DURHAM, N.H.
After more than a decade spent recruiting and building a support base for minority students, the University of New Hampshire remains a very White school in a very White state.
Minorities made up about 6.5 percent of the school's undergraduates as of last fall. That’s more diverse than the state as a whole
To end the sit-in, then-President Joan Leitzel agreed to 11 objectives, including increasing Black student enrollment to 300 by 2004 and increasing the number of Black tenure-track faculty members to 10 by 2003. By fall 2008, there were 197 Black undergraduate and graduate students at UNH and UNH-Manchester, and eight tenure-track faculty members.
The school has responded to the challenge with a range of minority recruitment programs and a support system that includes the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, the Black Student Union, and the Diversity Support Coalition. In 2007, the university was one of two dozen colleges and universities around the country recognized for its diversity programs by Minority Access, Inc., a national nonprofit educational organization.
Some students say the culture shock of arriving on campus was nearly unbearable and that they seriously considered transferring to more diverse schools. Things improved for senior Nina Reyes of Westchester, N.Y., after she helped form Delta Xi Phi, a multicultural sorority in 2007.
