Climate Review / Equity Report
Bishop David Cooper, Senior Pastor of New Hope Full Gospel Baptist Church’s Albuquerque location, said the complaint he helped file against UNM for discrimination against African Americans is supported by UNM’s own documentation.
The Daily Lobo spoke with Cooper, who on Nov. 10 filed the joint Title VI complaint with the Ministers Fellowship of Albuquerque & Vicinity and the Albuquerque Chapter of the NAACP.
Cooper said complaints against UNM include documented cases of the following:
1) Hostile Climate for African-Americans
2) Compensation Disparities
3) Adverse impacts of policies upon African Americans that reduce the number of African-American role models, reduce quality of health care and reduce delivery of services to African Americans
4) Inequitable distribution of federal funding for minority health care research
Daily Lobo: What is a Title VI complaint?
David Cooper: We filed a Title VI complaint against the University of New Mexico, which is based on discrimination based on race, color, or national origin and the Title VI provides that no institution receiving national funds can be found guilty of discriminating on these bases.
DL: How were you made aware of the situation at UNM?
DC: My organization, in partnership with the NAACP local chapter, sought to address some issues that came to our attention in April of last year with UNM, especially Health Sciences on north campus and especially considering treatment of African-American physicians.
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We have been in contact with Dr. (Paul) Roth (dean of the School of Medicine and chancellor for Health Sciences), and during that some of the African-American faculty on campus came to us and asked us to help them, and we began to advocate for some of their concerns. This is a campus-wide problem. To my knowledge, there is only one black full-time tenured professor on the campus.
DL: How did you document this discrimination?
DC: We then conducted an investigation into some of these activities. We talked to many professors and doctors who had left UNM under adverse conditions, or because of a hostile environment.
I have all their names and phone numbers, which I am not divulging to the University but which I have given to the Department of Justice and the Department of Education. I can’t give you any of their contact information because many of them are in litigation or wish to have their identities protected.
We also used UNM’s own documentation to show this adverse climate (UNM’s African-American/Black Climate Review Report and UNM’s Equity Report). People in the same job with the same experience were making less. The evaluation tools said that if there is a 1 percent difference in compensation, it is discrimination. Among African Americans, the average difference was 4.4 percent according to UNM’s own report.
DL: Was Dr. Roth receptive to talking about the issue?
DC: Our conversations were productive in that they opened up communication, and we agreed to work on three different areas (recruitment, retention and promotion), but it’s now December and we were supposed to do something within three months. … We’ve been in dialogue for 11 months and we haven’t seen any changes. In his defense, they said they had talked to a couple people who said (discrimination) was not why they left. … But several of the employees who left had decided to settle (with UNM for monetary compensation) regarding these claims, but some just left.
DL: Have you been in contact with the University since filing the complaint?
DC: I got a call from Dr. Anne Simpson saying that Dr. Roth would like to meet, but I’ve been in Chicago for a couple of days, so I won’t be meeting with them until next week. … I don’t think he knew at the time we had filed the complaint. They did contact me before we made the complaint public.
DL: Does the discrimination just involve employees? In what other places have you seen disparities?
DC: Recently the University got a $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, and when the University put out its brochure on how it was going to improve minority health, they noted Hispanics and Native Americans, but not African Americans, even though we have the larger percentage of our people being affected.
DL: Do you think this is just an African-American issue, or does this go across racial boundaries?
DC: I think it does cross racial boundaries, but … we are focused as African Americans on the discrimination at hand and haven’t yet addressed all discrimination issues at UNM. … There are some women on campus with disparity of pay as well. Our concern is the minority of the minority in a majority/minority state.
DL: Why did you file this complaint in the first place? Are you seeking any monetary compensation?
DC: No, no, some of the individuals involved are seeking reparation in their individual suits, but we want to see equal treatment of African Americans.
Look for continuing coverage of this issue with comments and interviews from UNM administrators and student leaders.
