CSU has been working on inclusion for decades, Mary Ontiveros built her legacy around it

Mary Ontiveros once had to ask an Asian student to add a letter to her first name to input her data into the university’s computer system.

She helped students fill out questionnaires that forced multi-racial students to make difficult, if not impossible choices about who they were and how they wanted to be identified.

She had to hire a less-qualified white male to a management position because the school’s administration wasn’t about to let Latino women occupy the top two positions in the admissions department she was running at the time.

Memories of the racial insensitivity she has seen during her 51 years at Colorado State University have left a mark on Ontiveros.

Her work to address those issues built a legacy.

“It’s hard to overestimate the impact that Mary has had on access for students and professionals of color at CSU,” said Shannon Archibeque-Engle, the university’s assistant vice president for diversity. “Mary is the brain behind so many of our programs that have become our shining stars.”

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Ontiveros, 69, came to CSU as a freshman student in the fall of 1969. She’s leaving Dec. 31 as the university’s vice president for diversity, a position created in 2010 by then CSU President Tony Frank and filled immediately by Ontiveros.

“Mary brought that office to life and in doing so, helped CSU move forward in its own walk toward being a more just and equitable community,” Frank, now chancellor of the CSU System, said in an email.

It was a part-time position at first, at least in budget and compensation, said Ontiveros, who was also serving as the director of El Centro, an advocacy program at CSU to encourage, promote and support Latino students, and as associate vice president for enrollment and access.

She didn’t mind the extra workload, Ontiveros said. She never has. Give her a task to complete, and she’ll pour everything she has into accomplishing it.

“There’s a level of strength that is deep inside her,” said Dora Fria, the current director of El Centro. “She doesn’t take no for an answer, and she just keeps going at it.”

Ontiveros credits her parents for her strong work ethic. Her mother raised six children — she had an older sister, three younger sisters and a younger brother — and her father was a laborer at the Pueblo Army Depot who later became director of the chemical munition storage site’s office of equal opportunity.

Her parents insisted she go to college, but they didn’t have any money to help cover the costs.

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“You do what you have to do, right?” Ontiveros said. “So I had a lot of jobs.”

Those jobs kept her busy while she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, keeping her on campus as other students went home for long weekends and holiday breaks.

“I would go all around campus asking for different jobs, so I came to know the university quite a bit because of that, and I think that eventually helped me in my career as I went forward,” she said.

Following her graduation, Ontiveros started a long professional career at CSU, starting out as a research associate in 1974. She worked her way up from an administrative assistant in the Chicano Studies Office to acting director of Chicano Student Services and then to associate director of admissions, where her primary task, she said, was to recruit more minority students to help CSU diversify its campus.

It was a monumental task that Ontiveros — who prefers to be called Chicana rather than Latino — is still working on five decades later, after continuing her climb through the university’s administrative ranks to director of admissions, executive director of admissions, associate vice president for enrollment and access, and her current role, vice president for diversity.

Along the way, she worked with Colorado high schools to offer resources and support to help prepare their students for college, Archibeque-Engle said. She helped get scholarship programs started for first-generation and minority students. She launched CSU’s employee climate survey, chaired the university President’s Commission on Diversity and Inclusion, was a founder of the Multi-Cultural Staff and Faculty Network, and started a chapter for diversity offices in higher education throughout the Rocky Mountain region.

And every step of the way, she used the knowledge she has gained in half a century’s worth of work at CSU to provide important perspective in how CSU got to where it was, where the university is headed and what that means for students of all races, ethnicities and socio-economic groups.

“She was active and engaged in equity and inclusion as a student and then she made a career out of it,” Archibeque-Engle said. “She paved the way for a lot of us who came after her. I don’t think we really understand what we’re losing with her retirement.”

'It’s important that people know that these kinds of things were going on'

Although representation of minority groups on CSU’s campus continues to increase, it’s still not reflective of the racial and ethnic diversity of the state’s population. CSU reported that 25% of its incoming undergraduates in 2019-20 were from diverse populations; the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 32.3% of the state’s population in 2019 came from population groups CSU classifies as diverse.

“When I was a student, we didn’t have large numbers of Black students or Latino students, Asian students or Native (American) students, we just didn’t,” Ontiveros said. “And for students who are here today, there’s no question that we do not look like Denver or other big cities and such in so far as we don’t have those same kinds of numbers. But compared to where we had been, yes, the university has become more racially and ethnically diverse, and that’s a good thing.”

Equally important, maybe even more so, Ontiveros said, is that those students feel connected to the university and its culture, no different than any other student.

And that’s where Ontiveros’ work has been the most significant.

When she was working as the associate director of admissions, she discovered that the computer system CSU used for all its student data wouldn’t accept first names with fewer than three letters. So she actually had to ask an Asian student with a two-letter first name to change it.

“Today, that’s just unthinkable, right?” Ontiveros said. “But back then, that’s the way it was because most ‘American names’ were three letters or longer.

“She was so gracious. She said, ‘OK, I’ll add another ‘O.’' She made it very easy, but that shouldn’t happen. We should not have to ask people to do that kind of thing.”

She discovered similar issues with other forms and data sets over the years.

CSU’s first computer system, she said, allowed students to identify themselves as members of the university’s honors program or a person of color, but not both. Students also could only identify themselves as a member of one race, so those who were multi-racial were forced to choose between the race of their mother or the race of their father — a situation she found particularly egregious as the mother of a multi-racial child who went on to attend CSU.

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“To force somebody to disavow any kind of relationship with one parent didn’t make sense to me, either, so I said, we’re going to figure out how our system will allow us to have students list all that apply, and then we’ll deal with the federal reporting as we need to do with it.”

The most distressing incident of racial bias she dealt with, though, came directly from the top: the university’s own administration under then-President Ralph Christoffersen. Ontiveros had just been promoted to director of admissions and needed to hire someone to fill her former role as associate director.

The most qualified person, she said, was another Latino woman with several years of experience in the department.

“I was told the university is not ready to have two Latinx women in a leadership position in the same office,” she said. “So I had to chat with her and chat with the white male who was placed in that position and let them both know that this was the reality.

“The white male was really great, and I said, ‘You are fabulous, you really are. But you’re not the best at this right now; she is the best. She is the better person for the job, but I cannot hire her.

“I think it’s important that people know that these kinds of things were going on.”

The white male left for another job four or five years later, Ontiveros said, and she was then allowed to hire the Latino woman as the associate director.

“That’s an example of how the university changed over time,” she said. “One year, you’re told no for a pretty racist reason. It was definitely an anti-feminist issue, too, but in that case, it was racist because we were both Chicanas. And then time passes, not really a long time, either, and then suddenly, it’s OK.

“That’s what we're (still) trying to address across campus. … There are still units (on campus) that think that way, and so we’re trying to identify those and help them understand: one, it’s not right; two, it’s not legal; and three, it’s not the best practice.

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“You will have a healthier organization if you are more inclusive, so that’s the kind of work that we’re still doing.”

Ontiveros has seen CSU grow from a university of 16,252 students when she arrived in fall 1969 to a record 34,166 in fall 2019. She has worked under the leadership of seven university presidents, including the first Black president, Albert Yates (1990-2003), and first female president, Joyce McConnell (2019 to present).

She was a freshman student on campus on Feb. 5, 1970, when Black protestors interrupted a basketball game at Moby Arena between CSU and Brigham Young, a school run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which at the time did not allow Black men into the Mormon priesthood. Later that year, May 8, CSU’s main academic building, Old Main, was burned to the ground during antiwar protests.

She was the university’s director of admissions on July 27-28, 1997, when waters from the Spring Creek Flood inundated 40 buildings on campus, causing more than $200 million of damage. She was still in that role, but also the parent of an incoming freshman student, her son Matthew Burt, on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorist attacks took down the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York.

And she was on campus last spring, when the decision was made to shut down all in-person instruction for the remainder of the spring semester and much of the summer to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Those were each memorable events, she said, and like each of those seven CSU presidents she has worked for, significant in the way they shaped the university and its culture.

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“There are some pretty significant things that happened historically, and I’m just glad that I was at CSU,” Ontiveros said, “because the one common denominator that I think helped me get through everything are the people. … Even though the physical plant is fabulous, and I think the university is trying to do everything it can to respond to the needs students have, it’s really the people that make a difference.”

And only a select few have made as big a difference as Ontiveros.

“Mary Ontiveros’ walk through her life, to me, demonstrated bringing people together,” Frank said. “She had faced racism and bias over decades at the institution where she trained and which then employed her, but she never lost her commitment to the shared ideals it embodied, even if the flawed human beings who make up that institution might, at any given moment, not been worthy of that commitment.

“She made CSU a better place through her presence and that quiet, yet relentless commitment. … I’m proud to have worked alongside her, proud to call her my friend, and am a better human being for knowing her.”

Kelly Lyell is a Coloradoan reporter. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, follow him on Twitter @KellyLyell and find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.