The closure of CHAS and what it tells us about this moment in higher education
When colleges abandon equity work, it hits students the hardest. It also ignores or minimizes decades of hard work and steps toward progress. I was in the room when the Consortium on High Achievement and Success (CHAS) was born 26 years ago, so watching it disappear now feels less like a policy direction and more like erasure.
Under the leadership of Sharon Herzberger, then the Vice President for Student Services at Trinity College invited representatives from over 20 liberal arts colleges to the Hartford, CT. campus in January 2000. The goal was straightforward. Transform campuses rather than keep blaming marginalized students for institutional failures around inclusion. Originally focused on Black and Latino students, CHAS advanced resources and initiatives that sought to“affirm identity, build community, and cultivate leadership,” work that Beverly Daniel Tatum documents in her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? CHAS created opportunities for faculty, administrators, and support staff to question and confront the structures shaping student outcomes and to remove barriers to the success of Black, Latino, and first-generation students. That work included faculty diversity curriculum grants, campus racial climate surveys and research, workshops for administrators and support staff, presidents’ forums, and student conferences.
Along the way, I was fortunate to work with courageous CHAS colleagues like Karla Spurlock-Evans, Mabel Millner, Mirian Feldblum, Darryl Smaw, Leslie Hill, Eric Benjamin, Susan Layden, Rolando Arroyo-Sucre, Rafael Angel Zapata, Eric Estes, Gretchel Hathaway and many others. Having colleagues on other campuses who stood behind principles of equity and social justice was the next best thing to having trusted allies at Vassar. Collaboration and transparency were central to the work. No institution is immune to the historic and endemic results of inequity. Every campus has faced, and will face, student movements that bring attention to institutional failures. I was hired in 1990 following campus protests and a student coalition led by Black students at Vassar. I never forgot that. So, when Trinity College invited other leaders to the Hartford campus to put everything on the table, I wanted to be there for the long day of discussion that sparked decades of collaboration and sustained commitments to inclusive education.
Another “we’re in this together” moment emerged through the annual student conferences for Black and Latino men and women of color. Held separately and hosted by one or two campuses in the fall and spring (aside from a multicultural student event), these conferences helped students to see and feel their collective power beyond their isolation and the reality of not always being seen or heard on a single campus in the Northeast or Midwest. Students also encountered academic scholars and thought leaders like Kimberle Crenshaw, Marc Lamont-Hill, Kiese Laymon, David Perez, Shaun Harper and others who challenged and expanded how they understood their experiences on and off campus. These conferences may have been CHAS’ most powerful work. Students returned to their campuses energized, informed, and ready to act as agents for change.
CHAS was funded by institutional memberships, with each campus contributing a small annual fee to the consortium based at Trinity College. That revenue source, along with a major foundation grant from Nellie Mae, made it possible to offer these resources to students, faculty, staff, and presidents. Collectively, we did what few campuses could have done alone.
And now we find ourselves in this challenging, perilous moment.
Before leaving Vassar in 2021, I saw the writing on the wall. In September 2020, the Trump administration issued Executive Order 13950, labeling diversity and anti-racism work as divisive and un-American. Orchestrated and baseless attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT), along with Project 2025, contributed to this hostile and anti-diversity rhetoric—and now policy. When I spoke with Sourav Guha, CHAS’ executive director, a while back, many colleges had begun quietly scrubbing their websites of equity language, especially the names of offices. When Ken Miles , one of the first CHAS Black and Latino men’s conference participants, texted me in early January alerting me that CHAS was closing its doors, I was disappointed, though not surprised. CHAS, like many identity-based initiatives, is a casualty of dangerous retreats from democratic principles and the deliberate framing of equity and inclusion as anti-American and not meritocratic. The truth, of course, is exactly the opposite.
I don’t doubt that equity and inclusion initiatives like CHAS will surface again. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often quoted Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and abolitionist, who said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. But I am not mourning the end of CHAS or similar initiatives.
If we stay in the fight, right will prevail over wrong. We can swing the pendulum back.
These views are my own, not those of CHAS or any institution. Images and documents are from my personal archive.
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