Georgetown administrators agreed to create a new LGBTQ advisory board in a Monday meeting with the GU Pride leadership in the wake of a September hate crime involving Georgetown students.
This agreement came after Pride held a rally in Red Square the same day.
The administration will also conduct a public forum during Coming Out Week next week. Pride members and administrators say they are working to schedule the event to allow President John DeGioia to be present.
“It was a productive first meeting, however it was just that—a first meeting,” Pride co-president Scott Chessare (COL ’10) said.
Over a hundred students attended the rally to criticize, with faculty members, the University’s slow response to the hate crime. The administration did not alert students of the assault of a gay student until September 27th, three weeks after the incident.
“Our point was that this is the worst in a long series of events against LGBT and that the silence for three weeks, especially to a marginalized community, is really hurtful,” Chessare said. “Whatever their intentions were, it carried across to the LGBT community that the administration didn’t care or [that] it wasn’t reporting this specifically because it was an anti-gay attack.”
Director of the Center for Minority Educational Affairs Dennis Williams said that the administration’s late response was out of concern for the victim’s privacy and because the suspect had been identified shortly after the crime.
“Because the suspect was identified to MPD early on, it was our judgment that this was not something that was posing an immediate threat to the campus at large,” Williams said.
Dana Luciano, an assistant professor in the English department and one of the speakers at the rally, strongly disputed the administration’s rationale.
“Any bias crimes threaten all members of the community,” Luciano said. “They’re making an attack on gayness, not that individual alone.”
