Student Demands:

1. Increase diversity in faculty and staff, retention of current faculty and staff of color

• Create a structured wage table so that faculty and staff member of color can receive and anticipate raises
• Every faculty and staff member of color must receive a wage increase in the next fiscal year, and other measures must be created to ensure the retention of the faculty and staff of color that we have
• In the 2017 fall semester, the faculty hirings must be majority people of color, majority women, and include more than two black identified faculty
• must provide evidence of these hiring and raises within the next six months

2. Require cultural competency trainings for faculty, staff, and students

• Demand workshops/trainings on racial profiling and cultural competency specifically for public safety officers to be completed by the end of Spring semester 2016, and to be repeated every year with up-to-date materials for the duration of their employment with the University
• These trainings must be required for all incoming students in their orientation
• These trainings must be required for all incoming faculty and administrative staff, and these groups must be required to attend up-to-date cultural competency trainings annually for the duration of their employment with the University

3. In their first semester at USM, students are required to take a course on the history of privilege and oppression, specifically concerning histories and realities of the oppression of women and racial, sexual, gender, and religious minorities

• Classes that fulfill Diversity requirements must address race, privilege and oppression, and intersectionality
• These courses are required to include materials written by Black people, LGBTQI people, disabled people, and non-black people of color, published within the past five years

4. The administration must evaluate and update their system for tracking and recording harassment on campus, as well as commit to responding, recording, and acting on reports within 48 hours

• Faculty and staff who have delayed their responses to incidents in the past must issue a formal apology to the students individually and to the student population at large, recognizing their part in creating an unsafe campus environment
• There must be a formal effort to make access to and understanding of formal reporting available to students - official report forms must be prominently located in every dorm hall and every academic building on both Portland and Gorham campuses, and an online page for formal reporting must be created, publicized, and prominently available on the USM website

5. Expand mental health resources

• Because students of color cannot go to white counselors and expect them to understand their plight:
• We demand that Je Boone, who was retrenched in 2014, be rehired or if he is not willing or able to return another Black counselor be hired;
• As well as making sure there are academic advisors of color available to students regardless of their major

6. Revise speech code

• Stop using coded language such as “civility, diversity, etc…” when describing a racist campus climate
• Use explicit language around racism and white supremacy on campus

7. Faculty, staff, students of color should be on the Diversity council that reports to the president

• The Board of the Diversity Committee must include at least one black-identified faculty or staff member, unless all black-identified faculty or staff members are unwilling or unable to be in that position.

8. Make a concrete plan to retain students of color in the 2017/2018 academic year and beyond

• work in tandem with the Diversity Council to create this plan, and have the final plan be approved by the Diversity Council

9. Make resources available so that Students for #USMFutures can do an investigation into all of the racist acts that have been reported to Dean Pufhal, as well as the actions that she has taken in response (while respecting the confidentiality of students involved).

• These findings will be the basis for further actions holding Dean Pufhal, and potentially other administrative staff, accountable for failures of previous investigations and the ongoing sense of unsafety felt by students of color on both Portland and Gorham campuses

10. The Board of Trustees must engage with Students for #USMFutures as well as the Diversity Committee in an ongoing relationship concerning the enforcement of these demands and any other issues raised by either group, and furthering the transparency of the workings of the University.