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In addition to a budget that would allow them to offer more cultural, social, and educational programs, the students wanted upgrades to their clunky, outdated computer equipment. More broadly, they wanted a minor in Black studies, a commitment to hire more Black tenure-track faculty members, and a seat at the table on all search and hiring committees. To make sure all this happened, they called on the university to hire a chief diversity officer, reporting directly to the president, who would champion their goals.
Then, and now, Black students represented only about 3 percent of the students at the mostly Hispanic university, and, their leaders said, they were tired of feeling overlooked.
Change, while slower than they would like, has been happening. In April 2021, New Mexico State hired its first vice president for equity, inclusion, and diversity to oversee an office aimed at making the university a more equitable and welcoming place for diverse students and employees. Teresa Maria Linda Scholz, a former associate vice chancellor and chief diversity officer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, was selected after a nationwide search. In November, the university opened a larger, more centralized center for Black Programs, one of four diversity programs Scholz’s office now oversees. (The others are for Chicano, American Indian, and LGBTQ students.)
But instead of quelling the complaints, the new equity and diversity office has churned through a succession of interim Black Programs directors who have been fired, driven out, or dropped. Students say that being on their fifth interim director since 2019, and the fourth since Scholz arrived, means that planned programs get cancelled and activity organizers are overwhelmed.
Student leaders now insist that their programs need to be moved out of the Office for Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity that their predecessors had demanded.
“It was created because students were so frustrated and felt they needed a champion,” said Bobbie Green, who was fired in February, the third turnover in the job in a little over a year. “Unfortunately, it’s a case of ‘Be careful what you ask for.’”
In addition to being a former business faculty member at New Mexico State, Green was well connected in the community as president of the local NAACP. She confirmed her dismissal in an email to The Chronicle that started: “I Bobbie Green, President of Doña Ana County NAACP, was fired by the VP of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity at New Mexico State University DURING BLACK HISTORY MONTH!”
It was created because students were so frustrated and felt they needed a champion.
The battle over Black Programs’ place in New Mexico State’s diversity office comes at a time when DEI offices are under intense scrutiny, mostly from conservative lawmakers intent on abolishing them. Turnover among diversity leaders is high, and morale is low.
Usually, the pressures come from outside the office. At NMSU, they’re also coming from inside.
New Mexico State isn’t the only minority-serving institution with limited budgets and competing demands struggling to meet the needs of increasingly diverse student bodies. At this campus, though, those problems have been aggravated by clashing personalities, a lack of trust, and relationships strained by communication problems. And it’s come at a time when the university is struggling with a series of leadership crises that have diverted the attention of campus leaders, some of whom have recently left or are on their way out.
To report this story, The Chronicle interviewed more than a dozen current and former campus administrators, faculty members, and student leaders and reviewed dozens of pages of emails, campus memos, meeting notes, complaints, and audio files.
First, it helps to consider the broader context in which the tensions in the diversity office are playing out. Both the former provost and Title IX coordinator have filed lawsuits, claiming they were dismissed in retaliation for trying to investigate what they saw as improprieties in pay and hiring practices. John D. Floros resigned as president last year, and the Board of Regents decided in December not to renew the five-year contract of the chancellor, Dan E. Arvizu.
Meanwhile, hitting closer to home for students, the men’s basketball season was cancelled, and its former head coach was fired after reports of persistent hazing. The New Mexico State Police and the Bernalillo County District Attorney’s office are also looking into how the basketball team’s coaches, staff, and players handled an incident in which an NMSU player, Mike Peake, fatally shot a student from the University of New Mexico who police say had ambushed him to get even for an earlier fight. The turmoil in the basketball program has caused further stress in New Mexico State’s small Black population because most of the athletes, including Peake, are Black.
A law firm hired to investigate found no evidence that laws were broken, but it recommended that the university tighten its weapons and curfew policies.
In the midst of turmoil, whether it’s the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 by Minneapolis police officers, the Covid-19 pandemic, or the university’s internal troubles, the Black Programs office has provided camaraderie and support for many of the approximately 400 Black students at the Las Cruces campus, students said. Students gather in the lounge for game nights and study sessions, and faculty members sometimes drop by to hang out with, and get to know, the students. Black students make up 2.8 percent of the population of about 14,000 students, mirroring their population in the state of New Mexico. The campus’s 8,325 Hispanic students represent 58 percent of the population.
The goal of Black Programs, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, is “to unite students of African American, Caribbean, and African descent by increasing the awareness and appreciation of Black history through educational, cultural, social, and academic programs.”
Until recently, it struggled to get by with one part-time student employee, while other diversity programs had full-time coordinators. Now, all the diversity programs have, in addition to program directors, staff program coordinators who each earn $30,000 a year, a campus spokesman said. And while, in the past, Black Programs has worked with a smaller budget, all the diversity programs now receive the same funding — $25,000 a year from the university and an additional $8,000 from student government.
Some of these changes have come about in the aftermath of the emotional 2019 town hall, in which students aired their grievances about what they perceived to be a lack of attention to Black students’ needs. But that’s also when the turnover of Black Programs directors began.
In October of that year, Patrick Turner, then the new director of student success, was asked to take on the additional role of acting director of Black Programs. He replaced Festus Addo-Yobo, who had overseen that program since 2005 amid escalating complaints about its effectiveness. Turner helped the university land its next interim director of Black Programs, Kimberly D. York.
York, who had spent several years mentoring and volunteering with the program, stepped into that position in July 2020 with the expectation, she said, that the job would become permanent. She put her background in clinical social work, nonprofit leadership, and youth development to work, reaching out to athletes to get them more involved in campus activities, and built on her community connections as a leader in the local NAACP.
She started a weekly podcast highlighting the work of Black faculty and staff to create a bridge between students and employees, and launched a “Success Through Sisterhood” program to expand access to professional mentors, as well as opportunities for students to mentor middle- and high-school students. Outdoor activities like a “Girl Trek Walk” provided relief for students cooped up inside during the pandemic.
Scholz started at New Mexico State in August 2021. A first-generation college student, she was raised in Guatemala and the United States and pledged to propel the university forward as both a Hispanic-serving and minority-serving university. But, to some critics, her attention tipped too far toward the interests of Hispanic students, who greatly outnumber other groups.
Scholz addressed the controversy in a widely circulated email on March 10. She acknowledged that “several leadership changes in our Black Programs office in recent months,” coupled with top-level administrative turnover and turmoil in the basketball program, “have left some in our community feeling a little uneasy about the future.”
The university’s shift toward focusing more on equity, inclusion, and diversity has created positive changes, she wrote, including new staff positions to oversee diversity efforts at the program and college levels. “Whether positive or not, change is inherently stressful,” Scholz added. “Even sought-after, welcome changes sometimes bring their own sources of anxiety — and when change happens, our first instinct is sometimes aversion.” Sometimes, she wrote, “this backlash can slow our momentum.”
Scholtz declined an interview request but issued a statement to The Chronicle that expressed the university’s commitment to support “all students, including NMSU’s Black students, through a diverse array of programs” that it’s “constantly working to update and refine.”
In the statement to The Chronicle, Scholz pointed out a 2020 external review by three leading higher-education diversity officers that recommended that the university hire a vice president/chief diversity officer who would oversee all its diversity programs. Having the programs spread across different offices, they said, could create redundancy and communication problems, and make it more difficult to evaluate their success. In general, the reviewers found, “structures and programs that have been set up to address diversity are disconnected, unrecognized, and under-resourced.”
Traditionally marginalized groups, the reviewers said, described a campus environment that is “hostile” and “lacking in equity and inclusion despite its representational diversity.” The report presaged some of the conflicts that would arise with the new diversity office. Some people told them they were skeptical that the university’s stated DEI commitment would stick, in part because of the frequent leadership changes in recent years.
“The university’s designation as an HSI and MSI institution represents the diversity among students at NMSU but is not a proxy for being an inclusive community,” the reviewers wrote. “Campus climate and culture is influenced by whether NMSU is viewed as welcoming and inclusive for ALL.” The university, they said, should examine how the campus looks to different groups: Whose photos are on the walls? Whose public art is represented? Who are the buildings are named after?
One of the reviewers was Paulette Granberry Russell, who has since become president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. She said she hasn’t been following the developments at New Mexico State and couldn’t comment on the friction within the diversity department.
Asked for specifics, she said it was mostly the tone in which Scholz talked to her. “It wasn’t just me who noticed it. Students did, as well,” York said. “The way she spoke to us was different from the way she spoke to the Hispanic students.” Scholz has declined to comment publicly on such complaints, saying they involve private personnel matters.
York was popular with students. In January 2022, at a second town hall organized by the university’s Black Student Association to assess progress on their 2019 demands, the group’s president called on the university to name York the permanent director of Black Programs. But by then, the relationship between York and Scholz, which played out in tense mediated sessions, was fraying to the breaking point. In one recorded conversation that York shared with The Chronicle, York told her supervisor, “You are very condescending. Never in my life have I experienced anything like this. Any time I have to meet with you, I am having anxiety attacks.” The conversation was mediated by an administrator from the human-resources office who suggested that York let Scholz know when she felt Scholz was talking down to her.
We are desperately trying to become a successful program for our students, which is hard to do without the proper tools and encouragement from the campus.
York said in an interview that she was tired of feeling as if she was “on trial the whole time.” She accused Scholz of reneging on a stated plan to appoint her to the permanent position as Black Programs director and opening it to a national search instead. She believes Scholz did so in retaliation for a disagreement they had about a candidate for a joint staff position for Chicano and Black Programs. York said the candidate, whom the Chicano Programs favored, said something she found racially problematic during her interview, but when York shared the video of that conversation with Scholz, at Scholz’ request, the vice president didn’t listen to it.
Scholz said they’d need a more specific reason for rejecting the candidate than saying the person “wasn’t a good fit.” That’s the kind of language, she told York, that implicit-bias training warns can be “coded bias language.” She acknowledged that York hadn’t been through that training. York, who said she was working on a Ph.D. in organizational psychology, later said she provided Scholz with research articles she said showed that not being a good fit or a good match was an acceptable reason to reject someone. Once again, she felt she was being talked down to.
In a February 2022 email from the chancellor, which York shared with The Chronicle, Arvizu chastised York for the way she was handling conflicts with Scholz. Instead of addressing concerns with her boss directly, he wrote, “you instead engage other NMSU colleagues on your behalf, sometimes with misinformation.” In doing so, he said, York had politicized and stalled the hiring process and undermined her supervisor’s role as hiring manager for the permanent Black Programs director position. If she continued, Arvizu warned, disciplinary action would result.
York said the chancellor sent her the email during a virtual meeting he had invited her to, without informing her why she was being called or that her supervisor, Scholz, would also be attending. “I felt like I was being ambushed,” York said. She said the colleagues she had been speaking with were members of an advisory group, set up after the 2019 town hall, to ensure that diversity goals were being met.
In March 2022, she wrote the human-resources department, saying she was resigning to protect her “well-being and psychological safety.” She added, “In good faith and in the face of blatant inequities, I have worked diligently to restore the health and confidence of the Black Programs Department. Prior to the installation of my new supervisor, Linda Scholz, I made it known directly to top administration that I do not feel psychologically safe with her. Under her leadership, the past seven months have literally been tormenting.”
The university asked Michael Ray, director of American Indian Programs, to step in as the next interim director, essentially doing double duty for both the American Indian and Black Programs.
About five months after Ray had started, Scholz sent an email to several campus administrators informing them that yet another interim director would be hired in the fall while the search for a permanent director continued. That prompted Turner, one of the former interim directors and now associate provost for student success, to email the chancellor that Black students, faculty, and staff had been left out of the various search processes. (Scholz wrote in an email to The Chronicle that “there were conversations with Black employees and community members, but typically faculty, staff, and students are not consulted when appointing an interim.”)
Turner went on, in his email to the chancellor, to say that he and Black student leaders had talked to Scholz and found her disrespectful and uncooperative in their interactions. His email didn’t provide specific examples, and students who have complained about their interactions with the vice president haven’t publicly shared examples either, making it hard to know exactly how their perceptions of Scholz being condescending to Black people have developed. “This comes at a time when it is critical that Black Programs connect with new and returning students, parents, and families to create a space of belonging and visibility,” Turner wrote. Arvizu, he said, didn’t respond to his request for a meeting.
Again, the search was on for an interim director for Black Programs.
But tensions were growing between Scholz and Green, who says she told her boss that Black students “are underserved and understaffed and undersupported and underrepresented.”
Emily Kinskey for The Chronicle
Five months after she started, Green was fired. As with her predecessors, no reason was publicly given for her dismissal, but it happened soon after Scholz accused Green of extending a job offer to a new full-time program coordinator without going through all of the proper channels. She also criticized Green for offering a salary — $36,000 — that the vice president said was above the university’s entry-level pay. Green said she was forced to retract the offer and re-offer the position at $30,000, which Green called “less than a poverty-level wage.”
On February 3, Green sent an email to Scholz, copying university and student leaders. In it, she accused the vice president of retaliating against her for asking that Black Programs be moved to the student-success office. “Black Programs has been treated differently than the other diversity programs and has been SET UP TO FAIL,” she wrote. The lack of stability and constant turnover in the Black Programs office has made it all but impossible, Green wrote in a subsequent email, to apply for grants.
In an emailed response to The Chronicle last week, Scholz called Green’s accusations of favoritism false and said that all of the program coordinators were hired at the same rate in accordance with a collective-bargaining agreement the university has for non-exempt employees.
On February 28, Scholz sent out an email thanking Green for her service and announcing she was being replaced. Patricia Leyba, who’s also the director of experiential learning, became the fifth interim director for Black Programs since 2019. She’ll serve while the university finalizes plans to hire a permanent director it expects to bring in by this summer.
Despite being fired, Green said she wants to continue working, from her position as an NAACP chapter president, to support Black students at NMSU. But unless the Black Programs office is removed from the equity office, she said, “it would be hard for me to recommend NMSU to Black students or faculty.”
“Being so close to campus it is supposed to feel like a home away from home,” she wrote. “Instead, we’re feeling alone. We are desperately trying to become a successful program for our students, which is hard to do without the proper tools and encouragement from the campus.”
Gentle and the BSA’s president, Clarissa Bryant, also circulated a statement calling for Black Programs to be moved, citing the “lack of support” for BSA while it’s under the Office for Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity, and the high turnover of interim directors. Both Gentle and Bryant declined interview requests.
Darnicia Holt, a 2020 NMSU graduate who was president of the BSA when it presented its demands in 2019, said she was disappointed to hear that Black Programs had been struggling under the diversity office she’d fought for. “I’m glad that they got their space, but you have to have money to support programming,” she said. With all of the turmoil at her alma mater, “directors coming and going — it doesn’t necessarily surprise me.”
Black, Chicano, American Indian, and LGBTQ programs all have new full-time program coordinator positions, Scholz pointed out. This “will allow us to expand their important work beyond student activity programming into areas that allow our students to experience a deeper sense of belonging through collaborative and meaningful work.” None of the other coordinator positions have faced the kind of turnover seen in Black Programs.
In a column last February, Scholz referred to the university’s dual designation as both a Hispanic-serving and minority-serving university. She wrote about the importance of not just enrolling, but serving the needs of minority students, a concept that scholars like Gina Ann Garcia of the University of Pittsburgh and others have promoted mostly in the context of Hispanic-serving institutions.
Many universities, like NMSU, hold dual designations, say as minority-serving and Hispanic-serving institutions, but they sometimes have to focus on one for the purposes of obtaining certain federal grants. A group of researchers is pursuing a new way of classifying minority-serving institutions that recognizes their multiple identities and “does not render invisible the students of color who attend that institution.”
Turner said he’s excited about the opportunity to see his university truly serving Hispanic students, but that it has to do the same for all minority students. When only a limited amount of federal funding is allocated to minority-serving institutions, including Hispanic-serving, historically Black, Tribal, or Asian, “it’s almost like you’re pitting minorities against each other,” he said. When a Black person attends a Hispanic-serving institution or a Hispanic person attends a historically Black college, “that doesn’t mean we don’t want to be seen. You can’t say we have many identities, but we’re just going to focus on one.”
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Katherine Mangan
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