 "Photo: Charlie Deboyace")
As more than 600 students marched on the Main Administration Building last week touting megaphones, banners and indignation over the removal of a top diversity administrator, Cordell Black — the ousted official at the center of the controversy — sat in a doctor's office.
Even if he had not had the standing appointment, Black said he still would have avoided the hordes of students protesting in his name outside his office. Black, the associate provost for equity and diversity, spoke briefly at a town hall meeting the night before but maintains the uproar is not about him.
"It's about what the students perceive as an erosion in the university's commitment to diversity," Black said. "I'm not influencing these students one way or another."
This decision to keep to the sidelines is a rare one for Black. Growing up in Detroit, he fought his high school's policy of tracking black students away from a college preparatory curriculum. As a college student, he marched for civil rights in Raleigh, N.C.
Black displays binders full of speeches he has delivered to the university community on a bookshelf in his office, and faculty members said he rarely misses an opportunity to speak his mind on diversity issues.
"It takes a courageous person to successfully persuade upper-level administrators about the importance of diversity and the importance of putting financial strength behind it," Nyumburu Cultural Center Director Ronald Zeigler said.
Black's very arrival at the university as a French literature professor in 1979 stemmed from a federal mandate to integrate faculty at public universities. He has since lobbied to fund diversity programs and pushed to diversify the university's faculty. He said he was particularly proud of the engineering school, which has one of the country's few black engineering deans.
Luke Jensen, the director of the Office of LBGT Equity, said it was Black who advocated on his behalf when Provost Nariman Farvardin balked at continuing the contract for the office's only full-time staffer.
Farvardin lauded Black's 18 years as an administrator as "essential and invaluable to the university's diversity efforts."
"He's one who speaks the truth," said Dottie Chicquelo, the president of the Black Faculty and Staff Association. "If he's asked to talk about an issue, he's not one to bite his tongue."
But Black's take on the truth — aggressive and to the point, he admitted — can rub people the wrong way.
"It has its drawbacks," he said. "It can be an alienating experience, but that's never deterred me."
The provost said Black's dismissal was based solely on budgetary calculations, and Black insisted he has never received a poor job performance review. He even offered to show his personnel file to prove it before his secretary pointed out it would violate university policy.
"Sometimes I have to serve as Dr. Black's gatekeeper," joked Jacqueline Sibert, who has been Black's secretary for six years.
Black's job placed him at the head of the Office of LGBT Equity, Nyumburu and the Office of Multi-ethnic Student Education, but the directors of those offices said he rarely confined himself to those responsibilities. Students and faculty seeking mentorship and advice were mainstays in his office.
Jensen described Black as a community builder.
"If you're looking for someone who goes to meetings and has agendas and sets out goals that are written down in bullet points, that's not Cordell," he said. "What Cordell does is less formal. It is accomplished in chance meetings that, in reality, aren't set up by chance, in conversations that might seem superficial but, in reality, there's a lot of content in that conversation, by simply being in certain places at certain times."
On June 30, Black's administrative position will become a part-time job. Black remains skeptical of the position's future.
"The paperwork might be handled on a part-time basis, but certainly not the advocacy," Black said. "The very time I put in attending events — there's no way in heck that can be done part-time."
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