On April 13, 2018, Virginia Tech President Tim Sands announced that the university would be opening a new living-learning community, or LLC, a special kind of residence hall for students with a common academic or personal interest. It would be called Ujima — named after the third principle of Kwanzaa, often translated from Swahili as “collective work and responsibility” — and it would be focused around Africana studies and the African American experience.
He made the announcement as part of the 2018 Black Alumni Reunion, which was an especially momentous occasion: It was the 65th anniversary of the admission of Virginia Tech’s first Black student, Irving Peddrew III, and the 60th anniversary of the graduation of the school’s first Black graduate, Charlie Yates. The two men are the namesakes of Peddrew-Yates Hall, built in 1998 and named in their honor to mark the 50th anniversary of Black students at Virginia Tech. Peddrew-Yates would host Ujima.
“I wanted to share this exciting news with our Black alumni during the reunion weekend because this is part of their legacy,” Sands said as he made the announcement. “I have great respect for their years of hard work and commitment to developing a more inclusive university community.”
Since then, Ujima has grown from an initial 70 students to 188 students, as of the fall of 2025. Among LLCs around from the fall of 2023 to the fall of 2025, only the Corps of Cadets, Impact (focused on data analytics and based in Cochrane Hall) and Thrive (focused on personal growth and based in Slusher Tower) added more students than Ujima. Two LLCs that launched in the fall of 2024, Securitas (focused on cybersecurity and based in Cochrane Hall) and The Roost (focused on addiction recovery and based in Payne Hall), have 60 and nine residents, respectively.
On Ujima’s Instagram page, one can see years of get-togethers, celebrations, excursions and testimonials encouraging students to join them in Peddrew-Yates.
Seven years later, the dissolution of Ujima has been heralded with markedly less fanfare.
Since the spring, Virginia Tech has been reviewing its policies and programs to comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to scrub diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from higher education. After moving to dissolve the Office of Inclusion Strategy and Excellence and reallocate $8.4 million of funding for DEI programs, the university decided early in the fall semester that Ujima would be dissolved at the end of the 2025-26 academic year.
Three other LLCs will be dissolved, too: Orion, located in New Residence Hall East and centered on science; Rhizome, located in the Creativity and Innovation District and centered on global leadership principles; and Lavender House, located in O’Shaughnessy Hall and centered on LGBTQ+ studies.
“Students currently living in those living learning communities were notified a few weeks back, and the university will continue to share these changes when students sign up for living learning community options later this fall,” university spokesperson Mark Owczarski said in a statement to the Collegiate Times.
In the wake of the decision, Ujima residents have been attempting to make sense of it, with some fighting to keep its spirit alive beyond this spring.
One of those 188 Ujima residents is Abraham Welle. He agreed to meet outside the Data and Decision Sciences building. As construction work carried on nearby, he spoke loudly to be heard above the jackhammers.
Welle, a freshman electrical engineering student from Lorton, said that what drew him to Ujima was what he’d heard about its community.
“I already knew a lot of people who had experience being in Ujima,” Welle said. “They had a lot of good things to talk about. Even my cousin who didn’t room in Ujima, the LLC, he still said he was often at Peddrew-Yates all the time, just to connect with the community, talked about all the different events that they would have going on or, even if they didn’t have events, just if someone’s baking cookies or they’re having a game night, something like that.”
When Ujima students were given the news that the LLC would be shut down, Welle was away in Maryland. Once he returned, he found an atmosphere of desperation.
“It was unfair that this community was being taken away when there’s so many different other communities on campus,” he said.
But then the residents got to thinking about what they could do to change it, about how they could raise awareness about what they faced, about who could step forward to lead their cause.
“I know definitely we’ve been talking about having a couple people specifically meet regularly to think and brainstorm about ways we can meet with whatever executives or presidents —whichever council people we need to talk to — to be able to see whatever policies we can reform despite things that might be going up in higher office.”
Even though Welle will not be able to live in the Ujima LLC beyond this academic year, it has already made its impact on him and others seeking to preserve something of that sense of community among Black students at Virginia Tech.
He said being at Ujima had helped him “meet the right friends, meet the right people,” with him “feeling like I’m at home.”
The resolve to make some kind of change has resonated beyond the walls of Peddrew-Yates and among people in the broader Black community at Virginia Tech, like Zee Myrthil.
He agreed to meet twice at the Black Cultural Center in the Squires Student Center, the nature of which is also due to be affected by the university’s move away from DEI initiatives. The walls are decorated with pictures of Black alumni and pieces of Virginia Tech’s Black community’s history. On a wall is a marker from 2023 commemorating 70 years of Black history at the university, including a picture of Peddrew alongside Ujima residents outside the residence hall that bears his name.
Originally from Miami and currently living in Burke, Myrthil is a senior majoring in entrepreneurship and minoring in music production. He lived in Ujima as a freshman and described it as a key factor in deciding to come to Blacksburg.
“It was a big part of why I came to Virginia Tech,” Myrthil said. “I saw that there is an active Black community on campus that was dedicated to teaching you about your history and placing you in a community with others that look like you, keeping you in a safe space, offering a safe space, and education about your history.”
During the year he spent in Ujima, he often heard that the LLC’s existence was under threat and that residents like him should prepare for when the moment finally came.
“I found out, I think, a week before the Ujima kids found out and I wasn’t necessarily shocked because, ever since my freshman year in Ujima, we’ve been warned that Ujima’s being targeted, that people just think it’s an all-Black dorm,” Myrthil said. “We were told that we should start preparing for that and start building our own community that isn’t too reliant on the school’s funding or institutional backing and, so, once Ujima was gone, it was a disappointment.”
That fight has been embodied in the Black Coalition, an organization developed by a group of students who saw the Black community at Virginia Tech as faced with many different issues. Work on the coalition began in the spring, and it was officially launched earlier this fall.
“The Black Coalition was this idea that we saw a fragmented Black community that was dealing with not only current events but they were struggling to collaborate with each other in terms of different student orgs,” Myrthil said. “They were competing with attendance, dealing with cliquiness, standoffishness, disconnect between underclassmen and upperclassmen and just an overall, like, fragmented community.”
The Black Coalition’s goal is to form a sense of community among Black students at Virginia Tech independent of school-sanctioned institutions, organizations and activities. Now, with the closure of Ujima, Myrthil feels that the coalition’s work is more important than ever.
“Our community has been in a state where we’ve been reacting to everything,” he said. “Reacting to the news, to policy changes. And we wanted to get ahead and just start acting, making changes for ourselves, building power, and getting ahead of the curve so that, when changes do happen, we aren’t as affected or, hopefully, not even affected at all.”
Much of the Black Coalition’s work involves filling spaces like the Black Cultural Center and building relationships between Black students on campus through events like its Shop Talks. There, Myrthil said, people can be vulnerable and open to others, building new bonds and creating a sense of community.
“One of the impacts I heard directly from an underclassman, she was telling me, ‘Oh, people have never usually just come up to me and introduce themselves,’” he said. “’This was probably the first time where people just came up to me and just said, “Hey, how are you doing? My name is blank.”’ It’s the small things that like that that really lead to a bigger community.”
On Monday, Myrthil took part in an afternoon protest march from Squires Student Center to Burruss Hall, organized by the Virginia Tech Students’ United Front, a coalition of left-wing activist groups led by the campus chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. The march was held to protest the board of visitors’ decisions to phase out DEI initiatives on campus and was scheduled to coincide with the first day of the board’s meeting at Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus in Alexandria. In a four-minute speech on the steps of Burruss Hall to a few dozen protesters, Myrthil encouraged them to take part in “direct organization” instead of engaging with university institutions he characterized as dishonest and uncooperative.
“Direct organization is not chaotic or ineffective,” he said. “It’s what led to every step towards progress in our community at Virginia Tech. It’s what led to the admission of Irving Peddrew III in 1953, the first Black student to ever step foot on this campus — one Black student among more than 3,300 white students. It’s what led to Charlie Yates becoming the first Black graduate in 1958. It’s what led to the rise of the first Black student organizations, the creation of the Black Organizations Council in 1985, the founding of the Ujima LLC in 2018, and the opening of the Lavender House in 2022. The presence of this progress may cause others fear, to misrepresent our purpose and misjudge our power, but they will never break our spirit because we come from a legacy of activists who fought harder battles with fewer resources and still won.”
On Nov. 14, the Living-Learning Program priority application process closed, with returning Virginia Tech students who live in or are interested in any of the LLPs on campus being able to apply for on-campus housing before the housing application process opens in January. Given that Ujima would be wound down by the fall of 2026, Welle and more than 180 other residents will be looking for a new place to call home before then.
Welle applied to Mozaiko (focused on intercultural learning and based in Harper Hall) and Convergence (a brand-new LLC focused on “transdisciplinary collaboration” to be based in the Creativity and Innovation District) for next year.
“I would still like to be surrounded by a like minded community and form connections,” he texted.
Reporter Lisa Rowan contributed information to this report.