For the last 128 years at the University of Rhode Island, systemic racism has been at the core of this establishment, and the roots of this evil continue to grow. Since our administration and senior leadership here at URI has not only failed to remove racism, but continue to promote systemic racism, it falls to us students to hold them accountable for their wrong doings and to help them hold themselves to a higher standard as our educators.

We need inclusion, love, and diversity to be the core building blocks of our beautiful school, not just a frivolous idea that senior leadership and department heads give us the illusion of. In 128 years we have not had a single African American president or member of senior leadership, and extremely qualified and intelligent African American and Native American job candidates are being rejected in fear that they will provoke necessary transformative change and help put an end to the violent and derogatory offences towards marginalized students being swept under the rug by Kathy Collins and the Office of Student affairs.

The handful of African American and Latino professors we have, struggle for tenure and are being passed over for leadership positions, and the list goes on! We will not stand for this blatant acceptance of racism by senior leadership any longer and we DEMAND change. Our mission is to educate students to be dignified selfless guardians and advocates of structural diversity in academic institutions, and to hold establishments, especially establishments of higher learning, responsible for their disregard and callowness of basic human rights and dignity of the marginalized students on and off our campus.  

Some of our main demands include the following;

(1)The next President of the University of Rhode Island must be an African-American with a lineage to slavery. The Criminal Justice Department and Harrington School must diversify leadership and faculty immediately to reflect the demographics of our nation.

(2) Current recruitment firms for senior leadership must change immediately. Current recruiting firms are using the same racist procedures and embedded cultural hegemonic discriminatory practices that have produced the same all-White leadership at URI for 128 years.

(3) All Search and Leadership Committees must include: Africana Studies Department Chair Professor Dr. Vanessa Wynder Quainoo, African-American students from the Black Student Union and the leaders in the Africana Studies Department

(4) Recruit and retain African-American and Latino students and immediately remove barriers for Black Greek Life organizations to open chapters on campus. 

(5) The two highly qualified candidates Dr. Harry Alston and Dr. Sylvia Spears who were derailed by Mary Grace, Kathy Collins, and the URI leadership must be offered the position of VP for Diversity (Chief Diversity Officer) and/or position of  Director of Diverse Faculty Recruitment and Retention.

(6) Current CDO Mary Grace must be fired or transferred out of the Community, Equity and Diversity (CED) office, as she is ineffective and incompetent. She has the ardent support of those who intrinsically benefit from URI’s systemic racist policies that she helps maintain for the all-White URI leadership—while using her color as a shield against criticism. She failed at Brown University and had to resign.

(7) Current Executive Director for Inclusive Excellence in the College of Business, Sean Rogers must be removed, he can remain in the business school as a labor business professor. The URI leadership see Sean Rogers as a credible representative for Black people at URI and they exploit this resource.  

(8)Either the CDO position is raised to an independent sovereign VP level position so the person can be effective; or the controlling VP Kathy Collins of the Division of Student Affairs needs to be removed from office if URI is to move forward and develop a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program with high caliber African-Americans who are critical race theory and DEI experts and also well versed in civil rights advocacy and possessing deep contacts in the African-American civil rights community.

(9)Henceforth, ALL diversity and search committees must be made up of a majority African- Americans and Latinos—there is no need for White faculty/administrators on committees because it is self-evident that they have proven themselves to be incapable of fairness and are hopeless at recruiting equitably and impartially. 

(10) Human Resources: Anne Marie Coleman and Laura Kenerson need to be fired. It is impossible for this egregious level of racism and employment discrimination to exist at URI, without their complicity and without a normalized integration of racial discrimination in Human Resources

Read our full list of demands under the tab “Declaration of Diversity” or download it here Declaration of Diversity. To learn more please visit diversitythinktank.org 

(Please feel free to contact URI students Anna or Lindsay at anna_barone@uri.edu and lberthiaume@uri.edu with any questions)

(List of demands in Declaration of Diversity are compiled, suggested, edited or written by: Ajibola Olatunji, Ashley Heaven Diaz, Austyn Ramsay, Benjamin Wilkie, Destiney Palacios, Flora Silva, Jude Amoako, Leila Cox, Michael A’vant, Mitchell Asante, Nadia Tate-Maloney, Prof. Louis Kwame Fosu, Sean Miller and others.)