The University of Mississippi was ranked number 20 on The Princeton Review’s annual list of LGBTQ, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning, unfriendly schools.
This year was the first time the university has ever been included on the list.
Jaime Harker, associate professor of English and interim director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, said a major factor in the ranking was the heckling of the Ole Miss Theater’s production of “The Laramie Project” last fall.
“When students shout homophobic epithets at other students, in a production that is about the problem of homophobia and violence, it tends to give the home university a bad reputation. And I don’t think one can argue that the reputation is entirely undeserved,” Harker said. “The events of last fall made it clear to me that we need to do much more to make The University of Mississippi live up to its creed and create a better climate for LGBTQ students.”
The Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve LGBTQ equality, surveyed thousands of adolescents nationwide, and charted the comparison of responses from Mississippi LGBTQ youth, LGBTQ youth from the rest of the US and non-LGBTQ youth.
Eighty percent of LGBTQ adolescents in Mississippi feel as they don’t fit in, compared to 47 percent of LGBTQ teens responding the same way across the country, according to the Human Rights Campaign’s survey. Only 16 percent of non-LGBTQ youth said they didn’t fit in in their respective communities. Over half of the LGBTQ respondents in Mississippi said they had been verbally harassed with sexuality-related slurs, with two-thirds of respondents stating their community was not LGBTQ accepting.
Harker said LGBTQ students face a number of challenges that non-LGBTQ students are not presented with, including a cone of silence that seems to exist about LGBTQ issues.
“They feel invisible,” Harker said. “LGBTQ students are often just figuring out who they are and how they will navigate a world that seems to exclude them.”
Not everything is negative, however.
Seventy-three percent of Mississippi respondents stated that most peers were okay with their LGBTQ identity, and almost 90 percent said they had heard positive messages about being LGBTQ, according to the survey.
The university is making strides to become more inclusive to all people. The Ole Miss Alumni Association implemented a branch called the LGBTQ Alumni and Friends Council last April, only the third of its kind in the Southeastern Conference. The Isom Center is now offering a sexuality emphasis for its gender studies minor.
Events for World AIDS day, October’s LGBTQ history month and Thacker Mountain Radio’s upcoming reading by transgender novelist T. Cooper all exhibit the progress the Ole Miss community is making towards becoming more inclusive.
Tim Walsh, executive director of the Ole Miss Alumni Association, said the Alumni Association’s mission is to be an organization that should strive to make all Ole Miss people feel welcome and that the LGBTQ Alumni and Friends Council is a key part of that mission to incorporate everyone.
“It’s a segment of our alumni population that, to an extent, has not felt as welcomed as the mainstream alumni base,” Walsh said.
Walsh also said that the LGBTQ Alumni and Friends council was not formed in order to get away from any negative image of the school.
“We did it because it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
Harker said her appointment as Interim Director for the Isom Center in itself is another milestone.
“As far as I can tell, I am the first openly gay director of any center on campus,” she said. “And that fact was never an issue in my hiring.”
The Princeton Review’s rankings are compiled using online surveys answered by students. Tens of thousands of college students from various universities across the country respond to the survey annually, with an average of 343 students per college campus.
In other Princeton Review lists, Ole Miss ranked second on “Students Study the Least,” eighth on “Most Beautiful Campus,” ninth on “Town-Gown Relations are Great,” sixteenth on “Party Schools,” and eighteenth on “Lots of Greek Life.”
-Kylie McFadden
