LGBTQ+ Archives - The Hechinger Report https://hechingerreport.org/tags/lgbtqplus/ Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education Thu, 02 May 2024 16:37:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon-32x32.jpg LGBTQ+ Archives - The Hechinger Report https://hechingerreport.org/tags/lgbtqplus/ 32 32 138677242  Amid clampdown on DEI, some on campuses push back https://hechingerreport.org/amid-clampdown-on-dei-some-on-campuses-push-back/ https://hechingerreport.org/amid-clampdown-on-dei-some-on-campuses-push-back/#respond Thu, 02 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=100477

BOCA RATON, Fla. – It doesn’t take much searching to spot the fallout from the newest Florida law seeking to erase DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, from public campuses. Several weeks ago, for example, staff offices at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Inclusion, Diversity Education and Advocacy in Boca Raton were vacant, with name […]

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BOCA RATON, Fla. – It doesn’t take much searching to spot the fallout from the newest Florida law seeking to erase DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, from public campuses.

Several weeks ago, for example, staff offices at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Inclusion, Diversity Education and Advocacy in Boca Raton were vacant, with name plates blank and abandoned desks, plus LGBTQ+ flags, posters and pamphlets left behind.

Elsewhere on the palm-tree-framed campus, a sign for the “Women and Gender Equity Resource Center” remained, but a laminated paper on the door offered a new identity, “Women’s Resource and Community Connection Division of Student Affairs.”

In Florida, which, along with Texas, has the most extreme anti-DEI laws in the country, virtually all DEI staff have been fired or reassigned and offices shuttered — but that’s not the only story. There is also mounting resistance to the laws.

The staff offices at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Inclusion, Diversity Education and Advocacy are abandoned, with nameplates gone and posters and pamphlets left behind. Credit: Laura Pappano for the Hechinger Report

Students have devised workarounds, like camouflaging FAU’s annual homecoming drag show as “Owl Manor,” nodding to the school mascot. Mary Rasura, a senior, launched an LGBTQ+ newspaper, “Out FAU,” saying, “It just seemed like a no-brainer. You know, we are still a community. Like, we’re still here.”

And while some wary faculty members have recast their lectures, others have boldly not done so. Prof. Robert Cassanello at the University of Central Florida in Orlando — one of the nation’s largest campuses with 70,000 students — warned in red ink on the syllabus for his graduate seminar on the Civil Rights Movement (as for all courses he teaches) that he “will expose you to content that does not comply with and will violate” anti-DEI laws.

Cassanello feels compelled to object. “My area of research is Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. Being told not to discuss institutional, structural racism, “that’s like, what would be the point of me teaching? You know, I might as well just go home.”

Related: Student Voice: Bill targeting DEI offices in public universities has a chilling impact on students

The anti-DEI pressure in higher education has caught on — the Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI tracker identifies 85 anti-DEI bills introduced in 28 states since last year, with 13 becoming law — but it is hardly something that colleges and universities came to on their own. Rather, it is a campaign led by the conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo and other far-right influencers seeking to make “DEI” as scary and repulsive a term as “CRT” (Critical Race Theory). Rufo has said as much.

And while Rufo frames DEI as an affront to colorblind meritocracy, Brendan Cantwell, a professor at Michigan State University who studies politics and policy in higher education, argues that there is nothing ideological in how DEI offices operate.

The Center for Inclusion, Diversity Education and Advocacy at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, was shut down, leaving vacant staff offices with blank nameplates and celebratory decorations still hanging. Credit: Laura Pappano for the Hechinger Report

“The DEI movement as it manifests in colleges and universities is not radical,” he said. “It’s very bureaucratic and institutional.”

Cantwell said DEI shows up in tasks such as student advising or ensuring that databases accommodate gender identities and meet federal regulations — efforts that have arisen over the past decade as a direct response to campuses growing more diverse, racially and in other ways. DEI also covers veterans, first-generation students, international students, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and people of different faiths. The aim has been to institute policies and practices that allow all students to feel accepted.

But now anti-DEI laws are reaching beyond attacking such functions and seeking to control what may be taught in college courses.

“We are fighting over whether or not political parties that are in control of state government, in control of Congress, can control higher education,” Cantwell said. This is not about regulating funding or financial aid, but “what people learn” and “how colleges and universities can serve their students and staff.”

That was apparent in January when the Board of Governors for Florida’s state university system, in approving regulations for the new anti-DEI law, also removed sociology from the list of courses that meet general education requirements. (On the social platform X, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz berated sociology as “woke ideology.”)

At Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, anti-DEI laws have spurred name changes or shuttered LGBTQ+ centers and other services. Credit: Laura Pappano for the Hechinger Report

For Prof. Michael Armato, the sociology undergraduate director at UCF, the elimination of general education credit for his discipline was upsetting enough; introductory sociology enrolls 700 to 800 students per semester. But more disturbing, he said, “was the absolute silence on behalf of our administrators” who failed to defend the field or challenge state “meddling” in campus curriculum.

“What’s next?” he said, noting that fields like literature, anthropology and psychology also grapple with issues of race, gender and sexuality. “There is this sort of fear hovering over us,” said Armato, raising concerns “for what we can teach, for what we can advise students about.” As a result, his department now allows faculty who are assigned to teach potentially hot subjects like race and ethnicity to bow out. “It is their neck on the line,” he said.

Yet he is not backing down himself. He is preparing to teach a graduate course that includes Critical Race Theory.* “I refuse to kowtow to attempts to have me not teach what is the accepted and documented evidence within my field,” he said. Last semester, he taught a course, “Beyond the Binary.” Still, Armato wonders, “Is this going to blow up on me?”

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

Certainly, it’s easy to spot worry on campuses. At UCF, the student government counts on staff members to run an annual diversity training. The staffer responsible for it said he was unsure if it could happen — “we are waiting on guidance” — then ignored all follow-up emails. Across the state, more than a dozen campus leaders, including administrators, faculty representatives, staffers and student leaders who were contacted, declined to be interviewed about DEI or even to answer questions via email. Some apologized, as one did after initially agreeing to an interview, that “this is a very sensitive subject for state employees.” Some spoke only on background.

In teaching, Cassanello has a latitude that others don’t, because he has tenure. “If I were a lecturer, and I see what’s going on in Tallahassee,” he said, “I would say, ‘Maybe I don’t teach that concept.’”

Marissa Bellenger, one of Cassanello’s graduate students, was warned by a visiting professor teaching a lecture course on American history for which she is a teaching assistant. “He said, ‘You know, be careful of students asking you questions to get a rise out of you, to get you to say something that will get you in trouble,’” she said when we met outdoors in a shaded spot on campus. “I mean, if he’s worried about you, that says a lot.”

Bellenger, from Tampa, is studying for her Ph.D. at UCF, and has weighed leaving the state but would want to “come back and teach here. But then, it’s like, what is there to teach? You know, I’m going to be censoring myself.”

Student government leaders at the University of Central Florida, including Paige Fintel, the LGBTQ+ Caucus chair for the 55th Student Senate, have traditionally undergone diversity training programs arranged by campus staff, which may now conflict with the new anti-DEI law. Credit: Laura Pappano for the Hechinger Report

Such calculations are shaping Grace Castelin’s plans. Castelin, a senior and the president of the UCF chapter of the NAACP, sees professors avoiding certain discussions; they offer comments like, “Oh guys, you know, so the law, I can’t really say too much on this,” she said, or, as another did, add a disclaimer about “not trying to impose any beliefs on you guys.”

“It’s frustrating. It’s like we’re not getting the full course content,” Castelin said. She plans to go out of state to attend graduate school in public policy. “I applied to seven schools. None of them are in Florida,” she said. “If I stay here, I’m not going to learn the content that I need to know without it being censored.”

It is this kind of worry that spurred Michael H. Gavin, the president of Delta College in Michigan, a two-year institution, to start Education for All a year ago. The group gathers some 175 higher education leaders, many of them community college presidents, to monitor attacks on DEI and coordinate support through an online discussion list and regular meetings.

Gavin, who wrote a book on white nationalism and politics in higher education, said it is critical for leaders in states not facing anti-DEI laws to speak up for those who cannot. “Let’s not get tricked into this notion that we have to somehow be quiet about things that are right in our domain,” like restricting curriculum topics and banning books, he said.

He added that anti-DEI attacks are particularly damaging to students in community colleges, many of whom are from marginalized groups, “because the rhetoric is about their very identity.”

Related: One school district’s ‘playbook’ for undoing far-right education policies

Conservative activists cast the anti-DEI movement as a sober pursuit, but opponents say it appears bent on chasing certain people from view or halting efforts to acknowledge and serve them. This, despite the fact that high-quality research shows the value of “belonging” to student success.

But even as home pages for DEI offices are redirected or show error messages, services may still exist. For example, the University of North Florida in Jacksonville dissolved DEI-related offices, but OneJax, which had run UNF’s Interfaith Center for 11 years, became an independent nonprofit. Elizabeth Andersen, the executive director, said the group hired the same leader who is “continuing to serve youth in an interfaith capacity on campus.”

Severing campus ties left them without office space or supports, like HR and IT, however. “It’s been a difficult nine months,” she said.

Andersen finds the anti-DEI landscape absurd. “The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion have been co-opted to be bad words is bizarre to me,” she said.

A sense of outrage fuels Carlos Guillermo Smith, a policy adviser for Equality Florida and a former state representative now running for the state senate. Smith, a UCF graduate, helped lead a large protest on campus last spring. Smith is campaigning to support abortion rights, affordable housing and college affordability — and to hold DeSantis’s administration “accountable.”

Despite the clampdown in Florida, Smith said he sees no choice but to speak up and push back. “Resistance, public pressure and litigation are the only paths” to counter “the far-right’s extreme agenda of censorship and control,” he said.” I am committed to that fight for as long as it takes.”

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the course that Prof. Michael Armato is teaching this fall.

This story about the anti-DEI movement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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OPINION: I teach Renaissance literature at Columbia, but this week’s lessons are about political protests and administrative decisions  https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-i-teach-renaissance-literature-at-columbia-but-this-weeks-lessons-are-about-political-protests-and-administrative-decisions/ https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-i-teach-renaissance-literature-at-columbia-but-this-weeks-lessons-are-about-political-protests-and-administrative-decisions/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2024 19:25:17 +0000 https://hechingerreport.org/?p=100502

I have taught at Columbia University for the better part of 25 years. Last Wednesday, I held office hours, as I do every week. I met with students and we talked about their classes, their essays on Shakespeare and Milton, their progress toward their respective degrees, and their feelings about graduation. We also spoke about […]

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I have taught at Columbia University for the better part of 25 years. Last Wednesday, I held office hours, as I do every week. I met with students and we talked about their classes, their essays on Shakespeare and Milton, their progress toward their respective degrees, and their feelings about graduation.

We also spoke about their reactions to Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s recent Congressional testimony and her decision to authorize New York City police to break up the “Gaza Solidary Encampment” on campus, along with their views on the protests.

In each conversation, I was impressed with their thoughtfulness, intelligence and compassion – and with their skills as evaluators of others’ use of language. They are English majors, so they should have good close reading skills. But they took the time to evaluate the statements of others, in context, from multiple perspectives.

In some ways, Columbia students are getting two world-class educations right now: one in their classes, and another on a campus that has become a center of cultural and political forces we will spend years parsing.

Related: How to combat anti-semitism without compromising academic freedom

Everything changed on campus after our president authorized police to sweep the encampment, resulting in dozens of students being arrested. It was done without appropriate consultation with faculty and the university senate. There was no “clear and present danger,” as the administration claimed.

Columbia faculty are, for the most part, longform thinkers, researchers, experimenters and writers, considerers of evidence and engagers in dialogue, experimentation and peer review. We are not good at sound bites – or at least I am not. I am not interested in social media as a platform for speech or dialogue. But I am passionately interested in the university as a place for teaching, research and debate.

The president’s action not only degraded the mission of a great university as such a place, but it subjected our students and every single member of this community to an unnecessary escalation of turmoil both inside and outside our gates.

Many students were outraged. Many faculty were outraged. And the full media circus, along with dozens of extremists of all kinds, arrived at our gates. 

Much of our time now – the time of biologists and language teachers, of immunologists and anthropologists, teachers of literature and computer science and art – is going into handling the fallout from this grossly mismanaged crisis. It is not a good use of our time.

In some ways, Columbia is still working as it should. Students are protesting a brutal war, including in tents on a lawn, they are going to classes and to the library, writing essays, putting on the Varsity Show, and reporting, at a very high level, on the events unfolding for campus publications WKCR, BWOG and The Columbia Spectator.

Students are learning, very imperfectly, about the history of the Middle East, the history of protests on Columbia’s campus and elsewhere, and about the rights of protestors and the rights of other students.

They are also learning, again imperfectly, about the differences between their perceptions of what is happening on campus and the perceptions of others on that same campus at the same time, and about the difference between suspending a student for hate speech or harassment, and suspending them for participating in a protest.

They are learning about the power and opportunism of some members of the U.S. Congress, and about the consequences of bad decisions on the part of their university’s administration.

Our students also belatedly learned that administrators might learn from their mistakes after Columbia’s president, provost and trustee chairs took a step back Friday night, writing in a letter to the entire Columbia community that calling the police back to clear the encampment a second time “would be counterproductive, further inflaming what is happening on campus, and drawing thousands to our doorstep who would threaten our community.”

On Monday, they discovered that talks with administrators and student organizers have failed to reach an agreement.

The pressures working against nuanced dialogue across vast differences and experiences are enormous. Yet, we must restart those conversations. There are established places on campus for that work to take place: in classrooms, in representative student governing bodies, in representative faculty governing bodies, in conversations among students, faculty and administration, and in the university senate – the shared governing structure for the university.

More than 550 people came to the last open senate meeting on Friday. After much debate, the majority of senators voted on a resolution demanding that Columbia address reports of administrative actions jeopardizing academic freedom and breaching privacy and due process of students and faculty, along with violating shared governance principles. 

They proposed establishing a senate task force to present findings and recommendations for further senate action. The senate is contentious and baggy, but it, along with Columbia’s rules of conduct, were put in place 50 years ago to ensure that major university decisions be made representatively rather than by fiat.

They worked for 50 years. It’s time to bring them back.

Julie Crawford is the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Editor’s note: The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Columbia University’s Teachers College.

This opinion piece about campus protests was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in educationSign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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