Trotter Multicultural Center and Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs is a co-curricular hub that equips, engages and empowers students to co-construct transformational learning experiences, fostering an environment where all students can thrive.
Missions
Trotter Multicultural Center promotes intercultural engagement, racial healing, and transformative leadership education across generations and cultures.
Using the lens of race and ethnicity, MESA engages the campus and transforms the student co-curricular experience through vibrant enrichment and belonging opportunities for all.
Our why
Trotter Multicultural Center and Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs is more than any one building. It's a home away from home—rooted in generations of care and compassion—where students are celebrated and supported. Here, they lead, learn, and connect across identities and cultures. Our students get to chose how they explore challenge and build community, which nurtures belonging and empowers students to discover who they are and how they’re connected to others. Our core value pairings (Courage & Discernment, Creativity & Collaboration, Equity & Excellence, Dignity & Compassion) help guide our approaches to stewarding forth the legacy of ensuring theres is space on campus for any student to experience and co-create the environment that supports their wellbeing.
Our histories
In 1970, a class boycott organized by the Black Action Movement (BAM) began a legacy of student activism at the University of Michigan. As a collective effort of several Black student organizations, the primary goal of BAM was to challenge the university's lack of diversity and civil rights initiatives. The result of these efforts led the university to address many of the concerns around admissions, space, and support for Black students—a legacy that connects other departments and centers including but not limited to the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), the Comprehensive Studies Program (CSP), The DPE Program and Multicultural Lounges, and the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives (OAMI).
Shortly after the boycott, Trotter House—a Black Student Cultural Center named in honor of William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934)—opened for operation on November 15, 1971 at an old house on the corner of South and East University Street. Trotter House offered workshops for art students led by African American artists; sociology and psychology classes; orientation meetings for incoming students; academic and career counseling; a chess clinic; parties and dances; and a heavily attended weekly luncheon. After sustaining damage by a fire, Trotter House was established on Washtenaw Avenue in 1972.
Around the same time, the Office of Special Services & Programs began as a central area for communities of color at UM. This new unit had staff advocates that served a variety of ethnic constituencies. In 1977, the name changed to Minority Student Services to meet the needs of minority students and to promote the cultural diversity represented across the University.
Trotter House continued to grow, and in 1981 was renamed as the Trotter Multicultural Center, which expanded and deepened a focus on intersectional liberation and intercultural collaboration. By 1995, the office of Minority Student Services changed its name to Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs (MESA), and included the Trotter Multicultural Center. In 2014, MESA and Trotter became individual units working collaboratively to support students.
Today, Trotter/MESA reunites these intertwined legacies as a vibrant hub of student engagement that provides intentional space for community engagement promoting intercultural and multicultural engagement, racial healing, and transformative development across all generations and cultures.
With gratitude to the Trotter Multicultural Center History Project team: Elizabeth James, Charles Ransom, Edras Rodriguez-Torres, Stephen Ward
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