It’s been two years since a string of racial slurs defaced campus.
Students broke into outrage when racial slurs were written on the white board of a black student’s door in West Akers Hall and on a wall in Armstrong Hall, followed by the discovery of a black doll hanging by its neck in the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building.
In response, the MSU’s Black Student Alliance brought a list of demands to MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon to address racism, including building a free-standing multicultural center.
In two years, what was known as the Multicultural Center has been revamped, moved from its 14-year home in the basement of the Union and renamed the Mosaic Multicultural Unity Center thanks to the efforts of the BSA and other student organizations including the Council of Progressive Students, or COPS; the Council of Racial and Ethnic Students, or CORES; and Culturas de las Razas Unidas.
We still have work to do to make campus a more welcoming place for everyone, but the new center is a testament to how positive change can happen if students advocate for themselves and fight to make MSU a better place.
And if the center is used properly, hopefully it will do just that.
The center is a resource for everyone, not just multicultural groups, to come together and share ideas in a healthy space.
Different organizations can use the center to collaborate. Anyone — not just multicultural groups — can rent out rooms at the center.
The new theater presents an opportunity to bring individuals together who might not directly be involved in any multicultural groups.
Study spaces give students a chance to sit with people who might think, look or act differently. Instead of holing up in bed or hiding in a favorite nook at the Main Library, take advantage of this resource and study at the center.
By design, it’s intended to be a place to interact with people from diverse backgrounds in a safe and engaging way.
So now the center is in the public’s eye and not shoved in a basement, use it. Don’t let it go to waste.
Not only is the center an opportunity to embrace diversity on campus, hopefully it will inspire others to stand up for student needs.
It’s a blessing that something good came from something so disgusting, but it did not come easily.
The BSA was less-than-polite when members met with Simon and urged her to build a free-standing multicultural center on campus.
“You keep throwing around the word ‘recommendation,’” then-BSA Vice President Silver Moore said to Simon during the meeting. “These are not recommendations or suggestions. If they were suggestions we would put them in a suggestion box. These are demands.”
We’re not advocating for tense arguments between students and administrators, but MSU needs more students and organization who truly believe in making campus better and are willing to fight for that.
This is our campus, and we have a right to be heard if we think something needs improvement.
At the time of the meeting between Simon and the BSA, the chances of creating a free-standing multicultural center might have seemed dim. But those students, and others, kept pushing.
In the end, students were able to communicate with architects about how to design the space to most effectively meet their needs, Residence Halls Association Director of Racial, Ethnic, and Progressive Affairs Travis Lunsford said in a previous interview with The State News.
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We didn’t get a separate building, but we might have gotten something better: a fresh space built from student input in a main campus hub.
This is proof for anyone who doubts whether students can play a role in shaping the face of campus.
