“We protest. We are sick. We are tired. Still, we protest.”
That quote, inspired by famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, comes from an open letter sent on April 16, 2024 to Dr. Neeli Bendapudi, president of The Pennsylvania State University.
“We are sick and tired of the lack of progress toward racial justice at Penn State under your leadership,” the letter continues. “We expected better.”
Dr. Gary King, professor of biobehavioral health and African American studies at Penn State, and a member of the Committee of Black Scholars.
King said neither Penn State’s administration nor Bendapudi have responded to the letter, which addresses many concerns, including the cancelation of the planned Center for Racial Justice, the debated closure of the on-campus Multicultural Resource Center (MRC), and a lack of attention given to two scholarly studies, produced with the approval of Penn State’s Institutional Review Board, which enumerated concerns regarding inequity and discrimination experienced by Black faculty at Penn State.
“We as a faculty, Black faculty and others, have been fighting the administration to address matters of racial justice, and in a very forceful and progressive manner, for the last 20 years or so in different iterations,” said King in an interview with Diverse. “My colleagues and I picked up the mantel about five to six years ago.”
The resulting report, More Rivers to Cross Part 1, released in January 2020, contained 96 pages of quantitative analysis on the paucity of Black professors and their stagnating numbers. One statistic shows that, between 2004 and 2018, the number of Black professors at Penn State stayed roughly the same, from 109 professors to 112. Proportionately, the percentage of Black faculty fell from 4% to 3%.
