Boston College has provided an example to follow
Richard Friedman
Having been a Domer for the past 3 1/2 years and having grown up only an hour away from Notre Dame, I've been taught to be anti-Boston College on many levels. All of our sports teams are better than theirs, our campus is nicer, the people here are better; I mean we are the nation's best Catholic University, are we not?
Setting those sentiments aside, however, I would like to take this opportunity to praise Boston College for doing what Notre Dame just cannot seem to do. Just this past week, the president of Boston College sent a letter to their student body president notifying him that the College would be officially recognizing a newly proposed gay-straight student alliance.
Over the past few years, Boston College has consistently ranked with Notre Dame near the top of the Princeton Review's least accepting schools in terms of alternative lifestyles. While in the past few years Boston College has ranked as slightly less accepting than Notre Dame, this recent decision shows a profound effort on their part to try and correct their problems and to let students take an active part in accomplishing that goal.
Surprisingly, even before this action, Boston College was more "officially" open to homosexual students' needs than Notre Dame has been. Their original student group, known as LGBC (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Community), has been denied recognition three times over the past few years in a very similar way to Notre Dame's denial of OutreachND, but it has been allowed College office space for the past few years. Notre Dame has yet to even allow Outreach or IFLAG something as simple as that.
The praise for this action by Boston College should not only go to the administration, however, as the students were instrumental in helping to change the College's stance. Last Spring, student leaders at the College responded to student requests to start to pressure the College to be more supportive of their gay and lesbian students. Student government made it one of their priorities, and with the support of LGBC and many students, they continually met with Boston College officials in order to work out a compromise and to set up the kind of group that would offer the student support that gay and lesbian students wanted.
While Notre Dame has made many efforts and much progress in the past few years, it still seems far from reaching a point at which it will take such action. While the Standing Committee on Gay and Lesbian Student Needs has been a wonderful advancement, and the social settings provided by its monthly coffee hours certainly do their part in fostering a sense of community among gay and lesbian students, there needs to be a further effort by the University to respond to the students‚ needs by providing more student initiated support activities.
We have made many advances on the social side of things, but now we need to respond more to the personal and individual side. With Notre Dame's last year denial of recognition to IFLAG, a group made up of straight students and allies, it is obvious that our University has far to go before it will allow students any sort of control over an official student support-type group.
What Notre Dame needs now is more student support. While as students we do offer Outreach and individual students a lot of support and personal respect, we need to more vocal in our continued support for them. It should not just be gay and lesbian students that are bothered by and publicly express criticism for homophobic Viewpoint articles, but rather all students. The rest of the student body needs to start to stand up in support for gay and lesbian students and to voice their opinion to the University.
As this University strives to improve its image, we as students need to continue to show our discontent with our high homophobic rating, just as the students of Boston College did.
In recognizing the new gay-straight student alliance, Boston College officials took a huge step forward in showing everyone that they are willing to work with their gay and lesbian students and willing to try and provide them with the type of student-based support that they need. They deserve to be commended for this effort as well as does the Boston College student leadership who helped to make it possible.
At Notre Dame we now need to follow in their footsteps. We as students need to be more direct and more vocal. Boston College has helped by showing us a way that both a Catholic identity and a homosexual group can be combined; and now it is up to us to continue to push for a way to also accomplish that here at Notre Dame.
Richard Friedman is a senior majoring in architecture and psychology. His column runs every other Thursday, and he always welcomes your comments at rfriedma@nd.edu.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, February 6, 2003
