t was mid-morning on Friday, April 16, when two dozen students mounted the stairs to the third floor of the Eustis Administration Building chanting “racism must go.” Many of the students had gotten up early on Wednesday morning, two days before, to attend the 8 a.m. Campus Community Committee meeting in the Pugh Center, where the Task Force on Institutional Racism had presented its final report. Many also had been up late Thursday night at a Student Government Association (SGA) meeting advocating creation of a minority affairs representative on the SGA’s legislative body, the Presidents’ Council.
The chanting group was a coalition of white students joining students of color, with a few faculty and staff members as well. They all shared a commitment to rid Colby of any and all residues of racism that still insidiously infect institutions and society in America, including Colby, they said. And, they said, they were frustrated.
The students requested and got a meeting with President Bill Cotter, who was attending the April Board of Trustees meeting across campus in the Roberts Building. When Cotter arrived, they presented a list of 16 demands and vowed to remain in the president’s office until they received answers and assurances. “We are tired of the same old rhetoric,” their statement said.
Cotter, needing to get back to business with trustees, agreed to see students at 6:30 p.m. The students decided to stay put until that time, and the sit-in of 1999 began.
Student frustration was brought to a head by several developments on campus in the week leading up to April 16. An opinion piece in The Colby Echo had contained remarks that they characterized as racially insensitive. The presentation of the Report of the Task Force on Institutional Racism the previous Wednesday had refocused attention on several issues, including how minority students feel burdened by the role they feel compelled to take on to improve issues of diversity and equality on campus. And on Thursday an initiative to get a voting minority-affairs representative approved for the Presidents’ Council achieved what some proponents considered less than half a loaf—a non-voting representative of the Pugh Center Alliance (a coalition of multicultural clubs and organizations with offices in the Pugh Center).
These events and the students’ assertion that it is the job of Colby’s senior administration, not students and faculty, and particularly not students and faculty of color, to root out and redress inequities, led to a late night strategy session on Thursday. Plans for the march were hatched.
“Dialogue is good. Talking about these issues is important,” said Kyle Potter ’99 afterward. “What I’m saying is, I’ve talked about them for four years.”
Students said they decided to test Cotter’s open-door policy and intended to remain in his office until they got a satisfactory response. In interviews held afterward, there was near unanimity among student leaders of the protest: “We’re not condemning Colby. We’re saying that we feel Colby can be a better place and we have some ideas that I think are really good ideas,” said Potter. “We’re not calling anyone racist. We are in no way calling President Cotter racist. Anyone who knows his track record knows that he cares. We just went to his office to say to him, ‘look what can be better.’ He’s the guy who can get this stuff done.”
“The system here is not perfect. If you work on it, it can be better,” said Kenya Sanders ’00, student convener of the Task Force on Institutional Racism and a spokesperson during the protest. “It wasn’t a personal attack, but as president of Colby College, he is not doing everything he could be.”
“Colby is not any worse than Bates or Bowdoin or most other schools of its rank,” said Stephen Murphy ’99. “But Colby needs to take the challenge and go beyond its peers and be a leader.”
