Many students carried signs that mentioned the “CMC mold" in reference to an email Spellman sent to Lisette Espinosa CM ‘15 that infuriated many students of marginalized identities. “[W]e are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold,” read Spellman’s response to Espinosa, who had sent Spellman and other CMC administrators her Oct. 23 TSL op-ed about her experience feeling unwelcome at CMC as a low-income woman of color. This phrase quickly became a rallying cry for CMC students who had experienced discrimination and intolerance on campus and felt frustrated and ignored by the administration. In fact, the campus group CMCers of Color presented a set of proposed actions to Chodosh in April of this year containing the same demands made today, as documented in the student groups' letter. Varughese says students want to be involved in creating and designing temporary and permanent resource centers that have been promised as well as in the hiring of the new dean of students and a diversity administrator. Chodosh said in an interview with TSL and the CMC Forum that CMC has authorized diversity positions in both the dean of students and the dean of faculty offices, although the hiring processes for each of these positions has not yet begun, and that he intended to address the rest of the students’ demands. “I will reiterate: I am committed, as I have always been, to support students of all backgrounds, of all needs and interests, and I will work to continue to change the institution,” Spellman said at the protest. Chodosh confirmed a permanent programming space to support campus climate, including “identity, diversity, and free speech,” in an email sent to students 20 minutes before the protest and in an interview with TSL and the CMC Forum before the protest. “You stand here like a man in front of me and tell me you can’t afford a space for us to feel safe?” el-Jazara, one of the hunger strikers, said to Chodosh at the protest. Though praising its reputation as a "leading liberal arts college," CMC’s accrediting body, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, criticized the school’s lack of “recruitment of talented women and persons of color” and “attention to diversity and campus climate issues for minorities” in reports in the 1990’s, 2000, and 2009.
– Another college official has resigned in the wake of racial tension, this time in California. Mary Spellman, dean of students at Claremont McKenna College, stepped down Thursday, after sending an email that sparked an uproar last month, the Los Angeles Times reports. But the larger brouhaha started in April, when around 30 students of color wrote to the college's president to complain about feeling uncomfortable on campus. Just 4% of undergraduates at the school are black, 8% are mixed race, 10% are Asian-American, 12% are Latino, and 43% are white. The students listed incidents such as racial slurs, vandalism, and mockery on campus, and accused administrators of trying to silence their complaints. Then, last month, one Latina student wrote an op-ed in which she discussed feeling uncomfortable at the school, and Spellman responded with a letter promising to assist students "who don't fit our CMC mold." Cue outrage. Spellman's email sparked more protests, including a hunger strike by two students, and the university did a review of her office. She apologized but ultimately stepped down anyway. "I believe [stepping down] is the best way to gain closure of a controversy that has divided the student body and disrupted the mission of this fine institution," she wrote in her resignation email. The student protest leaders say they're not done; they want more diverse faculty and staff and more funding for multicultural clubs, among other things. In addition to similar protests at Mizzou, the Times notes that students at New York's Ithaca College are also calling for the president to resign because he allegedly has not addressed racial problems on campus; the New York Times reports that students at Yale and UCLA have also been protesting in recent weeks over campus racial tensions.