For months, Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society have been trying to get the University of South Florida to increase the number of Black students.
On Tuesday, about fifteen members of SDS chanted in front of the library on the USF Tampa campus.
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WMNF News interviewed Eithne Silva, a junior physics major at USF.
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In a phone interview, USF’s vice president of institutional equity, Haywood Brown confirmed that Black student enrollment makes up about 9.4% of USF’s total and that it had dropped from about 10.3 percent in 2013.
At the SDS demonstration, two or three counter-demonstrators yelled at the SDS members like David Jones, a sophomore at USF majoring in chemistry.
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Scholarships like the one SDS member David Jones mentioned is one way the USF administration says it can help increase Black student enrollment.
USF’s Brown said that’s something the university is working on.
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Here’s more on the issue via CL.
