Anderson Freeman Center Supports Minority Students

The College has opened the Anderson Freeman Resource Center (AFC) to support minority students in an institutional effort to take new steps to better serve an increasingly diverse campus. Director Roberto Lint Sagarena said the AFC, located in Carr Hall, will house cultural organizations, a study library and drop-in counseling and advising, among other resources.

“The goals of the Anderson Freeman Center include addressing the unique social and cultural concerns specific to students of color, students who are the first in their families to attend college, students from low-income backgrounds, LGBTQ students and others that have been historically underrepresented or marginalized in American higher education,” Lint Sagarena said.

So far, the AFC has hosted events related to orientation, Homecoming and a Halloween gathering at Carr Hall. A grand opening is planned to coincide with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January.
AFC fellow Gaby Fuentes ’16 said the Halloween event was part of the center’s larger push to initiate conversations on cultural appropriation that resulted in a campus-wide video about respectful costumes for the holiday.

Debanjan Roychoudhury ’16, another fellow, said the AFC has dually advocated for underrepresented students and provided them a place to feel welcome and safe.

“Halloween was definitely huge,” Roychoudhury said. “We spearheaded most of the initiative to rid our campus of racist costumes. It’s become quite an epidemic in the last few years.”

“On one hand we were advocating for students, we were pushing administration, we were raising awareness,” he added. “On the other hand we were providing a space here for students who maybe felt Halloween wasn’t a safe space outside this center.”

According to Roychoudhury, the fact that cultural insensitivity makes some students feel unsafe on campus shows how the College advertises for a diverse student body but has allowed minority students to fall through the cracks.

“Students have fought for this center for a very long time,” added Social Media and Marketing Fellow Diku Rogers ’16.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work that institutionally is supposed to be provided for us,” Roychoudhury said. “We were told we would be supported in these ways. We have Discover Middlebury. We have Prospective Students day. We have particular ways that this school markets itself to be a particular institution. We were not told the whole truth.”

What’s in a name?

As part of its marketing, the College claims a legacy of inclusion because it graduated the nation’s first black student, Alexander Twilight, in 1823. But Twilight’s ancestry was not rediscovered until 1971, when elite schools were fighting to claim the first black American graduate, Conor Grant ’15 wrote for the Campus last year.

“When Twilight was admitted, Middlebury administrators did not know that he was black,” Grant wrote. “In fact, most who knew him assumed Twilight was white.”

“That was a diversity effort, not an effort to say who was actually best serving black students,” Roychoudhury said. “Middlebury won.”

When choosing a name for the new center, the AFC team decided to honor two alums of color whose blackness was known during their time at the College.

“The first known black student at Middlebury was Martin Henry Freeman,” Roychoudhury said.

“He was the first black president of a college in the entire United States. The fact that that man went to this school and that so many students of color don’t know about it is a shame.”

The other honoree, Mary Annette Anderson, was the first black woman to attend the College and the first black female Phi Beta Kappa inductee.

“Both of them led lives of academic excellence,” Roychoudhury said. “They were both pioneers and they both very much gave back in their time after Middlebury. We thought that dedicating the center in their name would be important in terms of cultivating a sense of pride and a sense of history among students of color, who for a lot of us feel like we’re the first people of color to ever come here.”

That isolation exists in part because many students of color have never met their predecessors.
Roychoudhury said the College had not hosted an Alumni of Color weekend for ten years until this fall.

“Coming to a school like Middlebury, the alumni network is really one of the most important things,” he said. ”Think about it. For ten years, there were students who spent their whole time here and didn’t have an Alumni of Color weekend. That’s a disservice. When we’re talking about these things, these aren’t just accidents. These are institutional disservices to students of color. We are in the business of reversing and correcting some of those disservices.”

Problems that persisted

According to the fellows, historically underrepresented students have struggled in the past because the College is still designed for its legacy of wealthy white students.

“When you have an institution that was historically based to serve only one demographic and then you try to diversify it without providing the necessary resources and support, you have students not succeeding not because they aren’t capable, but because the institution isn’t serving their needs,” Fuentes said.

Roychoudhury said many faculty members at the College are unprepared to encourage students of color, students for whom English is not their first language and other historically underrepresented students, and that some faculty were instead the source of the microagressions that made those students feel unsafe.

Students who face racial prejudice or discrimination are often referred for counseling rather than helped to handle the situation directly.

“Instead of addressing racism, what has happened in the past is students have been sent to the counseling center,” said Cindy Esparza ’17, AFC fellow and Alianza member. “There, they still haven’t been met with the means to really unpack what happened on campus.”

Even when referred for mental health services, some students met a staff that was as equally homogenous as the student body.

“The first counselor of color on staff at this school was Ximena [Mejia] in 2008,” Roychoudhury said. “Students of color didn’t just get here in 2008. They’ve been here for a long time.”

According to Esperanza, when the College didn’t help minority students, campus leaders did their best to step in.

“Before the center, cultural organizations had to wear a really big hat,” she said. “As a board member, you had to be there for your membership, which is part of the point, but you were solving problems that really weren’t your place as a student to have to deal with.”

“The upperclassmen were happy to help, but at the end of the day, it was really draining on them to have to help students,” she added. “I came here to learn, not to teach, and so being able to have a center where we have people that are trained and there are resources for the students, that’s really important.”

Steps to a solution

The fellows said Anderson Freeman Resource Center and its various systems of support have helped many students so far, but that much work remains to make the College a truly inclusive institution.

“I think we’ve been very successful if you look at the numbers of people we’ve had coming in and out,” Roychoudhury said. “We’ve had entire workshops held here on cultural competency for faculty. More than 1,200 visits were logged at the AFC in October.

“Now, when a student comes in and for the first time in class they’re told, ‘I can’t understand you. You have an accent,’ we can say, ‘Listen, we’re going to report this. We are going to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen on a regular basis,’” he added.

Esparza said having dedicated faculty and staff to support minority students has shifted the burden off cultural organizations and renewed communication with Old Chapel.

“Having [Associate Director] Jennifer Herrera and Roberto all in one space, I think that’s a huge thing to acknowledge,” she said. “Because before, it was like we would reinvent the wheel every year. You would have [student] leadership changing and you would have students facing the same issues and the administration would never reach out a hand. Now, there is a path for us to talk more directly to administration and for the administration to be more receptive.”

Rogers said that previously students who asked for dedicated resources were told, “The whole campus is a safe space.” Now, she said, students have more of the resources they need.

“Talking to the faculty here, they can say, “Oh, this is a project you’re think of? Talk to this person. Oh, this is something that happened to you? Okay, talk to the Dean of Students,” she said. “When things happen and I’m affected by it, there are people I can go to. We as students feel a lot that we have to work for Middlebury, but we also have to make Middlebury work for us.”

Roychoudhury added that when students visit the Anderson Freeman Center, for whatever reason, they will be met with acceptance and understanding.

“We don’t treat students that come into this center as if there’s a problem with them,” he said. “We treat students that come into this center as, ‘You are gifted. You are talented. And you are looking for a space where that brightness is going to be encouraged. We are working on less stigma and more assistance.”

Combined with a lack of resources, that stigma when seeking support is often what holds minority students back from getting the help they need. Roychoudhury added that the AFC aims to support students by treating them like valued members of the College and giving them a place to feel like a part of the campus.

“Someone who graduated last year was visiting this weekend,” Esparza said. “They said to me, ‘Man, if a space like this would have existed, I’d easily have a 3.8 GPA. Because I’d have had a place to work were I felt comfortable.’ It’s amazing how much better you perform when you’re comfortable in a space and when you feel like you belong.”

“Students of color are not the weakness of the campus, and that’s very much how we’ve been viewed,” Roychoudhury said. “Low retention rates. That we need academic services. That we’re here on handouts. That we don’t deserve to be here. These are the things we get told every single day. We’re fighting for diversity to not be something that is just part of this campus, but is a central strength of this campus.”