Blanche Hughes came to CSU in 1982 for graduate studies in student affairs, abstaining from an accepting an offer to Harvard University –– a decision that brought her into a scant minority population.
But the now vice president for Student Affairs and member of the black community here says coming back from other communities with bigger minority populations, as she has done, is always "a no brainer."
Fort Collins, she said, appealed to her lifestyle as the mother of two children, even though the black community was a small one.
Since she moved here, though, the university's minority community has seen tumultuous couple of decades.
When she arrived at CSU, Hughes said the university was in a bit of a lull for social action after a decade rich in activism that was spurred by the Civil Rights Movement brought a flurry of equality initiatives to the university.
During the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Hughes said, the university was trying to bring in a larger ethnic population, and it was working. But there was no mechanism for retention. Minority students would enroll and have no support group, so they would drop out, and, as a result, the black population remained static.
"There was no way to keep them here, so it was a revolving door," Hughes said.
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