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In honor of Pride Month, we want to celebrate some colleges and universities known for their LGBTQ-inclusive policies, programs, and practices.
Take our polls below and let us know your favorites!
Our selection comprises some schools that have been previously recognized for some aspect of their LGBTQ-friendliness. Let us know your picks and suggest other schools we should add to the list!
Which of these southern schools is LGBTQ-friendly?
I wrote most of this post in another thread, but it may be useful here:
Note that there are various angles of this that may not be fully covered by “LGBTQ+ friendly” or not. In particular, the friendliness to various letters of the acronym tends to vary (usually LBf > GBm > Tm >> Tf). But also consider that the following aspects can vary:
State laws and policies on the subject (look at state level politics, such as the state legislature and governor, rather than national politics like US senate and presidential elector election results). Movement Advancement Project | Snapshot: LGBTQ Equality by State can be a useful list, although changes in the state level politics over the next few years can change the laws and policies while a student is in college.
Why did y’all choose the schools you chose for the polls? Trying to figure out your rationale. I am the parent of two LGBTQ kids and live in the South and this is a bit of an odd list of schools to me. There are some good ones on there but just kind of a weird list. There are a lot of lesser known schools and ones that I have never heard of a LGBTQ kid going to (not that they haven’t just that it is not a school with an LGBTQ buzz about it). Are these schools that you as the poll maker thought might be LGBTQ friendly or had heard were somewhere? Or are you trying to point out the ones that aren’t?
Pro tip: most women’s colleges are very LGBTQ friendly.
@Sweetgum, the list contains some schools that have been previously recognized as LGBTQ-friendly. Of course we couldn’t list all schools in a specific region, so please add your picks in comments.
Might be interesting to ask parents if they have LGBTQ kids or their straight kids have LGBTQ friends where they have gone to school and had a good experience.
We know LGBTQ kids who have had good experiences at UNC Chapel Hill, SCAD, Hollins (lots of Ls and Ts and Bs), Warren Wilson, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Greensboro (great theatre program, decently fun city), Oberlin. I’ll try to think of some more.
I think the point of this exercise is to get us all talking and thinking! Like “How could they have left so-and-so off the list?!” or “Why did they even include so-and-so as an option?!” Or “Wow, 2 schools in the same city (Dallas), and one has the reputation for being super queer friendly, and the other is reputed to be quite the opposite!”
I guess if there is one thing I learned after sending an LGBTQ+ kid off to college is that many of my preconceived notions were wrong. If there was one thing I was “certain” about, it was that we should definitely avoid religious schools, especially Catholic schools. But in the end my kid ended up at a Catholic school (Fordham LC) and it has a thriving LGBTQ+ scene, very very queer friendly.
Thank you so much for this. Honestly, we’ve been automatically avoiding Catholic schools and you’re helping me see my own bias in this and will change my approach and open my mind more!
Schools for the polls were generally selected as either being on the Princeton Review list of LGBTQ-friendly schools (i.e. based on surveys of students) and/or that received 5* from Campus Pride (i.e. the school’s policies). Originally, the questions were designed to try and get people to identify schools which made the lists, as sometimes there were surprises on the lists (or surprises as to which schools did not make the lists).
But @CC_Sorin suggested, and I agreed, that it could be more interesting to have posters engage more fully to see which schools they would pick as being LGBTQ-friendly. As it has often been mentioned on various threads where students are looking for LGBTQ-friendly schools, a school may have one type of reputation but it doesn’t necessarily line up with how things are in reality.
To provide some additional context, the original proposed questions are below:
Which of these southern schools received a 5* rating from Campus Pride?
Have you spent much time looking at the Campus Pride index? The data is very sparse in terms of coverage—many schools are not listed—and also seems inaccurate for schools that are. I wouldn’t use it as a reliable data source at all.
Using it in the framing of the questions as was done is really misleading. For example, the question about “western schools” saying that Lewis & Clark and Cal Berkeley didn’t receive 5 stars, excludes the fact that they aren’t included in the Campus Pride database in the first place. In fact, the CP database only includes 3 colleges total in Oregon. It also only includes one of the UC campuses (Irvine) and only 7 out of the 23 CSU campuses.
The question about “southwestern schools” is even more misleading. Only one school is even listed in the database for both AZ and NM: Northern Arizona University and NM State. And only six Texas colleges are listed, with UT-Austin and U of Dallas excluded.
The Campus Pride index also doesn’t state the date of the information that they are using for the limited number of schools listed in their database, and when I spot-checked some individual schools, the data that the rankings are based on appears to be inaccurate and out of date.
@YoLo2, the poll is not about the Campus Pride index. You can vote from the existing list or add your pick in the comments. This is intended as a fun, collaborative exercise to identify schools that are LGBTQ-friendly. If a school is not listed, and we know many are not, please mention it in the comments for folks to keep it in mind.
