Minor Progress in Black Enrollments at the University of Colorado

The 2005-06 academic year is one most black students at the University of Colorado at Boulder would rather forget. A black student leader received a racist death threat in an e-mail sent from a campus computer. The message read, “Why don’t you and all your black nigger friends disappear off our campus. You guys don’t belong. You will die if you run for student government again.” Several days later, racist fliers were posted on campus and additional fliers were slipped under dormitory room doors at the university. The previous year there had been several other racial incidents on campus.

As a result, in order to make black students feel welcome on campus, the University of Colorado made a concerted effort to attract more black students. This fall there are 78 black freshmen on campus. This is up 18 percent from a year ago. Yet overall enrollments at the university are up 12 percent. So blacks are only 1.4 percent of the first-year class, up only slightly from 1.3 percent a year ago.

Blacks are nearly 4 percent of the total population in Colorado.

Copyright © 2006. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.