LGBTQ and ALANA Center
What’s up with LGBTQ and ALANA
Thanks to USS’s tireless campaigning and the support of the Provost Tim Marshall, the New School is now establishing a LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) Center. This is a great step, and now USS and the Provost’s Office are considering how to further expand services for LGBT and ALANA (Asian Latino/a African- and Native-American) students.
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The following statement was drafted before USS and the Provost’s Office decided to launch the LGBTQ Center in November 2009. We will replace this with a detailed plan of the LGBTQ Center shortly, as well as the report of our forthcoming Committee on ALANA Services, but are leaving this report here in the interim for research purposes.
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USS thanks every constituency in the university for supporting the LGBTQ Center project and bringing it to fruition!
Who does have an LGBT or ALANA Center?
Almost all significant universities, liberal universities and important colleges support LGBT and ALANA students better than we do. Because the list is so long, here are just a few examples of important LGBT centers in the US. Just click to see what we are missing.
• Direct Competitors— Columbia, NYU, CUNY, Vassar LGBT (& Vassar Alana)
• Large Universities— Cornell, George Washington, Nebraska (hi Bob!), Indiana, MIT, Penn State, U Penn,
Princeton (five offices), Yale (six), Rutgers, SUNY (many).
• Universities thought to be “conservative”— Dartmouth, Duke, Texas A&M, Utah State, Univ of Utah
• A much longer list is at the Consortium of LGBT Resources in Higher Education.
• The President of Emory University chairs the Emory LGBT Task Force!
• Dartmouth has a 200-year-old special fund for Native American related research.
• And we won’t even START listing California!
Read University Diversity Committee Proposal to the Provost (2008):
• Executive Summary
• Powerpoint Presentation, Charts and Graphs
Why have LGBT and ALANA Centers?
The New School’s core identity is “a progressive, liberal, urban university.” Omission of LGBT and ALANA programs is inconsistent with the University’s core mission.
LGBT and ALANA Centers would:
• retain and recruit satisfied and happy lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, asian, latino, african- and native-american students;
• promote academic excellence through the study of American subcultures;
• create a welcoming and appealing University community for students, faculty, and staff;
• conform the New School to modern academic and social standards;
• raise the profile of the university through conferences and research;
• promote fundraising both from foundations and satisfied alumni;
• provide safe space and help for gay students who are coming out.
Although few accurate statistics are available, we believe that the majority of New School students are probably African American/Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender; certainly half the city is, and there are many vibrant subcultures to study right outside our doors.
How do LGBT and ALANA centers support academic work?
Most important universities study LGBT and ALANA subjects because American subcultures are so vibrant and interesting. One can’t understand the world without thinking about ourselves. The New School is right here in the world’s most important gay neighborhood, but for example, we ignore the current turf war between LGBT youth of color and LGBT property owners around Christopher Street. Our ALANA center could be a national authority quoted in the press about ALANA issues around the levee rebuilding in New Orleans. Also, in April 2009, the New School hosts an “Immigration Reform Conference,” but amazingly has no representation about lesbigay immigration (which is denied by the US, separating gay couples); and around HIV issues (The US remains one of the only countries in the world which bars any HIV-positive people from even entering the country; this leads visitors not to bring their medicines, killing people.)
USS doesn’t necessarily think New School programs, conferences, departments and recruitment ignore LGBT and ALANA on purpose. However, the very reason to have LGBT and ALANA Centers is to keep dialogue flowing, so as to help the whole university remember and relate to these vibrant American subcultures (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, asian, latino, african and native american). These areas must no longer be merely an afterthought — they must always be included, for us to fulfill our core mission and to give our liberalism a 21st Century style.
What else could LGBT and ALANA Centers offer?
Retention: Lang lost more than 30% of its freshman class last year through out transfer. This is certainly partly related to the lack of ALANA/LGBT programs and services; at the Spring 2008 Lang Dean’s forum, minority and LGBT students were particularly in force and expressed bitterness at a lack of these programs; the problem has been covered in the Free Press and noted in faculty workshops on the difficulty of raising race relations in New School classes.
Opportunity: LGBT and ALANA programs make people like the university and attract new students and faculty. They result in highly positive press coverage, and give us the legitimacy to host conferences—we could not currently host a national conference of LGBT or ALANA programs, since we don’t have any, but we would also gain standing to host conferences such as University of Nevada at Las Vegas’s Milennium Conference on Gay Youth Issues, which we currently have no home or coordinator for.
Centers: Since the New School is going in the direction of forming academic centers generally, these programs fit excellently, as a center for subcultural studies and a center for sexuality studies. (No extra resources are required for LGBT and ALANA Centers, since the large benefits far outweigh the costs, not to mention that we don’t want to be outdone by Texas A&M and the University of Utah, in what should be “our own backyard.”)
Academic Support: These centers support and engage all students and faculty interested in exploring issues of cultural and racial identity, social justice education, and studies of American subcultures. They create promote equity, cultural pluralism, positive intergroup experiences, and relations with the broader community.
Conferences: These centers sponsor conferences (like the Rutgers Sex/Drives Conference and the University of Nevada Millennium Gay Youth Conference) and symposia, raise money for research funds (Princeton’s FFR spends millions on LGBT related research via a special alumni fund); they attract Phd students and professors (Dartmouth has a Native American studies fund); they coordinate courses and sometimes offer majors and committee-led degrees; and they sponsor speeches and publish magazines (such as the Harvard Lesbian and Gay Review, which has become a major national magazine).
Counseling and advising: LGBT and ALANA centers provide an important advising function for new students who may be coming to terms with their sexuality or cultural identity, they foster self-esteem by providing counseling, social opportunities such as coming-out meetings and parties; and advise those who wish to integrate sexuality or subcultural studies into their academic programs.
Alumni: Many schools (Vassar, Princeton, Dartmouth, NYU) have Alumni LGBT Organizations, which keep alumni involved with the school and result in copious fundraising. Vassar’s Blegen House was overfunded with alumni contributions, while Princeton’s Fund For Reunion is a dedicated LGBT-related research fund that not only funds a graduate center, but maintains a fund to which current students can apply for subcultural research stipends. Princeton’s FFR runs a multi-university Alumni Social Network which throws dozens of intercollegiate LGBT alumni parties every year; The New School has no LGBT alumni association to join this group.
Funding: Establishment requires, at minimum, hiring two staff members and providing two rooms for the centers. This is in addition to whatever programs, services, and conferences the centers want to offer to the University. These costs are small, and would surely be outweighed by retaining and recruiting more students, increases in all sorts of fundraising, a decrease in noisy student dissatisfaction, and an important rise in the New School’s academic and social profile.
— USS Statement drafted in February 2009
By Peter Ian Cummings