IU earns top rating for LGBT-friendly campus, policies

Identity is complicated.

IU earned Campus Pride’s five-star rating on the LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index in the results released this month.
 
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Student Support Services fills out a survey each year that evaluates eight topics, including support and institutional commitment, academic and student life, housing, safety, counseling and recruitment efforts.

Only 33 of 291 institutions were given the five-star rating.

The survey mainly includes administrative policies and available resources.  It doesn’t address who uses those resources or why.

“Students aren’t just gay, bisexual, lesbian or transgender. There are lots of different identities that are intersecting,” said junior Barton Girdwood, a triple major in Gender Studies, Communication and Culture, and an individualized major in Human Migration and Diaspora studies. “We have lots of resources, but how do we build community?”

If a student is openly gay and Latino, for example, he may go to Latino friends instead of a GLBT center because that community is already supportive of one part of his identity. Collaboration or integration of programs between GLBT SSS and other culture centers could provide increased resources, Girdwood said.

However, the GLBT SSS aims to support students no matter their multiple identities.

“GLBT issues are part of the diversity dialogue on campus,” said Doug Bauder, coordinator of GLBT SSS. “We have a widespread approach to providing support to gay students.”

Girdwood has acknowledged that IU has made significant steps in GLBT acceptance but said the University can do more.

“There are some individuals, especially Doug Bauder, that have made IU a very inclusive campus at an administrative and policy level,” Girdwood said. “But there are lots of things that need to be dealt with, and those come into stark light when talking about gender-neutral housing, bathrooms and accessing safe spaces.”

While IU does provide gender-neutral housing,  transgender students will be placed in single rooms on floors with their assigned gender and given personal bathrooms.

Both Bauder and GLBT SSS office supervisor Carol Fischer acknowledged the need for increased attention to transgender issues. 

This includes working with University administration and RPS to provide expanded gender-neutral housing and bathrooms.

The administration has also been involved with various GLBT activities.

Pete Goldsmith, vice provost for undergraduate education, attended Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Equality’s candlelight vigil for the gay teen suicides last fall and stood to make a statement afterward.

Girdwood said the vigil had a huge turnout, but the majority of attendees was white.
“It was a realization that the (GLBT) community has an image,” Girdwood said. “We aren’t being creative in how we construct identity in our minds.”