Discrimination complaints filed against MATC Board and President Dr. Anthony Cruz by four Multicultural Affairs Office student services specialists unjustly terminated!
By H. Nelson Goodson
Hispanic News Network U.S.A.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin - On Wednesday, November 19, 2025, Attorney Mark Thomsen at a press conference addressed the four discrimination complaints filed against MATC. Attorney Thomsen is representing the four MATC Multicultural Affairs Office student services specialists who last week filed discrimination complaints with the State of Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development Equal Rights Division after getting unjustly terminated when the Multicultural Affairs Office was eliminated by Milwaukee Area Technical College President Dr. Anthony Cruz. The press conference was held downtown MATC. (Video link: https://youtu.be/VyTtNJw0H9s)
Speakers:
• Rev. Walter J. Lanier — Community Leader & President/CEO, GLUE
• Attorney Mark Thomsen — Civil Rights Attorney
• Pam Fendt — President, Milwaukee Area Labor Council
• Minister Greg Lewis — President, Souls to the Polls; President, Pastors United for Change
• Former MATC DEI/Multicultural Services staff
• Samuel A. Alford, MATC former student & alumni
MATC's Culture at a Crossroads: Community Responds to DEI Dismantling and Discrimination Complaints
Second Such Complaint Filed Against MATC in 2025
The speakers addressed:
• The loss of culturally grounded student support
• A long string of retaliation concerns at MATC involving employees who raised issues of race, equity, or workplace culture
• Harmful and confusing public messaging surrounding diversity and federal guidance
• The broader cultural crisis at MATC
• Coalition demands for transparency, accountability, and restoration of the eliminated positions
MATC's statement: "Like other universities and colleges across the country, we continue to work to carefully balance and incorporate directives coming from the U.S. Department of Education, aligning federal guidance with local priorities. Our goal, which we believe we are achieving through the office of Community Impact and other programs, is to avoid jeopardizing the critical funding needed to maintain operations and student aid at MATC, while still providing the necessary support to our students...We can confirm we have offered support to each of the four affected employees. In fact, two of the four are currently working at MATC in ongoing or new capacities."
What's misleading by the MATC's statement is that the two employees were terminated from full-time positions at the Multicultural Affairs Office and one of them kept her part-time job as faculty (instructor since 2000), and the second employee had to reapply as a new hire for a full-time position that now pays half the wages compared to the full-time job at the Multicultural Affairs Office where she was terminated from by Dr. Cruz and lost all her earned sick leave hours and might not recover her years of seniority at MATC as well.
Also MATC asserts it's one of the most diverse technical colleges in the Midwest, which continues to provide necessary resources and support needed for students to be successful at MATC and beyond. With uninterrupted services provided by the newly created Office of Community Impact that replaced the Multicultural Affairs Office.
Through the Office of Community Impact, students continue to receive holistic services, academic support, one-on-one coaching, peer mentoring, student-parent resources, community partnerships, and access to programs like emergency funds and food pantry to ensure srudent success and deliver a college experience...that services to students have not been reduced and will remain committed to meeting students needs, according to the MATC released statement.
What the MATC statement fails to say is, that under the Office of Community Impact, multicultural student services are no longer provided to recruit and help retain students of color, it no longer promotes diversity and multicultural understanding, bilingual assistance can no longer be provided due to ethic (race) affiliation under the illegal Trump DEI prohibition federal guidelines. Students of color are no longer receiving student services based on race, and diverse cultural events are no longer assisted by the new Office of Community Impact, including culturally diverse activities with other ethnic groups based on the race identity factor, which is prohibited under the illegal Trump federal guidelines to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). The Native-American students including the African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American students are no longer being fully serviced by their own academic counseling and advicing peers to meet their cultural needs and learning experience that were previously provided by student services specialists from the now eliminated Multicultural Affairs Office due to their race factor.
In other words, today the creation of Office of Community Impact serves only one purpose for MATC Dr. Cruz and the MATC Board of Trustees, and that is to erase diversity, equity and inclusion based student services including the gradual cleansing campaign to eliminate all multicultural student services and programs at the technical college to comply with the unenforceable and illegal Trump order to eliminate DEI programs at universities and colleges.
MATC has now officially deviated from its vision of becoming a local and national leader in graduating successful multicultural students who transform the technical college and our communities.
Multiple federal courts have ruled that Trump's era elimination of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs at universities and colleges, and threatening to hold back federal funding, if they don't comply is unenforceable and unconstitutional because it violates instructors free speech in the classrooms.
It seems, that the MATC administration wants to continue to comply with Trump's unenforceable federal guidelines that eliminate DEI programs, eventhough multiple federal courts say it's illegal.
MATC student population stats: The technical college has 63% majority minority student population with 24% being Latino/Hispanic students.
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