Hundreds of University of Colorado Boulder students packed an annual State of the Campus meeting this morning in response to a between a white woman and black students on Sunday.
Chancellor Phil DiStefano again condemned the incident, which was caught on video and went viral on social media over the weekend.
“You have told us loud and clear that you want behavioral change in this campus, and I wholeheartedly agree with you,” DiStefano said.
Campus leaders will meet with students from the Black Student Alliance tomorrow to review policies, trainings and more, DiStefano said, and a timeline of those changes will be released after the meeting.
CU Boulder police this morning announced they had identified the woman who accused black students of “stalking” her and berated them with expletives and racist epithets while they studied at the Engineering Center.
CUPD has identified the suspect in a racist video that was posted on Sunday. Thanks to community tips & body-worn camera video from prior interactions with her, CUPD has identified her as 33-year-old Rebekah Krajacic, who is not affiliated with the campus.
— CU Boulder Police (@CUBoulderPolice)
Police identified the woman as Rebekah Krajacic, 33, and said she is not affiliated with the campus.
Community tips as well as body-worn camera evidence from prior police interactions with Krajacic led to her identification, according to a tweet from CUPD.
The tweet did not say if Krajacic would be facing any charges as a result of the video. Krajacic does not have any prior criminal history at the state level, according to court records.
But students who attended the State of the Campus meeting and submitted dozens of questions to DiStefano said the fact the woman wasn’t a student didn’t change how they felt.
“Any threat to students needs to be taken care of, regardless of if they’re a student,” said Jamilah Toure, a freshman.
Toure attended the meeting with freshman Ashok Edwang, and both students said they didn’t think the university’s policy on racism is enough.
“We just want the university to care about us as students,” Edwang said. “As students they should care about all of us and protect us, as they say they are and they want to, but they’re not making us feel welcome at all by not responding to it.”
Black Student Alliance President Fitzgerald Pickens said he was disappointed but not surprised by DiStefano’s speech.
“I’m not putting a lot of hope into statements that are made in that forum,” he said.
DiStefano started the event by briefly addressing the incident before moving on to talk about the university’s goals and achievements, particularly around mental health and wellness.
After his speech, he answered a few submitted questions by students and moved on to a panel discussion with university administrators about student mental health.
Hundreds of students silently walked out in the middle of the panel discussion, which Pickens said was not meant as a specific statement.
“We just didn’t feel like we needed to sit in a room and hear somebody not answer our questions,” he said.
https://twitter.com/Katielangford35/status/1181597873324077056
The Black Student Alliance published a list of demands on Monday, including barring the woman involved from campus, developing a systemwide, zero-tolerance policy for discrimination, instituting campuswide training and for Kennedy to condemn the incident as racist.
“We want a campus that is safe for all students and by all students that has to include minority students, queer students, (transgender) students, black students,” Pickens said. “It has to be all inclusive.”
