Students Say The New School Lacks Centralized LGBTQ Resources

The New School doesn’t have a specific office dedicated to supporting LGBTQ students. Some students say that they see the effects, such as faculty repeatedly misgendering students and the lack of sufficient support networks for students struggling with their identities.

“I’ve not had one professor make space for asking if anyone would want to say what their pronouns are or anything like that. There was definitely not a space for that,” said Mariah Lonergan, a Parsons freshman.

Lonergan and many other LGBTQ students feel that the university hasn’t done enough for queer students. The New School doesn’t hold mandatory training for faculty on LGBTQ issues, and while students and staff have tried to solve this problem through a patchwork approach, some believe things won’t improve enough until the university creates an office specifically devoted to their issues.

At New York University, Columbia University, and other universities around the country, issues and concerns within the queer community are handled by a dedicated office. At The New School, however, the LGBTQ community relies primarily on an overworked student health services office and the group of students they employ, the Queer Collective, who juggle the concerns of those whom they serve and a full course load.

While the school offers Safe Zone, a voluntary training program for students, faculty, and staff who want to be better allies to the LGBTQ community, many stated that the community needs more structured support. The Queer Collective, an organization staffed by student workers, peer health advisors, and volunteers, which advocates for the LGBTQ community and allies, is housed within Student Health Services, a department also charged with providing medical, psychological, wellness, and support services to students.

Some members of the Queer Collective feel that the perception of The New School as a progressive, accepting environment for LGBTQ students creates the assumption that support isn’t needed as much as it may be in a less liberal environment.

Lina Landstroem, a junior at Lang, described The New School as “an open and affirming place,” but said that the school often forgets “that our students many times come from traumatic backgrounds due to their sexuality or gender identity — from less accepting environments. It’s when people are just getting out of those places that they need the most support, guidance, and community.”

According to Tamara Oyola-Santiago, assistant director of Wellness and Health Promotion within Student Health Services, the Safe Zone training started after data from the 2010 National College Health Assessment showed that LGBTQ students at The New School and across the nation suffer from increased mental health challenges when compared to heterosexual cisgender students.

“Setting up a center would make it possible for us to have more regular events, create more support groups, and make it easier for students to find us,” Landstroem said.

What you need is respect, so that when you’re going through that journey you don’t feel like you’re walking on eggshells

This semester, in addition to a gender pronoun campaign, the Queer Collective is leading efforts to add a blurb about the LGBTQ community to course syllabi around appropriate use of pronouns. As is, syllabi typically include information about disability services and gender discrimination under Title IX, but few professors have elected to include information about LGBTQ issues.

“OK, great, we’re finally here, people want to acknowledge trans people, non binary people… but there’s not that know-how knowledge to actually do it, and I think that’s what we’re working towards in terms of actually constructing [a blurb for syllabi],” said Elliott Ryan, a Lang student and member of the Queer Collective.

For Oyola-Santiago, the syllabi example “illustrates what happens when there’s an office with dedicated staff,” as she said that the inclusion of a Title IX statement and a disability services statement is the result of the university having dedicated offices for those groups.

Elle Williams, a transgender woman in her first year at Parsons, doesn’t expect faculty to understand everything about transitioning, but said that misgendering students is “blatant disrespect” during a vulnerable time.

“What you need is respect, so that when you’re going through that journey you don’t feel like you’re walking on eggshells,” Williams said.

For Williams, being misgendered repeatedly by a professor made the classroom environment feel unsafe and support was difficult to find. Eventually, after going through the coordinator for veteran affairs at The New School, Williams, a navy veteran, was connected with resources to report the concerns to administration, who were able to talk to the professor. “The situation has definitely improved since,” said Williams, but “those resources were hard to find.”

The Queer Collective may be leading these efforts, but as a group made up of full-time students, there are not enough hours in the day to do the work that a dedicated salaried staff could manage.

Lonergan and Claudine Brantley, also a Parsons student, agreed that the small staff of the Queer Collective, all of whom are balancing school and other commitments, leads to difficulties in assisting the LGBTQ community. “We’re not enough, we’re only a small team. There needs to be other outlets for students to engage in this community,” Brantley said.
Wellness and Health Promotion also leads Safe Zone. While typically a four-hour training, additional tailored trainings exist as “capacity building for classrooms, for specific departments, for specific divisions,” Oyola-Santiago said. ”We tailor the workshops and the materials that we present so that it’s specific to that student within that program.”

Since starting in 2010, the Safe Zone program has held on average one to two general trainings open to the whole school, as well as an average of 12 modified trainings each semester for specific departments or programs who request it, according to Oyola-Santiago. Participation in general trainings is entirely voluntary, but Oyola-Santiago estimates that close to 1,500 individuals have undergone Safe Zone training since 2010.

In August 2016, Rita Breidenbach, Director of Faculty Development, led an orientation for new full-time faculty which included a mini Safe Zone training. “It would be good to roll [Safe Zone training] into orientation [to] begin to change the population and identify individual faculty who need additional education,” Breidenbach said, noting that identifying those faculty members requires that students report concerns to administration.

Oyola-Santiago and Breidenbach both expressed uncertainty about whether training around LGBTQ issues should be mandatory for the entire community.

“In an ideal world, the Safe Zone capacity building around gender and sexuality would be something that all New School community members would be exposed to as soon as they are welcomed,“ Oyola-Santiago said. “We really believe that will build a common language and a common baseline across the entire university community.”

However, Oyola-Santiago said that mandating the training was an issue “that merits a bigger conversation.” The success of the program has been due, in part, to the fact that participants have been people who wanted to be there, while mandating the training would “get people in the room who don’t want to be there, but maybe those are also the people that should be there.”

Regardless of any potential impact, Oyola-Santiago said mandating Safe Zone training for all faculty and staff would require changes to resource allocation in The New School. “You can’t make it mandatory with the given resources,” she said.