The Red Room was filled to capacity on Feb. 12 when President Anthony Marx spoke of the College’s responsibility for achieving its goal in the areas of intolerance and inclusion devolving to all departments, offices and individuals. Everyone understands that we all share a level of responsibility. But, at the end of the day, who plays the key leadership role in developing critical plans? Who executes initiatives to promote a campus environment that respects and celebrates diversity? Who guides the community through challenges posed by encounters with different cultural perspectives and experiences? Who undertakes programs that increase awareness of and sensitivity to cultural diversity?

The answers to these questions didn’t come from the administration during the “Raising Our Voices” discussion. They came from Trinity College’s Dean of Multicultural Affairs and multicultural directors from Williams and Smith Colleges as they explained why the presence of permanent diversity staff is integral to their respective college communities. Throughout my time at Amherst, I have been asking deans, directors and cultural advisors at other colleges myriad questions about the importance of a permanent diversity infrastructure at their institutions, as a basis for comparison to the resources at our own school. When I gave these individuals our administration’s text-book answer to such queries, the best response came from the director of Tufts’ Hispanic Cultural Center. “If you asked me who initiates, coordinates and implements programs to promote cultural, class, gender, sexual orientation and religious understanding for the campus,” he said, “at one point in our school’s history, we would have said ‘all of us.’ It’s not until it became the full-time priority of people like me that anything ever happened.”

Many students, faculty and alumni at the Be Heard discussion made a similar pitch for institutional support. One professor said bluntly, “I’m convinced we need help.” The Amherst community is asking for solutions, however, the College seems to insist on throwing us bread crumbs.

Our sentiments at the Be Heard discussion were clear. The senate and the affinity groups agree that multicultural resources are long overdue. A Multicultural Center, deans of multicultural affairs, directors of multicultural programming, cultural advisers—some combination of these exists at every Ivy and NESCAC college. Despite the positive impact and success of such programs at these other institutions to date, the College has neglected to create anything exclusively devoted to multiculturalism. We are the college without any institutionalized resources or mechanisms for support. This is an intolerable situation.

Multiple years of planning, community discussions, forums and efforts on behalf of the students, affinity groups and a few courageous members of the faculty have aimed at the development of the Multicultural Center. But if this proposal is to be our victory, the results so far have been shameful. At the outset, the center was denied allocation of a space and was redirected to request the occupancy of a storage room in Gerald Penny 1997 Memorial Black Cultural Center. Last Monday, a proposal was brought to the senate to place the Multicultural Center in the Association of Amherst Students office, which sits in the basement of Keefe Campus Center. If this new proposal is realized, we will have moved from a closet in the Octagon to a box in the basement of the campus center—a box that will be unstaffed and insufficiently funded. There will be no dean or director of multicultural affairs, unlike in most colleges, employed to staff the office and initiate programmatic work, as the administration drags its feet for every issue concerning staff. The room will not even be staffed by paid student-workers, but by volunteers, because the College has declined to grant work-study benefits to students who run the center. In addition, the proposed Multicultural Center will need to be shared part-time with the AAS.

This obvious lack of regard is frankly humiliating. I have been optimistic for far too long; I now take the options of a box in the basement of the campus center or a closet in the Octagon as symbolic of our institutional lack of commitment to inclusion. The rest of the Five College Consortium all have staffed cultural centers with program directors; why should we be any different?

Let this sink in—among the Five Colleges, NESCAC schools and Ivies, Amherst College is the one institution that has not committed any institutional resources to fostering campus diversity and inclusion. I am not sure where on that continuum the President’s Office thinks we fit, or why our administration believes we are the anomalous institution that needs no program director or dean. After reviewing Monday night’s proposal, the senate almost unanimously agreed that there is a need for more than an unstaffed, underfunded box without any director that will be shared part-time with the AAS. As a senator, I feel that this is not a sufficient solution. As a student of color, I find this personally insulting.

I know that many students are eager to get this project off the ground by March. However, the chances of having a sufficient Multicultural Center by then are slim. How could we possibly be optimistic with the meager resources the administration has provided us? At this point, Amherst students may have to demand the requisite reforms through acts of protest and civil disobedience. While my hope is that we will not have to see that stage of action in order for the administration to finally commit the necessary resources, there is precedent should that course be pursued.

In 1992, Hampshire College students had to occupy the college’s science building to demand the faculty and resources that the administration promised to multicultural programming in a 1988 written agreement. A situation similar to ours happened in the spring of 1997 at Yale University, where the administration offered their cultural center a room in an old campus basement with a maximum capacity of 40 people. Sit-ins were organized to protest these decisions and the administration quickly abandoned plans to relocate the cultural centers. In 2005 and 2006, Yale and Wesleyan students held sit-ins in their schools’ admissions offices and rallies on school quads to protest dated financial aid policies and diversity stances, after the administrations of the two schools dismissed student concerns. As a result, both schools have seen changes in policy in recent years. Amherst’s administration is the one that lingers behind, and while regrettable, recourse to the proven tactics of protest and civil disobedience may be the only way to get the recognition we need.

With the unanimous formation of an ad-hoc committee to address this pressing issue, I hope that the senate can be an agent for mobilizing student support for the cause. Ideally, we can send a strong message to the College that we are serious about resources for multicultural action. Hopefully, the support that the AAS helps generate will lead to serious action by the College. The senate is in complete support of this cause; we did not dismiss the merits or needs of the proposed Multiculturalism Center. We denounced, unanimously, the administration’s makeshift solution to the issue. The need for institutional support must be taken more seriously than the College might like to believe, and it may fall to the students, with AAS leadership, to impress this fact on the administration.