University of New Hampshire Makes Progress in Increasing Diversity

DURHAM, N.H.

After more than a decade spent recruiting and building a support base for minority students, the University of New Hampshire remains a very White school in a very White state.

Minorities made up about 6.5 percent of the school’s undergraduates as of last fall. That’s more diverse than the state as a whole — which is about 95.5 percent White — but below the goal set in 1998 when a group of students staged a sit-in at the university president’s office to demand more diversity.

To end the sit-in, then-President Joan Leitzel agreed to 11 objectives, including increasing Black student enrollment to 300 by 2004 and increasing the number of Black tenure-track faculty members to 10 by 2003. By fall 2008, there were 197 Black undergraduate and graduate students at UNH and UNH-Manchester, and eight tenure-track faculty members.