UNH President, Black Student Leaders Strike Agreement

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CONCORD, N.H.

University of New Hampshire President Joan Leitzel
signed a list of demands last month from Black students who had staged
a sit-in at her office.

Leitzel said the list contains goals agreed to by the protesters
and school officials that will help the university bring diversity to
the campus.

“Diversity in our student body, faculty, and staff is important to
providing quality education because people from different backgrounds
with different beliefs learn from one another and because our students
are likely to live and work in pluralistic societies when they
graduate,” she said in a statement.

More than 60 of the university’s 73 Black undergraduate students,
many of them members of the Black Student Union, walked into Leitzel’s
office and gave her a list of demands.

The students, who were joined by supporters of all races, called
for school officials to increase student and faculty diversity and
offer more race-awareness programs.

School officials negotiated with the students for more than five
hours, and announced at 7 p.m. that a compromise had been reached that
involved the school increasing diversity and admitting it had failed to
do so in the past.

The students had asked the university to enroll 500 Black students by 2004.

Leitzel also agreed to establish a recruitment program to help
increase the Black student enrollment, and to add six tenure-track
faculty positions for Blacks by 2003.

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