BIPOC Graduate Student Support

In this report we use the imperfect term BIPOC - Black, Indigenous and People of Color - to represent the range of racial and cultural identities of graduate students at the University of Connecticut while knowing “the ways it engages an erasure of the wide diversity of human identity yet articulates distinctive lived realities” (Wendi Williams: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/06/18/advice-how-colleges-can-lift-some-emotional-burden-bipoc-faculty-opinion).

In Spring 2020, The Graduate School began to gather information about the experiences of BIPOC graduate students in direct response to specific events of racial injustice. We recognize that we should have acted sooner, and we regret that it took the shock of these events for us to respond. This report focuses on the race/ethnicity of students, but we recognize that other individuals with other identities experience hate and injustice and that other identities intersect with race/ethnicity, often amplifying the injustice they feel. We do our best to incorporate an understanding of this complexity into the actions we implement as a result of this report.