Expanding the Circle

Creating an Inclusive Environment in Higher Education for LGBTQ Students and Studies

John C. Hawley

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781438454627
  9781438454610
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438454634
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

Examines strategies and best practices that effectively integrate LGBTQ areas of teaching and research with student life activities.

Many educational professionals agree that the time has come to expand their circle of inclusion and broaden their definition of diversity by increasing LGBTQ studies, but the question of how to do so is still debated. Although some colleges and universities have been incorporating LGBTQ studies for decades, courses and programs continue to be pockets of innovation rather than models of inclusion for all of higher education. Colleges and universities need to encourage faculty members to teach and research a wide range of LGBTQ topics, as well as support student life professionals in building inclusive campus communities. This book includes testimonies that alert educators to possible pitfalls and successes of their policies through an analysis of changing student attitudes. Based on these case studies, the contributors offer practical suggestions for the classroom and the provost's office, demonstrating not only the gains that have been made by LGBTQ students and the institutions that serve them, but also the tensions that remain.

Part I

Changing Institutional Structures

Chapter 1

A Website Evaluation of the Top Twenty-Five Public Universities in the United States to Assess Their Support of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People

Bharat Mehra, Donna Braquet, and Calle M. Fielden

Introduction

Evaluation and assessment of information resources and services are key areas of research, study, and practice in the enactment of the information creation-organization-dissemination processes that form the core of the library and information science (LIS) professions in all its varied manifestations (Diamond and Sanders 2006; Munde and Marks 2009; Wallace and Van Fleet 2001). They have also provided practical relevance as a management tool for leaders in diverse LIS environments (e.g., public, academic, school, and medical libraries) to identify and execute change in tangible directions and operationalize improvements in the planning, design, delivery, performance, and implementation of different kinds of information services (Matthews 2007; Matthews 2003; Weingand 2001). This chapter focuses on application of evaluation and assessment in the analysis of the websites of the top twenty-five universities in the United States to identify and measure their support (or lack of thereof) of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.

The development of this research is based on an intersection of three knowledge areas, as a result of which it makes a unique contribution to this collection of work, namely: information resource evaluation and assessment (Johnson et al. 2002), LGBT information representation (Jackson 1995; White 1999), and website design and development (Lawrence and Tavako 2006; Plumley 2010) in academic institutions of higher learning in the United States. Evaluation and assessment of one kind of information resource (namely, academic university websites) forms the goal of this research, representation of LGBT information provides the context of study and becomes the subject of scrutiny under examination, and the specific objects being studied are the websites of the selected universities.

LGBT people have long been marginalized in American society (as well as in other parts of the world) often persecuted and treated with hate as criminals or worse (Brown and Alderson 2010; Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock 2011). Social, cultural, political, religious, legal, familial, and other support systems are limited and lacking for LGBT people in the manner that most heterosexuals consider their birthright and take for granted (Isay 2009; Parker & Aggleton 2007). Further, an irresponsible media is always at hand in the United States to prostitute itself in exchange for increased ratings and often more than willing to straddle its legs up in the air for the manipulative games of the politicians who have used the “gay card” during election times to distract the public, in order to avoid dealing with real issues facing the nation (Cahill 1999; Smith 2008). The audacity of the conservative religious right in trampling the democratic values of liberty, equality, and justice at every step has also known no bounds in recent years, as they continue to brainwash the ignorant public and target LGBT people as the problem (Aarons 1995), manipulating the First Amendment and the right to freedom of speech argument to new diminished levels in spreading the message of hate and demonizing an already marginalized minority (Lakoff 2002; O’Connor & Cutler 2008). For example, the opinion of authors Alan Sears and Craig Osten (Sears & Osten 2003) is that the “homosexual agenda” is to trump the rights of all other groups, especially those of people of faith, except that they fail to recognize the documented fact that it is LGBT people who have been ostracized, ridiculed, and even killed (e.g., Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder and the numerous hate-crimes since) (Cortese 2005), their rights of life, liberty, dignity, and equality denied (Cobb 2006; Shepard 2010), and not the other way around (compared to people of faith).

Even within the information world, there is much literature that would simply just want LGBT people to disappear (Mehra & Braquet 2007, “Process”) and/or information about them is often either completely lacking or presented in an isolated, incomplete, and fragmented manner owing to conscious or unconscious ignorance, deliberate malice, homophobia, and pervading heterosexism, among other reasons (Mehra & Braquet 2006). Moreover, in the LIS professions, LGBT people have long been considered invisible, conspicuous by their absence (Mehra & Srinivasan 2007), and are only recently beginning to get recognized as a significant underserved population, worthy of study, focus of library services in different environments, and important enough to be touched on in mainstream LIS education knowledge domains and practices (Mehra & Braquet 2011).

Academic institutions of higher learning, especially in the United States, have garnered tremendous prestige and an enviable reputation of providing cutting-edge education in the pursuit of academic excellence (Volkwein & Sweiter, 2006.). The 2010 “Webometrics Ranking of World Universities” identified 103 universities in the United States in the Top 200, based on web presence, visibility, and web access (Aguillo, Bar-Ilan et al. 2010), while the Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s “Academic Ranking of World Universities” recognized more than 30 of the highest-ranked 45 institutions are in the United States, measured by awards and research output (“Academic Ranking” 2011). In light of such a positive image of academic institutions of higher learning in the United States worldwide, how are the top-ranking universities in this group representing relevant LGBT information and presenting LGBT services that exist in their academic environments? This research addresses the question to identify how such an influential assembly of members considers one of society’s most disenfranchised populations to make them included and welcome in their institutions and what strategies they are employing to create safe and supportive environments for LGBT people. The purpose of focusing on the top-ranked universities in this research is to provide benchmarks and best practices that may lead to development of positive trends in practice since other lesser-ranked universities and colleges regard the top-ranked as aspirational institutions and role models, more often than not emulating and replicating their efforts and strategies (O’Shea, et al. 2007). In evaluation and assessment research and practice the role and use of such benchmarks has recently found much tangible application in service design, development, and delivery (Madhaven, Tunstel, &Messina 2009.; Dunn, McCarthy et al. 2010), and it will be worthwhile to establish such benchmarks (if they can be formulated) for representing LGBT information on web resources developed by academic institutions of higher learning in the United States. Public institutions were intentionally selected as the focus sample for this research. The underlying reason is that public academic institutions are supported by federal and state monies and tax payer’s contributions, and since LGBT people pay taxes as much as anyone else living in the state or country; hence, it would be valuable to explore the extent of their needs, expectations, and representation on the websites of their public institutions of higher learning.

Traditionally, evaluation of information services has involved documentation of routine input-output like measures that present more of a perspective from the internal environment and system-centric view (Dugan, Hernon, & Nitecki 2009.), while more recently, outcome-based evaluation takes an external viewpoint presenting a customer or people-centric point of view (Smallwood & Forman 2011). The website provides an interface between the internal world of the institution and the external life of the community within which the institution is embedded. It becomes the translucent electronic facade—opaque in its limited coverage of the actual realities of experience that physicality embodies, yet, visible for the world to gaze and navigate to gain insights and understanding of the physical experience of a place, even at a distance—that has tremendous potential for shaping public perception, image building, and serving a constructive marketing agenda (Potts 2007).

Moreover, a study of web resources is key since during the past two decades the world has witnessed tremendous growth of the Internet and an almost ubiquitous adoption of the World Wide Web that has had an undeniable and everlasting impact on the way people from around the world search, find, and use information (Chowdhury & Chowdhury 2001; Muller 2003). Examining what strategies the top twenty-five public universities in the United States are using to represent LGBT information on their websites is important because such representations influence what people geographically dispersed may experience (and make assumptions), at a distance, of these institutions in terms of their campus climate and environment, based on what is (or not) represented (Weller 2010). This web representation or lack of representation of all forms of diversity (including LGBT people) shapes users’ mind-set at an individual level and helps them determine whether or not the different academic institutions are attractive places for them to join (Visser 2005). Having effective LGBT representation on the university’s website may thereby help attract the best students, faculty, staff, administrators, funders, and business corporations, among others, who are interested in endowing financial investments in progressive and safe areas for all people to live in. Future research will identify if any correlations exist between high-economic investments by financial investors in specific institutions and high (or positive) use of web representations for diverse groups (including LGBT people) by those institutions.

Research Methods

The methods used in this research have evolved (and been informed) as a part of a process that involved the participation of the authors and others in qualitative studies and action research conducted on behalf of LGBT people at the University of Tennessee since 2005. This chapter extends, modifies, redefines, and expands select variables from a study titled “A Website Analysis of the University of Tennessee’s Peer Institutions to Assess Their Support of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People” that the authors had led as part of the Research Committee of the UT’s Commission for LGBT People during January through June 2007 (Mehra et al. 2007). Twelve peer institutions recognized by UT’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment were included in the initial study that assessed their web representation of LGBT issues based on select variables from the list of “gay friendly” criteria identified in The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students (Windmeyer 2006). The initial assessment of UT’s support of LGBT people (based on the select variables) showed that the UT was ranked in the bottom two universities as compared to its peer institutions at the time. It led to identifying and mapping information-related LGBT-relevant criteria with LGBT representations, social justice activism, and interventions that promoted communitywide socially progressive changes on behalf of LGBT people (Mehra & Braquet 2007, “Library”). Information-related work activities were subsequently analyzed in the identified interventions. Efforts were proposed to integrate these in the delivery of an LIS curriculum to educate and train future librarians and information professionals to “become socially progressive curators of world knowledge,” “transform them to become true leaders involved in the organization/management of information” who realized the worth of questioning heterosexist assumptions in LIS work and took appropriate actions to “rectify biases in a systematic and holistic manner that may bring about community-wide cultural, political, legal, and economic changes for LGBT people” (Mehra 2011).

Having identified ways for LIS education to extend itself in its integration of LGBT content, this research broadens the scope of study in its website assessment of top-ranked public institutions of higher learning in the United States. Table 1.1 lists the top twenty-five public universities in the United States that were selected for this research. These universities were selected from the list provided by the 2011 U.S. News & World Report (“Top” n.d.) that identifies its reason for ranking colleges and universities to help students make “one of the most important decisions” of their life, since investment in a college education is on the rise and profoundly affects students’ career opportunities, financial well-being, and quality of life (“Why U.S.” 2010).

The “gay friendly” criteria developed over past research conducted by the authors were reevaluated and reconsidered over a period of time via sustained discussions and debate between the three authors based on their relevance and applicability in the new context of this website study. Factors such as applicability of the criteria during changing times in the contemporary context, reflecting current trends and practices in academic environments, and use of extended information and communication technologies, to name a few, were considered in the process. The criteria were also examined and modified keeping in mind new research and reports that have been developed during this time (Rankin et al. 2010). The reevaluated criteria were also tested in a pilot group of five randomly selected universities from the list by three different coders to identify which criteria were still relevant and/or needed to be redefined; the pilot study also contributed toward a refinement of some of the criteria meanings and definitions so that the three coders were on common ground while applying the framework to the entire website sample of all the universities selected for this research. This redefinit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Building on a Changing Paradigm
• Part I. Changing Institutional Structures
• Part II. Case Studies
• Part III. Changing Student Perceptions
• Part IV. Expanding the Circle
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover