By Cody Boteler
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
After more than eight hours of negotiation with a group of African American students, Towson University Interim President Timothy Chandler signed a document early Thursday morning in which he promised to resign if he did not meet certain demands of the school’s black students.
The letter, which was signed by Chandler at 12:40 a.m., contained 13 demands that include increasing the number of tenured or tenure-track black professors by fall 2018 and requiring cultural competency training during staff meetings for all colleges and departments.
“At the end I think that we made a victory, but for me, it’s more analyzing the size of the victory,” student activist John Gillespie told the university’s independent student newspaper, The Towerlight. “And how we can maximize the size of the victory, and how we could minimize any losses that we did obtain.”
The students, administration officials and legal counsel went over the demands line-by-line and at times word-by-word, discussing and finalizing what the president could sign.
“I’m extraordinarily proud of this group of students, who want to make this a better place, not just for them, but for all of us,” Chandler said in a statement released on Towson University’s newsroom.
The document came with a caveat for Chandler.
“By signing my signature on the line below I am acknowledging that in the event I do not keep my promise and begin to address these concerns, I will resign as president of this University for failing to effectively represent black students,” the document reads.
In fall 2014, just 27 of the 595 tenured or tenure-track professors teaching at Towson identified as black or African-American, according to documents from the school’s Department of Institutional Research.
Students staged a sit in at the president’s office Wednesday evening. The crowd thinned as the night wore on, but at 12:40 a.m., when the document was about to be signed, over a dozen students were still involved in the discussion.
Other administrators, including Debbie Seeberger, the president’s assistant for diversity and equal opportunity, and Santiago Solis, assistant vice president of student affairs for diversity, were a part of the discussion – and there until the end.
Just before 8 p.m., the negotiation took a sort of pause as the students decided to deliberate amongst themselves on how flexible they would be with their demands.
Around 9:30 p.m., while the students were in the middle of a discussion amongst themselves to finalize their demands, reporters from WBAL and WYPR, who were trying to record video, were asked by the students to leave.
The situation became tense when students realized that administration officials had allowed the reporters in but would not allow more students inside the building to join the sit-in.
Administration officials said that the reporters were allowed in as a result of a miscommunication. The discussion amongst the students resumed once the reporters left.
By 9:33 p.m., the students and administration were ready to discuss a negotiated version of the demands. At 12:16 a.m., the final version of demands that would eventually be signed was printed.