs in 1974 amid protests against the treatment of Chicano students on campus.
Students protested near the mosaic in March 2020, and the university added it to its permanent collection six months later.
And current and former students Audrea Fryar, Isaiah Chavous, Karia White and Woldemichael worked with professor Reiland Rabaka to establish the Center for African and African American Studies on campus to support teaching, research and creative work on the history and culture of people of African descent.
One of the newer campus groups that formed in the wake of May 2020 is diversifyCUnow, a coalition of students and other campus community members dedicated to amplifying the voices of Black, Indigenous and people of color on campus and to holding university leaders accountable.
Holly Olivarez, an organizer with diversifyCUnow, was in her first year of graduate school at CU Boulder when Floyd was murdered in May 2020.
“It was all I could think about,” she said. “I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep.”
Olivarez began emailing every faculty member she’d ever met with and asked them to forward it to someone higher up in the campus hierarchy. She wanted to know what was being done on campus to prevent tragedies like Floyd’s murder from happening again.
“By the end of two weeks, I felt like I was going to find community with folks who wanted to do this work,” she said.
That community coalesced into diversifyCUnow, which has acted as a platform to amplify student causes as well as to call out campus and system leaders.
DiversifyCUnow has reached thousands of people connected with the campus, Oliveraz said. The group published a timeline of former system President Mark Kennedy’s “racist/problematic statements and actions” that was the impetus for Boulder student and faculty governance groups voting to censure him.
Currently, the group is focusing on supporting BIPOC students serving in student government and to closely watch the process of selecting the system president search committee, Olivarez said.
At times, Olivarez said, the process of pushing for change on campus has been frustrating. Statements from campus leaders have felt performative, and meetings with campus administrators have felt guarded.
“Everyone is talking about the students from historically excluded groups, but no one is actually talking to them,” she said.
Olivarez added she was encouraged by DiStefano’s state of the campus address and that he and other campus leaders will reach out to students to hear about their experiences.
The process of progress
Listening is what Sonia DeLuca Fernández, the campus’ new senior vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion, has focused on since she began the job on Sept. 1.
DeLuca Fernández, who came to Boulder from Pennsylvania State University, said she didn’t start the job with a list of things she wanted to accomplish on campus.
“They’re not really exciting bullet points — talking to a lot of people, asking a lot of questions,” she said. “But it’s necessary to figure out how we can better prioritize, better align and better execute this comprehensive vision to advance diversity, equity and inclusion intersectionally with a social justice approach.”
There’s clear agreement about the need for leadership to help align programs, DeLuca Fernández said, but what her role precisely looks like is something she wants to create in partnership with people on campus.
“My goal is to participate and contribute something where we can evidence an impact, where we can talk about how campus climate has changed for the better,” she said. “All of that is a 23,000-foot view that, in a couple of years, will be able to show us how doing better makes a difference.”
The progress made on DiStefano’s eight action steps — most are completed or in progress — represent a lot of change in a relatively short amount of time. But there is also the slow, steady, everyday process of growth that’s happened on campus for years and will continue to take place.
It happens in student groups like Asian Unity, which President Justin Won joined as a freshman.
“I joined on a whim and went to the fall retreat, met my first friend group and had such a great time that I was dedicated to it,” he said.
It’s a tight-knit group with a strong sense of community, Won said
“I thought in my head, I want to be a part of this club because I want to reciprocate that feeling to other students.”
Won said he hopes to see more funding for student groups like Asian Unity so they can grow.
“I think it’s a really important step toward making diverse students feel more welcome,” he said.
Progress is also happening in programs like the Diverse Musicians’ Alliance, where university staff and students work together to empower underrepresented artists.
“Students have done a great job of challenging the College of Music to challenge themselves, of pushing people out of their comfort zones,” said Alma Ramos, diversity and outreach coordinator for the college.
That can look like creating community so that students feel less alone, building cultural competency for students who want to go into music education and seeking out music composed by people from diverse backgrounds.
“We have to deal with this now, because this momentum is not going to stop,” Ramos said. “We have to catch up as an institution to create the support needed for these students.”
