The Shadow University by Kors Alan Charles & Silverglate Harvey

Author:Kors, Alan Charles & Silverglate, Harvey [Silverglate, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: s Campuses, The Betrayal of Liberty on America&#8217
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 1999-07-14T21:00:00+00:00

These double standards by official group identity exist far beyond race and ethnicity. The UMass School of Education announced, in 1996, a one-credit weekend workshop on “Examining Queer Identities and Creating Queer Communities.” The official (indeed, credit-conferring) workshop sought to provide “a safe place” for “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender students.”33 The spokeswoman for the workshop, Dawn Bond, a UMass residence director, told the Daily Collegian: “We want this to be a retreat for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender students only or for those in question.”34 This was at a public university bound by nondiscrimination policies. As usual, this exercise in multiculturalism had a partisan view of issues. Its first goal was to “examine introspectively messages of internalized homophobia and look at how this oppression manifests itself in the lives of GLBT people.” Its final goal was to “challenge participants to develop a queer community that fosters a socially just, celebrative, inclusive environment which builds bridges among multiple identity [e.g., race and sexuality].”35 In the fall of 1992, when UMass opened its gay, lesbian, and bisexual residence, “Two in Twenty,” Jennifer Fazzi, a columnist for the campus conservative journal, The Minuteman, asked the Housing Assignments Office if a homosexual couple, or a bisexual couple of different sexes, could be assigned to the same room in the new program. The answer was yes. Could a heterosexual couple be assigned to the same room in other campus dorms? The answer was no: “There’s a policy that says it is not allowed.” Why the discrepancy? She was told, “To create a comfortable living environment for these people…. In most cases, a heterosexual couple is not facing the same issues as a homosexual couple.”36

If one truly believes in the liberty of gay and lesbian students, of course, the real struggle is not for special privilege, but for equal rights. Legislatures in culturally conservative states frequently attempt to bar the funding of gay and lesbian student organizations on the grounds that these organizations affront the values of most citizens. The answer to that assault on the legal equality of individuals and their voluntary organizations rests upon a civic value that allows all of us to live by and advocate our deeper private values: equal justice under law. Colleges and universities, no less than some legislatures, have shown contempt for precisely that principle. Without a commitment to that value, gay and lesbian students (and faculty) will not be “empowered”; they will be helpless.

At Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, the student government voted to deny funds to the Gay and Lesbian Student Association on the grounds that “sodomy” was illegal under Texas law. The university, claiming that any violation of equal rights would constitute the illegality, refused to withhold the funds. As Keith Roberts, the president of the Gay and Lesbian Student Association told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “You don’t realize what you have until someone tries to take it away from you.”37 That is profoundly true, but it is true for everyone. The

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