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Author’s note: This essay draws from a larger work examining my ten years at Lebanon Valley College and the experiences of Black faculty and students at predominantly white institutions. A more detailed account, including additional documentation and analysis, will appear in a book I plan to publish in late 2027.

After ten years as a faculty member at Lebanon Valley College, where I served as an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, I retired in May 2026. Retirement is often described as the natural culmination of a career. Mine was also a response to an institutional environment that I had come to regard as increasingly toxic. My first nine years at LVC were not without challenges. But the 2025–2026 academic year was different. For me, the environment became unbearable.

I write about my experience not simply to explain why I left. My greater concern is what the institutional climate at LVC means for Black students, particularly those trying to find academic, cultural, and emotional support at a predominantly white institution. The removal of the Black Lives Matter flag from the College’s flagpole provides an important place to begin.

From a symbol of welcome to something “fraught”

The Black Lives Matter flag had flown on LVC’s campus since 2020. At the time, President James MacLaren connected its display with a message that Black and minority students were welcome at Lebanon Valley College. Six years later, the administration removed it.

In announcing its replacement with an LVC-specific “Everyone Is Welcome Here” flag, President MacLaren wrote “The flagpoles on Social Quad outside MUND will display and ‘Everyone Is Welcome Here’ inclusion flag. This LVC-Specific flag will replace the BLM flag that has been displayed since 2020. While one could argue that the BLM flag has meaning beyond a representation of the official BLM organization, it is an organization with a political agenda and one where some of its leaders have faced serious legal charges. The College remains committed to racial justice and inclusion, but we need an unfraught way to signify our values.”

The President’s explanation deserves careful examination. The most revealing word may be “unfraught.” In 2020, the BLM flag was presented in the context of belonging—a visible statement that Black and minority students were welcome. By 2026, the same symbol had apparently become sufficiently fraught that it needed to be replaced with the more universal message, “Everyone Is Welcome Here.” Of course everyone should be welcome at a college. However, universal language intentionally erases the previous acknowledgement of the experiences of a particular group.

“Black Lives Matter” and “Everyone Is Welcome Here” do not communicate precisely the same thing. The first responds to a specific history and a particular experience. The second articulates a universal aspiration. That distinction matters.

When institutions eliminate commitments to a historically marginalized group Black students are entitled to ask whether something has changed. The President’s statement itself acknowledged that the flag could possess meaning “beyond a representation of the official BLM organization.” That acknowledgement makes the decision especially worthy of scrutiny.

If the College understood that the flag possessed a broader meaning for members of its community, why should allegations concerning particular organizational leaders determine whether that symbol of racial solidarity remain on campus?

For Black students, this was about more than a flag. It raised some more fundamental questions: What happens when an institution’s public commitment to Black belonging becomes politically uncomfortable? Whose interests are being served by this specific change? Whose concerns are being met and who’s are being tabled?

When students asked questions

Students sought explanations from the administration about the decision to remove the BLM flag. According to information shared with me, students pursuing those questions were offered letters of recommendation by the President and Provost, and the value of obtaining a recommendation from a college president for graduate-school applications was discussed with them. That interaction deserves transparency.

There is nothing inherently inappropriate about a college president or provost offering to write a recommendation for a student. Such support can be valuable. However, context matters.

When students are questioning senior administrators about a controversial decision involving race and are simultaneously offered something carrying potential educational and professional value, an institution should recognize the power imbalance and the questions that interaction can create. Aree the recommendations unrelated to the students’ concerns? Why were they offered in that context? How did the students understand the offers? I do not assign motives to the administrators involved. Nor do I presume to speak for the students. But these are reasonable questions.

Students should be able to challenge decisions made by powerful administrators without ambiguity about whether access, recommendations, opportunities, or future benefits intersect with their willingness to continue asking difficult questions.

A different process for my classroom

The flag controversy occurred within a broader institutional climate that I had already experienced personally. During my final academic year, concerns arising in my courses increasingly reached the Provost’s Office, and I was frequently called upon to respond at that level.

My objection is not that students should be prevented from raising concerns about professors. Students need accessible mechanisms for reporting legitimate problems, and faculty members must be accountable for their conduct. My concern was that the process applied to me appeared different from the process ordinarily used to address faculty-student disputes.

My understanding of the College’s normal procedure was straightforward: students with academic concerns should generally begin by addressing them with the professor. If the matter remained unresolved, they could take it to the department chair and, when appropriate, pursue additional administrative channels.

That structure serves a purpose. It allows ordinary disagreements and misunderstandings to be addressed at the appropriate level while preserving escalation for matters requiring greater intervention. However, during my final year, concerns involving my courses repeatedly reached the Provost’s Office.

For a Black faculty member at a predominantly white institution, apparent deviations from ordinary institutional processes deserve explanation. Why was a different level of intervention necessary? Was the same degree of senior administrative scrutiny routinely applied to other faculty members? What criteria determined when a classroom concern bypassed the professor and department chair? Fair institutions should be able to answer such questions. Accountability must operate in both directions.

Five months’ salary and my decision to speak

During discussions surrounding my departure, LVC offered me compensation equivalent to five months of salary as part of an agreement containing confidentiality and nondisclosure provisions. I declined the offer. Five months of salary was financially meaningful. However, I was unwilling to accept compensation in exchange for restrictions on my ability to discuss my experiences at the institution. I preferred the freedom to speak.

My decision matters because the issues I am raising extend beyond an employment dispute between a professor and a college. They involve institutional governance, racial climate, student success, faculty treatment, and the experiences of Black students at a predominantly white institution.

Universities teach students to examine evidence, interrogate institutions, challenge assumptions, and question concentrations of power. Colleges should be prepared to withstand the same scrutiny themselves.

Black students need more than admission

My deepest concern remains the experience of Black students at Lebanon Valley College. Recruiting Black students is not the same as supporting Black students. During my 10 years at LVC, I encountered Black students attempting to navigate an institution where, in my assessment, the academic, cultural, and emotional support available to them did not always correspond to the challenges they faced at a predominantly white residential college.

Some came from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other urban communities and found themselves adjusting not simply to college, but to a dramatically different social and cultural environment. An institution genuinely committed to their success must ask more than whether those students were admitted.

Do they remain?

Do they graduate?

Do they feel that they belong?

Do they have meaningful access to mentors?

When they encounter academic difficulty, are appropriate support systems available?

When they describe isolation or alienation, does the institution treat those experiences as meaningful information about campus climate?

Most importantly, what do the outcomes tell us?

Retention and graduation: What the numbers reveal

The available retention and graduation data provide reason for serious concern.

For the six reported retention cohorts outside the 2020 pandemic year—2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023—Black student retention rates were 47%, 46%, 50%, 50%, 61%, and 53%, respectively. During those same years, White student retention rates were 85%, 77%, 85%, 82%, 85%, and 85%. Across those six cohorts, the average reported retention rate was approximately 51% for Black students compared with 83% for White students—a difference of roughly 32 percentage points.

The disparity did not occur in a single anomalous year. Black retention was substantially below White retention in every reported cohort. Even in 2022, when Black retention reached its highest reported level of 61%, it remained 24 percentage points below the White retention rate of 85%.

The available graduation data reveal an even larger average disparity. For the four reported cohorts—2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021—Black student graduation rates were 44%, 23%, 25%, and 29%. White student graduation rates during those same years were 78%, 68%, 73%, and 66%.

Across those four cohorts, the average reported graduation rate was approximately 30% for Black students compared with 71% for White students—a difference of approximately 41 percentage points. Again, the disparity appears in every reported year.

The Hispanic/Latino figures provide additional context. Across the same four reported graduation cohorts, their average graduation rate was approximately 43%—also substantially below the White rate, although above the average reported for Black students.

Data for 2022 and 2023 were unavailable in the information I reviewed, and 2020 was identified as the COVID-19 pandemic year. Those limitations should be acknowledged. There are other limitations that must be acknowledged, for example, percentages alone do not tell us why individual students leave a college, and at a relatively small institution, cohort size can affect percentages considerably.

The data do not prove that racial discrimination caused a particular student to leave LVC. Nor can they tell us how much of the disparity may be associated with finances, academic preparation, advising, campus climate, social belonging, family circumstances, or other factors. However, that does not make the numbers less important. Quite the opposite.

When a disparity is persistent and substantial, the appropriate institutional response is to investigate it. If a college says everyone is welcome, retention and graduation provide two measures for asking whether students are experiencing that promise equally.

When approximately half of Black students are being retained across cohorts in which more than four-fifths of White students are retained, institutional leaders should ask why. When the available graduation figures average approximately 30% for Black students and more than 70% for White students, they should ask why again. They should make the answers part of a transparent institutional effort to improve those outcomes.

I had invested ten years in LVC

My decision to leave was particularly difficult because I had invested a decade in the Criminal Justice program.

When I arrived at LVC, the program faced significant challenges in its academic standing and identity. Over the next ten years, I worked to strengthen its curriculum, raise academic expectations, expand opportunities for students, and develop a program that could command greater respect within the College and within the broader disciplines of criminal justice and criminology. I feel that I left the program significantly better that I found it.

That work involved more than revising courses. It meant strengthening the intellectual foundation of the program, mentoring students, developing academic opportunities, and encouraging students to understand criminal justice and criminology as serious fields of scholarly inquiry. I took pride in that work and in what the program and its students became.

This history matters because my criticism does not come from someone who was indifferent to Lebanon Valley College. It comes from someone who spent ten years trying to make part of the institution stronger.

Ultimately, however, professional accomplishment does not insulate a faculty member from institutional climate. Nor should an institution assume that longevity, tenure, or professional investment will produce silence when serious concerns arise.

Institutional climate is built through decisions

Campus climate is sometimes discussed as though it were an abstraction. It is not. Institutional climate is produced by decisions. It is produced when a college raises a Black Lives Matter flag and associates it with belonging. It is produced when that college removes the flag years later because it seeks an “unfraught” way to express its values. It is produced by how administrators respond when students question that decision. It is produced by whether institutional procedures are applied consistently to faculty. It is produced by whether Black students have meaningful academic, cultural, and emotional support. It is reflected in whether those students remain and graduate. None of these events, considered independently, necessarily establishes discriminatory intent. That is not my argument. My argument concerns patterns, institutional choices, measurable outcomes, and accountability.

Higher education asks students and scholars to examine patterns rather than rely upon isolated observations. Colleges should be willing to apply the same analytical standard to themselves.

Accountability is not an attack

Lebanon Valley College has an opportunity to examine these issues seriously. The College should publicly examine racial disparities in student retention and graduation and identify the factors contributing to them. It should assess the academic, cultural, and emotional support available to Black students. It should explain how students’ concerns about faculty are processed and demonstrate that those procedures are applied consistently. It should engage directly with Black students and alumni about how institutional decisions, including the removal of the BLM flag, have affected their experiences and sense of belonging.

Most importantly, the College should establish measurable goals for improvement and report publicly on its progress. That would not constitute an attack on LVC.

Accountability is not hostility

I spent ten years at Lebanon Valley College. I taught students, advised and mentored them, conducted research, developed academic programs, and invested considerable energy in the institution. I remain proud of my students and of much of the work I accomplished there.

Institutional loyalty cannot require institutional silence. I retired in May 2026 because I concluded that I could no longer continue working in the environment that had developed. I also recognize that I possessed something students often do not: the ability to leave. Furthermore, Black students who enroll at predominantly white institutions should not have to leave in order to find belonging.

The most important question for Lebanon Valley College, therefore, is not whether everyone is welcome. It is whether everyone experiences the institution as though they are.

There is a difference.

A flag cannot answer that question.

Retention rates can help answer it.

Graduation rates can help answer it.

The experiences of Black students can help answer it.

A statement that “Everyone Is Welcome Here” expresses an aspiration. Student outcomes tell us how closely an institution is living up to that aspiration.

When the distance between the two is this substantial, institutional accountability requires more than a new flag. It requires explanation, investigation, measurable improvement, and transparency. Institutions willing to listen to what the evidence and their students are telling them can begin the difficult work of closing that distance.

Dr. Terrence Alladin is a former Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Lebanon Valley College.

Read More: Lebanon Valley College professor conducts prison recidivism study

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