Authors
Frank D Golom
Publication date
2015/1/8
Journal
Expanding the circle: Creating an inclusive environment in higher education for LGBTQ students and studies
Pages
107
Publisher
State University of New York Press
Description
In the fall of 2001, the Princeton Review’s annual compendium of the best undergraduate colleges and universities in the United States listed the climate at one of its featured institutions as “pretty homophobic”(Franek 2000). That same year, the campus community at this same institution would read two separate “Letters to the Editor” in the student newspaper detailing frightening accounts of antigay harassment in the college’s dormitories. By the spring of 2003, however, the environment that at one time implicitly sanctioned and facilitated such homophobia had changed dramatically. Not only would the college’s Board of Trustees honor the work of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) campus organization, but the student body would also elect several openly gay individuals to key leadership positions for the first time in the university’s history. How did an institution that had been publicly acknowledged as homophobic only two years prior come to be one of the leading religiously affiliated colleges and universities in the country regarding sexual orientation diversity and sexual minority concerns? How did the initial publication of two letters in a campus periodical end up as an ongoing institutional change effort of significant consequence for all involved? What are the lessons for other higher education institutions struggling with effecting similar pro-LGBT culture change? The purpose of this chapter is to:(1) explore an LGBT institutional change effort that occurred at a religiously affiliated university in the eastern United States between 2001 and 2004;(2) consider the key features of
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