UNM and Mississippi Valley State University have formed a partnership to facilitate cultural exchange, joining the two institutions to provide students with the opportunity to visit the other college campus and experience what they have to offer.
“(The partnership) will allow our students to attend a historically black university,” said Dr. Jozie De Leon, UNM’s vice president of equity and inclusion. “What we’re going to do is alternate, so the first year MVSU students will come here in the summer for four to six weeks.”
MVSU and UNM differ greatly in diversity enrollment. Last fall, MVSU had a total of 1,722 African-American undergraduate students, and only 22 Hispanic students, according to the university’s website. While UNM had 4,728 Hispanic and only 558 African-American undergrads, according to the division for equity and inclusion.
Mississippi native Sam Johnson, a UNM alum, helped facilitate the process. He said he wants UNM and MVSU to give students of both schools the opportunity to experience each other’s universities by having MVSU students experience attending a research institution, while UNM students attend a historically black university that has endured the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights Movement.
“I went to a segregated high school, so (going to UNM) was an awesome experience,” Johnson said.
De Leon said the program will allow MSVU students to study within UNM and its Africana studies program, and will provide MVSU students with the chance to go on cultural excursions in New Mexico that will take them to other locales around the state, particularly New Mexico’s tribal communities.
UNM and MVSU haven’t associated with each other in the past, and De Leon said the idea for the partnership came from Johnson, who believes that the students of both universities should have the chance to have the same cultural experience he had when he attended UNM.
“I think (the partnership) is a fabulous thing,” De Leon said, “we’ve been working on it for a long time and it provides an opportunity for our students to really have an understanding of communities outside the state of New Mexico.”
Since MVSU is in a rural community, De Leon said it will give UNM students studying there in the future, the ability to gain another cultural point of view. She said that the experience is similar to students studying abroad in different countries.
“I think it’s a great thing,” De Leon said. “It allows our students to grow in a different way and have learning experiences and academic experiences that are really going to enrich their experience here at UNM.”
Fin Martinez is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @FinMartinez.
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