January 28, 1998
 

Martin C. Jischke
President
117 Beardshear Hall
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50010
 

Dear President Jischke:
 

We are writing to express our extreme disappointment with your failure to respond to repeated efforts to arrange a meeting between our two parties and a number of civil rights and religious organizations that contacted you prior to January 20, 1998.  We have made every reasonable effort to arrive at a mutually agreeable settlement of the conflicts that divide us.  Your latest failure to respond is part of a larger pattern of behavior since the collapse of conciliation efforts on October 29, 1997.  This behavior indicates that you are not interested in renewed efforts toward a mutually agreeable settlement of our conflicts.  In support of this assertion, we offer the timeline of correspondence between us:

*  On November 4, 1997, we sent a letter to you confirming that the conciliation process had collapsed.  In this letter, we requested a resumption of the conciliation process.  We requested your timely response so that talks could resume as quickly as possible.

*  On November 11, 1997, we sent a second letter to you expressing our concern that you had not yet replied to the letter of November 4.  We informed you of our complaint against Mr. Pascual Marquez, and again requested the timely resumption of the conciliation process.

*  Shortly thereafter, we received a copy of a letter you sent to Mr. Pascual Marquez, also dated November 11, 1997.  In this letter, you asserted that the conciliation process had not, in fact, collapsed, and you expressed your desire to continue to pursue the conciliation process through Mr. Marquez. This suggestion was highly inappropriate in light of Mr. Marquez's unprofessional behavior at the meeting of October 29 and the complaints we had filed against him.  The copy of your letter to Mr. Marquez was the only written response we ever received to our letters of November 4 and November 11.  Indeed, despite your stated desire to resume the conciliation process, we have not received a single written offer of such a resumption since the collapse of the conciliation process on October 29, 1997.

*  In the first week of classes this semester, a number of organizations, including the Iowa-Nebraska and the Ames branches of the NAACP, the Kansas City branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the United Christian Campus Ministry (UCCM) of Ames, requested to meet with you on January 20, 1998.  The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the climate for diversity at Iowa State University, and, equally importantly, to set up further meetings between you, our organization, and these groups.

*  You responded to these requests by agreeing to meet with these organizations.  However, you stated that you could not meet on January 20, and asked Dr. George Jackson of the Ames NAACP to contact your assistant, Nancene Wengert, to arrange the date of the meeting.

*  To date, Dr. Jackson has made six attempts to arrange a meeting between the organizations mentioned above.  He called your office on these dates: 

  January 20
  January 21
  January 22
  January 26
  January 28

Your office did not offer Dr. Jackson dates for a meeting in any of these phone calls.  Also, on January 26, Dr. Jackson sent a letter to you asking that dates be arranged for a number of meetings between all parties, including The September 29th Movement.  Because you could not attend the January 20 meeting, the groups requesting a meeting with you had
decided to forego this introductory meeting in the interests of time.  You have not yet replied to any of these efforts to arrange a meeting.

It is our understanding that you have expressed alarm at the presence of The September 29th Movement at the proposed meetings.  We can see how some confusion may have been possible initially.  The letters sent to you during the first week of classes asked for a meeting that would not include The September 29th Movement.  Again, one of the primary purposes of this meeting was to have been the arrangement of further meetings between these organizations and our two parties.  Any confusion on this point should have been settled by Dr. Jackson's letter of January 26.

Considering the pattern of behavior described above, we must be perfectly clear.  We can only see your failure to respond to the efforts of Dr. Jackson as an insult to the NAACP and the other organizations listed above. Furthermore, it clearly constitutes an attempt to indefinitely postpone efforts at a mutually agreeable settlement.  This is unacceptable.

We have made a number of concessions to you in order to bring about an end to the conflict between our parties.  We are now willing to meet with you without a mediator or conciliator present.  We still request the presence of a tape recorder or stenographer at these meetings so that an independent record may be produced for later review by the Iowa State community.  We urge you to reconsider your opinion that recording meetings would prevent you from engaging in an "honest dialogue," and we remind you again that we have no hesitation to record any proceedings between our two parties.  We will be honest in a tape recorded meeting; we will be honest in an unrecorded meeting.  Nonetheless, we are now willing to concede even this point in trust of the reputations of the organizations listed above.

You have long requested meetings of this kind.  Thus, your apparent lack of interest is deeply disappointing.  We must remind you that your unresponsiveness will not deter The September 29th Movement from the pursuit of the requests we have brought to the Iowa State community for over two years.  Indeed, our commitment to these goals can only grow in response to your unwillingness to address these very serious issues.

As a consequence, we must inform you that we will only wait another 48 hours for the arrangement of meetings between our two parties and the organizations listed above.  At 5 p.m. on Friday, January 30, 1998, we will consider your failure to respond to be equivalent to an expressed lack of interest in addressing the concerns of non-majority students at Iowa State, and we will have no choice but to resume the execution of direct action.

We anticipate your response.  Thank you.
 

Sincerely,
 
 

Brian Johnson
for The September 29th Movement
 
 

 cc:    The September 29th Movement Central Committee
         Dr. Derick Rollins, Diversity Advisor, ISU
         Thomas Hill, Vice-President Student Affairs
         Dr. Robert Wright, President, NAACP, Iowa-Nebraska Region
         Dr. George Jackson, President, NAACP, Ames Branch
         Rev. Beverly Thompson-Travis, UCCM, Ames
         The Black United Front, Kansas City
         The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Kansas City
         The Ames Daily Tribune
         The Associated Press
         The Campus Reader
         Cityview
         The Des Moines Register
         The Iowa State Daily
         The September 29th
         KCCI-TV (8)
         KURE Radio
         The Omaha World-Herald
         WHO Radio
         WHO-TV (13)
         WOI Radio
         WOI-TV (5) 1