Racist and threatening graffiti left on dormitory doors at UMass Amherst this week continues to draw outrage and and calls for the administration to do more when it comes to diversity. The messages were left at the rooms of three students of color.  Some are using the incidents to have a larger discussion about diversity on campus.

A meeting of the UMass Diversity Steering Committee was scheduled before the graffiti was discovered. An overflow crowd of several hundred Thursday afternoon jammed a campus ballroom and many addressed the panel. Undergraduate Angelica Castillo says campus police and university officials should take these actions more seriously.

“It’s important that we don’t refer to it as just hate speech”, Castillo says. “This is a death threat…..death threat.”

The discussion also focused on ways the campus could become more diverse, both in terms of the student body and faculty. Armanthia Duncan, a graduate student, says there are not enough professors of color. She says black students looking for a mentor frequently seek out faculty members in departments other than their own.

“I have faculty from my department, the few blacks that are in my department, the department of sociology, the few black professors that are there are tired,” Duncan says. “Their constricted. Their creativity is stifled because they are overworked.”

Many of those speaking say they had seen or been the victim of racism at UMass. Others, like Andrea Morris provided a historical perspective. She’s a graduate, mother of a current student and a wife of a staff member.

“This is a problem that has been going on for 35 years since I was at UMass,” Morris says. “And really nothing has changed. On the surface it has changed. People may act a little bit more civilly towards each other, but the problem of institutionalized racism here go far beyond the student population.”

Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy says more needs to be done across the board to improve diversity on campus. He says this initiative needs to go further than just an order from the administration.

“You can’t simply make an edict and have all the ugliness, isolation, separation of communities and the discomfort communities have go away,” Subbaswammy says. “In order to make that happen, the entire community needs to come together and have the resolve to build a better community.”

Subbaswamy says after taking input from the community, he hopes the diversity steering committee will have recommendations in a few months. Meanwhile the investigation into the racist graffiti. Remains under investigation