sunspot.net - maryland news IN THE SPRING of 2001, Loyola College placed a job advertisement. The school needed a new assistant vice president for academic affairs and diversity . ...Denys Blell saw the advertisement and thought the job description fit him like a glove. He has a master's degree in African and Afro-American history. That spring, he was associate vice president for academic affairs and diversity at the University of South Florida. He had held the job for eight years.
Blell is, by birth, African-Lebanese. In the American shorthand, some might refer to him as a black man. But, according to Blell, Loyola College did not find him black enough.
Blell did not get the job. Now, in a lawsuit filed the other day in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, he says he was told by Loyola's hiring official, Vice President for Academic Affairs David Haddad, that "the African-American faculty (and Haddad, in response to their criticisms) needed to hire an African-American that was visibly black."