With college classes resuming in a few weeks, students across the nation are likely soaking up the last days of summer before heading off, or returning, to their college campuses. For many LGBT students, their college campus is a safe and affirming place, and a home away from home for youth who have faced intolerance from their families or others. For other students, however, their college campus — an environment generally thought of as a bastion of liberal acceptance where personal growth and freedom is valued — is another stronghold of homophobia.
Take, for example, Grove City College in Grove City, about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh. The small, Christian liberal-arts college just earned an unenviable title from the Princeton Review: the most LGBT-unfriendly college in the nation.
The Review named 20 schools on the list, as well as 20 that are deemed the most LGBT-friendly, a lineup that included Pennsylvania’s Bryn Mawr College. The ratings are based on 126,000 surveys from students regarding the LGBT-friendliness of a college’s academics, student body, administration and other factors. While some have criticized the report methods as not being comprehensive enough, there is clearly a problem at Grove City.
On its website, the college says it is founded upon two principles: faith and freedom. It goes on to say the college celebrates “both our diversity and our commonalities” and that its primary goal is to “provide a well-rounded curriculum that helps students see the broad intellectual landscape of ideas, people and events that have shaped, and continue to shape, our world.”
Sounds great. However, the college also notes proudly on its website that it is one of just a handful of schools in the nation that refuses federal student aid, so as to protect against “federal government oversight of our academic programs and finances.” Another red flag is a seeming total absence of words like “sexual orientation,” “gender identity” or “LGBT” anywhere on its website. A group of students founded an LGBT student group in 2011, but that organization appears to now be defunct. The school has also offered courses such as “Sociology of Deviant Behavior” that looks at the “sexually maladjusted.”
While the college is a self-defined Christian institution, in 2013 it should be feasible to adhere to one’s faith tenets without marginalizing a sector of a community that surely has a presence on campus, no matter how shadowed. While students can choose to not attend LGBT-unfriendly schools, some of these youth may be pressured into a Christian education by parents, and many may not yet be out, or may not yet themselves embrace and accept their orientation or identity.
Simple actions like instating an LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination policy, offering LGBT-specific counseling and resources or hosting out LGBT leaders on campus can mean a world of difference to LGBT or questioning students.
Grove City cannot change its culture overnight, but if the university genuinely cares about providing well-rounded education that values “freedom,” it should want to move towards taking itself off the Princeton Review’s list.