The queer experience at Rider University is nothing more than or short of casual. Out students are recognizable and, by in large, accepted. Public displays of affection by the handful of queer couples go on without riot; LGBT holidays like National Coming Out Day or the Transgender Day of Remembrance come and go without much notice. LGBT students have LGBT friends, hold leadership positions throughout campus, and receive impressive amounts of likes on their relationship statuses. Queer life is normalized. But normalized queer life at Rider University is a problem.
The legalization of gay marriage on June 26, 2015 was gay America’s signal to a new era of proximity to the average American life. NORC at the University of Chicago reported that the acceptance of same-sex marriage rose dramatically from 11% in 1988 to 46% in 2010, amid a landslide of gay media and push for equality that rose through the beginning of the 21st century. The vision of raising a family and living a peaceful life is no longer a distant dream for queer couples: it is sold to them across television screens, magazines, and Instagram pages.
With the general acceptance of LGBT people in the mainstream American media, high schools and colleges have also seen an improved climate for their students. Although GLSEN reported in 2013 that 74.1% of LGBT students were harassed because of their sexual orientation, and 55.2% for their gender expression, it also noted a decline over the years in the amount of harassment (both physical and verbal) that took place. After the suicide of Tyler Clementi in 2010, colleges across the nation began to make more conscious efforts to promote LGBT acceptance amongst their student bodies, moving en-mass towards backing student organizations, counseling centers and hotlines to support their students in times of need.
Rider has been no stranger to that progress. A February 22, 2013 editorial from The Rider News provides an overview of Rider’s progress towards LGBT inclusion. The first recognized LGBT group on the Lawrenceville campus, RiderFLAG, came about in 1994 after it was discovered that gay students at Rider were meeting with faculty in secret after feeling unsafe about revealing their sexuality. Since then Rider made strides through its student organizations, as RiderFLAG (meaning Friends of Lesbians and Gays) eventually became Spectrum, which represents students across the queer community. Concurrent to the editorial, a campus climate survey conducted by The Rider News pointed that 58% of students at the time felt Rider was queer-friendly, compared to the 18% of those students still felt unsafe on campus.
There are few students who, in my time at Rider, have never described any sort of discrimination. The campus staff and administration work with LGBT students with open minds. Academic faculty are often pleasant and supportive of their queer students, and the student body never fails to reinforce the achievements of its gay students (I find it hard to imagine that, thirty years ago, a student government board that was two-thirds queer would have ever been possible). In such an age of progress, and normalcy, what could be going wrong?
The problem that many of today’s gay college students fail to recognize, and experience, is that normalcy breeds complacency and, inherently, blindness. We see this first on the national level: we have marriage equality, yes, but how often do you hear members of the gay community talking about homelessness among LGBT youth? A cure for HIV, especially when the rate of infection is increasing among gay and bisexual males, and 44% of youth living with HIV (which are primarily LGBT) don’t know they are infected? Rampant racism, biphobia and transphobia which not only exist among heterosexual America, but within the gay community? Or moreover, we should be asking: what community?
Rider University as a whole may lack a social conscience, but for the queer student, that is all the more obvious in the nonexistence of a network among LGBT students. Regardless of Spectrum’s campus presence, queer students as a whole do not make the connection to support and back one another. There is no sense of urgency—the idea to a young, gay college student that they should have a comrade with their fellow gay students seems antiquated and unnecessary. On a campus that does not experience outward issues of discrimination or hate, why would that even need to be a thought? Why can’t queer students live equally undisturbed “normal” lives?
The harsh reality is that queer students have never been and currently are not equal on this campus or anywhere.
The Campus Pride Index ranks universities based on the queer-friendliness of their institutions. Assessments are made in accordance with how LGBT-inclusive the “policies, programs and practices” of an institution are. Of the 223 institutions listed by the Index, Rutgers New Brunswick (where Tyler Clementi was a student) is listed as the most inclusive, with five stars across the board in all categories; Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan is ranked the lowest, with only one. Only two institutions from New Jersey join Rutgers in the rankings. Princeton University takes proximity to the top of the list with a four-and-a-half star rating. Rowan University, on the other hand, strikes near the bottom with a two-star rating.
Rowan’s standing is explained in a breakdown of the university’s policies and culture in an “LGBT-Friendly Report Card,” which covers areas ranging from institutional commitment to student life. While Rowan does have non-discrimination policies, LGBT living spaces and even an educational resource center for its students, it’s dragged down by a lack of LGBT-specific recruitment efforts and academia dedicated to queer studies, among other standards even in the areas of student and residence life.
For a university to offer above-average resources to its students and still have a remarkably low rating may suggest that the standards the Campus Pride Index has are too heavy and unrealistic. But as Campus Pride notes itself, the index is updated frequently (most recently in 2015) as a way to follow the highest benchmarks achieved by colleges in pursuing queer inclusion. To suggest that Rowan’s efforts, though progressive, are anywhere close to Rutgers’, devalues New Brunswick’s push by comparison.
And the institutions that receive these rankings are not being pointed out for the sake of public roasting. The assessment Campus Pride uses to measure these colleges is done on a self-investigative basis, meaning that every group that goes through this rating does so on its own merit. Universities that go through the assessment are even given the option to withhold their results from the public, meaning that institutions that still show off their low ratings want the public to be aware they are willing to work toward the best interest of its queer students. The goal of this for all the institutions that opt-in, as Campus Pride themselves describe, is to pursue a “willingness to come out, be visible and actively advocate for improving higher education for LGBTQ people.”
A low rating is still better than no rating at all. Of course, it is entirely possible that Rider may never have been aware of Campus Pride, but that, in-and-of-itself, is one of many obvious signs that Rider is behind the times.
What would an assessment of Rider’s queer-friendliness look like? Based on the criteria described in the “Report Card,” not promising. Rider does not have academics dedicated to queer studies (Rowan has a gender studies program comparable to Rider’s, but does not make Campus Pride’s mark in terms of a focus specifically on queerness). It does not ask prospective students to specify sexual orientation, nor does it offer any LGBT-specific scholarships, or a graduation recognition for its queer students. It does not offer LGBT-inclusive career services, gender-inclusive housing or facilities, or LGBTQ support groups. Unlike Rowan, even, it does not have a queer resource center or LGBT-themed housing floors.
The majority of queer students at Rider are blind to these issues, and if they are aware of them, they do not feel the comfort or initiative to pursue changing them. The majority of queer students may not be aware that up until now, transgender students have had to privately seek out accommodations through campus administration, rather than having structured and certain avenues that would guarantee they would receive protective housing and appropriate health services. The majority of queer students at Rider are miseducated, under-informed and unaware that this lack of urgency not only keeps out students who are looking for supportive campus environments—who are looking for these higher standards—from applying to Rider, it keeps fellow students in the closet from finding a way out.
The question is equity, not equality. Queer students should not be foreign to one another in the same way students of other historically underrepresented groups come together across campuses. Ally programs are well, fair and necessary—but at the center of the queer struggle must be queer leaders who have gone through these experiences and can serve as role models for others in their own conflicts. Each queer person is responsible for the queer person next to them; the “new normal” is simply a disguise for division.
