College aims to improve discussion for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning students.
Faculty and staff at Houghton College work to improve the campus climate surrounding same sex attraction through a new study, community voice document, and discussion group.
Michael Lastoria, director of counseling services, emailed a survey to Houghton students on Tuesday, Nov. 4, as part of an ongoing study to understand the experiences of Christian students who experience same sex attraction and study at Christian colleges. Lastoria said this new survey is “undergirded” by previous research but is “more comprehensive.” The study will survey Christian colleges nationwide, and Lastoria said ideally it will follow up with students multiple times over the course of ten years, “but we’re shooting for five years at this point.” Lastoria said past results have indicated that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) students “feel kind of alienated” on Christian college campuses while they attempt to “make sense of their sexual attractions as believers.”
A component of the survey will evaluate emotional health to explore whether LGB students experience “some stress because of…the climate that they find themselves in.” Lastoria said he hopes this new survey will yield a more comprehensive picture of the areas in which students relate feeling unsupported whether that be spiritual, social, or administrational. Previous studies have indicated that “mostly it appears that these young men and women feel that alienation not so much from administrators or faculty or staff, but they feel it from peers.” It appears that LGB students feel more supported by the gay community than the church, and Lastoria said, “we just felt that there’s something wrong there. This is not quite right.” Lastoria said he anticipates first wave results emerging from this initial survey with second wave and comparative results to follow.
Lastoria also – along with four other staff members – offered his input to a Houghton College document titled, “Same-Sex Attraction: Our Community Voice.” According to Lastoria, President Shirley Mullen tasked Robert Pool, vice president for student life, “to formulate a statement for the college.” The committee consisted of Lastoria, Pool, Michael Jordan, dean of the chapel, Richard Eckley, professor of theology, and Dennis Stack, dean of students. They felt unqualified to offer a “theological statement,” said Lastoria and instead proposed a community voice discussing “how we ought to be with one another.”
The President’s Advisory Board, faculty, the Board of Trustees, the Parent’s Council, and a few LGBTQ+ Houghton students have all examined the most current draft which the President’s staff recently approved for distribution. Lastoria said he believes that when it comes to talking about LGBTQ+ topics and interacting with and supporting LGBTQ+ students the college has not been “the best that we can be” which motivated the document’s creation. The community voice communicates a desire to rectify the “discomfort and awkwardness” around discussion of sexual identity, to put aside the “crippling polarization that popular media presents,” and to acknowledge support for the Wesleyan church’s statement on same sex attraction while realizing that Houghton is a college and, therefore, has “students, not members.” Lastoria said the community voice “is there for our community to be in conversation about” and, for example, he could imagine staff using it to spark discourse in the future “when we train RAs and train residence life staff.” Jordan said, “I think it’s vitally important for Houghton going forward to realize the value of responding relationally” and that matters of sexual identity “don’t exist in a vacuum outside of people’s lived experience.”
With this goal in mind, Jordan came up with the idea of starting an LGBT discussion group which he has been co-leading with Lastoria this semester. Every other Tuesday night (the next meeting is Nov. 20) from 7-8:30 p.m. a mix of Houghton students and staff meet in the basement of Gillette to discuss LGBTQ+ topics.
Jordan said he felt discussion about sexual identity had been “kind of consigned to silence in our community” which he saw himself as having “the position and the personality temperament to help break.” Jordan went through “significant conflict in [his] previous church” which made the conversation something he “care[s] a lot about.” He said at Houghton people wanted to talk about sexual identity but were “really scared”, but Jordan felt confident starting this discussion because he went “through one big conflict” and “came out on the other side.”
So far the group has discussed sexual identity development among college students and theological perspectives on same sex attraction. Jordan said the group has no “prepackaged agenda,” rather Jordan and Lastoria wish to “model good discussion and then encourage good discussion among the group.” Sophomore Michael Carpenter who has attended the discussion group said, “I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I feel talking about things that would be hard in most other settings.”
Jordan said he recognizes that students with traditional beliefs on sexuality may find alternative views “horribly inconvenient” or even a “very threatening thing” for which he hopes he can act as a “pastoral role model in saying: Yeah, look this is how I understand things too, but you don’t have to operate out of a place of fear.” In an effort to keep discourse civil, Jordan began with “heavy ground rules” with the goal of helping people “learn how to talk about this without hurting each other.”
Lastoria said, “We have this idea out there of how we’d like to see the climate in our community change. We can’t mandate it. We can’t make a rule and say, ‘OK, everyone’s going to be nice from here on out.’ You know, good luck with that. But we can begin to talk about how we think we ought to be. And we ought to talk more about how we think we ought to be. And we ought to try to do how we think we ought to be.”