The fired workers — the dining hall’s general manager and head cook — are both white men, she said.

A statement from the university’s Governance Council of Minority and Marginalized Students said the same, and attributed the information to three N.Y.U. officials who work on diversity and multicultural initiatives: Lisa Coleman, Monroe France and Leah Lattimore. The officials could not be reached for comment Sunday afternoon. But an Aramark spokeswoman said that “one of the two managers who was terminated was a person of color, and the other was not.”

Watermelons and Kool-Aid have long histories as racial stereotypes. Watermelons, especially, have been used for more than a century as a “symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness and unwanted public presence,” the historian William R. Black wrote in The Atlantic in 2014, after two highly publicized uses of the stereotype.

In October 2014, shortly after an intruder managed to enter the White House, The Boston Herald published a cartoon that showed him standing in President Barack Obama’s bathtub, asking Mr. Obama if he had “tried the new watermelon-flavored toothpaste.” And in November, the author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) came under fire after joking about the fact that Jacqueline Woodson, a National Book Award winner who is black, is allergic to watermelon. (Ms. Woodson responded with a New York Times Op-Ed essay.)

In a phone interview Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris said she chose to believe that the Aramark employees had acted out of ignorance of their menu’s implications, not out of malice. But she added that it should not have been her responsibility to point out the problem — one that she said went far beyond a single incident.

“I would consider today a victory,” she said. “But it’s also very important that we had to publicize it in order to put the pressure on them to do the right thing, because I feel like had I not publicized it, this could have gone a little bit differently.”

Kayla Eubanks, a sophomore studying neuroscience, said in an interview last week that most of the students and faculty members she had spoken to were unaware of the incident.