The First Waterman Takeover

Lattie Coor said he was 39 years old when he took the office of UVM president in 1976.

“It was pretty unusual, but I think that is the average age [for university presidents] now,” Coor said in an Aug. 4 interview.  “Back then it was more normal to be in your 50s. I was glad they were willing to invite me to the position.”

Coor was president through the 1980s, while Sen. Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, he said.

This included April  1988, the first time students occupied the Waterman building, according to a history of diversity on the UVM website.

Karl Jagbandhansingh ‘05 said in an April 23, 2011 video reflecting on the 1991 “Waterman Takeover” that he was a part of the group of students who occupied Waterman in 1988.

“So I had heard about racism, my dad had told me stories but I never had felt the impact of what that meant,” Jagbandhansingh said in the 2011 video. “So having a chance to be here and see the devil up close and the act of getting beat up for no reason except that I was different really woke me up.

“In the beginning you take it kind of personally: What did I do wrong? How what could I have avoided this situation?” he said. “Luckily, there was a group of us who started talking and we realized it wasn’t an isolated incident.”

The 1988 Waterman Takeover happened because minority students were frustrated with the lack of cultural diversity on campus, according to a history of diversity published on the University’s website.

“There had been very little activity in adding courses and programs that represented the richness and diversity of subject matter embraced in the minority experience,” Coor said in an April 1988 statement.

Professor Emeritus James Loewen said a decision had been made two years prior to the takeover to drop a diversity course.  Loewen called the move “institutionally racist” to the “surprised, blank stares” of his fellow faculty members, he said.

The takeover began  April 18, 1988, and ended five days later on April 23. The students who occupied the building also went on a hunger strike, Jagbandhansingh said in the video.

During the five days of occupation, Coor met with students every day to negotiate their demands, according to an April 28, 1988 Cynic article.

On April 22, Coor said they had reached a “deadlock” in their talks and called in mediation, according to the article.

The next day, with mediators present, Coor signed off on the students’ list of demands regarding diversity at UVM, called the Waterman Agreement.

The board of trustees brought up the issue at their May 1988 meeting, according to an April 28, 1991 Cynic article.  The board unanimously approved a plan to combat racism at the University, according to a summary of the event by UVM.

This first takeover resulted in the one-credit race and culture diversity course requirement that was mandatory from 1989 until 2005, and funded by a grant that expired in 2005.

In 2006, the faculty senate voted to implement a new six-credit diversity requirement, which went into effect in the fall of 2008, according to the University’s diversity timeline.

Not long after the 1988 takeover, Coor said he resigned and announced he’d be moving to Arizona State University.

No job should last forever, Coor said.

“[University presidents] should understand what they and the institution are trying to accomplish and then step down and let new leadership come in,” he said. “I love UVM – my daughter has just joined the faculty, I visit often.”

So far, Coor was the longest serving president at UVM, according to UVM’s history of its presidents.

“I’m a great believer in cycles and institutional cycles,” Coor said in the August interview. “Fourteen years, then and now, was a relatively long period of time.”