by Dr. Cobretti D. Williams and Jesse Beal
Vikky Mir/Shutterstock
In honor of Campus Pride Month, it’s important to consider the progress made to embrace and include LGBTQA+ identities in the college campus culture. Within the last few years, there has been an effort to acknowledge and address the issues and challenges of student experiences in this minoritized community, however, there is still much to learn about how faculty and administrators process and understand their identity and role on campus. To learn more about this experience, I sat down with Jesse Beal to discuss their perspective on this topic.
Jesse Beal (they/their/them) is the director of the LBGT Resource Center at MSU and serves on the executive board of the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals as the external coordinator. They are a social justice and LGBTQA+ educator and consultant with over 15 years of experience supporting equity and inclusion in institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations.
Cobretti Williams: There seems to be plentiful research on LGBTQA+ college student experiences, but literature and analysis of staff and faculty is not as robust. Why do you think that is the case?
Jesse Beal: I think some of it is a structural issue. So, a lot of LGBTQA+ student services offices, queer resource centers, gender sexuality centers are housed within student affairs. So, because of their organizational location, their focus is on students. And so, a lot of the work of understanding and studying students’ success lives in student affairs. And LGBTQA+ serving offices tend not to have a mission that’s inclusive of LGBTQA+ faculty and staff. Most of us who work in these offices do that work in addition to our center’s charge because no one else is doing it. But the question becomes, are institutional diversity offices doing LGBTQA-specific work, and too often the answer is no.
Williams: Yes, that makes sense. I would love to get beyond the conversation of Safe Zone and Ally training because, yes, that’s one component, but to see the actions that colleagues take after those training — as well as broader policy issues addressed — is another. Generally, there is Title IX and non-discrimination clauses that have some impact, but what beyond those, what specific policies could we be focusing on to support LGBTQ faculty and staff?
Beal: One of the major things that needs to be addressed is how we capture demographics, specifically demographic information about LGBTQA+ identity. So, most colleges and universities do not capture that information accurately, and when they capture gender, what they’re really capturing is legal sex. And so, when we have large scale campus climate surveys on a campus, we’re frankly not asking the right questions about LGBTQA+ populations because we’re not getting the right demographic information. So, for me, that’s a huge part of understanding the puzzle, is being able to talk about what it’s like for our communities, and to talk about what it’s like for our communities across differences. So, can we also talk about what it means be a queer and trans person of color, and not just LGBTQA+ identity in general? Because we know that the LGBTQA+ community is not just one community and there are going to be different issues faced by different populations. What it is to be a sexual minority is very different than what it means to be a gender minority as well. So, I think demographic collection is a huge part.
Williams: Are there any other considerations that you think might be helpful to think about?
Beal: Well, whether the LGBTQA+ faculty and staff organization is funded is often a question. The other piece of this is, do large scale diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campuses include an LGBTQA+ lens? We’re lucky on our campus that when we went into our DEI-steering committee, we made sure that we had representation from LGBTQA+ communities and a Michigan State University group. I am also glad to say that we have a new Vice-President and Chief Diversity Officer, who has already, in his first six months, prioritized LGBTQA+ equity and inclusion efforts. But that isn’t necessarily how it is on all campuses. So, when we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, what do we mean? We absolutely must center race, but we also need to make sure to talk about class, gender identity, sexual identity, immigration status, tribal affiliation, disability, and so many different identities. So, making sure that whatever conversations you have on campus are intersectional and thoughtful, but also are funded and positioned appropriately.
Williams: How would you describe the campus climate now for LGBTQA+ faculty and staff? Especially given some of the recent anti-trans legislation around the country, what has been the conversation, if any at all?
Beal: I don’t know that things have gotten better in the past 10 years. I think we have gotten more visible as a community, which then has its own cost and its own challenges. I think in some ways, as things have gotten better, we have become more vulnerable. We are in a moment politically where the Bostock decision happened last summer, and so now theoretically, we are covered by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But in practice, is that actually happening? Does that translate onto our campuses? I don’t know. What I know is it feels like we’ve been having the same fights over more access to all-gender restrooms, more access to demographic collection information that serves our community, more fighting over resources, more resources specific to faculty and staff since I began my career. I think we have more people who are on the side of LGBTQA+ inclusion now, but we’re still having the same conversations.
Williams: I don’t think you are alone in that opinion, especially among critical scholars in the higher education field. Where do you think the tension point is for specific stakeholders that bear responsibility for this work?
Beal: Right. I tend to be a really structural thinker, so I actually think that it has to come from senior level administration, and I actually think that our institutional diversity offices need to create roles and funding streams for professionals that serve LGBTQA+ communities, so that the onus of LGBTQ inclusion does not fall on small, historically under-represented, historically marginalized, historically under-resourced LGBTQ resource centers that are too often housed in student affairs or on LGBTQA+ faculty and staff who do the work in addition to their other jobs. Now, there’s tons of ways to do this well, I think it’s possible to move LGBTQA+ centers outside of student affairs or to have a dotted line so that they are more able and positioned well to do institution-wide work. Safe Zone training is not going to solve the problem here. There should be LGBTQA+ cultural competence and cultural fluency training available, but that is a very, very low bar.
And a lot of campus LGBTQ centers in particular have moved away from doing Safe Zone trainings because they are so under-resourced that spending so much time and energy running a Safe Zone program that benefits mostly cisgender and heterosexual faculty and staff is perhaps not a really good use of their time when they have so many students that they’re supposed to be supporting and taking care of and engaging with, building events for. I believe that you have to be doing both things at once, you have to support the learning of heterosexual and cisgender folks to be more inclusive while also supporting students, but that’s incredibly hard to do with the way our centers are resourced and staffed. So, I think we need some more institutional support at most universities because it’s not a thing that is widely present.
Williams: Got it. As you are coming into your future role as the external coordinator, how do you envision the consortium being a change agent and helping to recruit and retain LGBTQ staff in a supportive campus climate?
Beal: One of the things that the consortium does so well is we issue promising practices documents on different areas. We are a collective-based organization, so I can’t say this with complete certainty, however, one thing I would like to see us do in the future is create best practices for LGBTQA+ staff and faculty. There’s nothing similar for supporting LGBTQA+ faculty and staff, and I don’t necessarily mean folks in resource centers, I mean focus who are LGBTQA+ anywhere at the university, what are things that we can do? Because so many faculty and staff organizations that are LGBTQA+ focused have already issued statements like this on our campuses. They’ve told the administration what they need, and so it is our job to listen.
And, as leaders in the field of LGBTQA+ inclusion and higher education, why don’t we set some standards for what the goal is… What needs to happen for universities and colleges to truly support LGBTQA+ faculty and staff? Especially, when there isn’t an LGBTQ center there, or you’re in rural areas of the country? How do we support those faculty, such that they feel like we can even come to the university, let alone survive their time there?
I think we’ve done so much work specific to students, which is great, but so many of us are doing the work of supporting LGBTQA+ faculty and staff in addition to our jobs, because who else is going to do it, and who else has the expertise to do it? And oftentimes, the answer is, “Well, if we don’t do it, no one’s going to do it.” And as a person who is LGBTQA+, I would certainly like these things to happen at the university, and I may be in the best position to have those conversations with the actors of the university.
