Last Friday marked the end of Coming Out Week, but it must not mark the end of pressure on Georgetown to increase LGBTQ tolerance and inclusion on campus. For the best chance for their demands to be met by their November 9 deadline, GU Pride should strive to maintain a reasonable and level-headed dialogue with the administration, temporarily relaxing its confrontational tactics.
GU Pride’s remaining demands include a full-time staff member for the LGBTQ resource center—most likely Bill McCoy, who currently directs the resource center part-time—and additional diversity training in freshman residence halls to promote LGBTQ tolerance. These steps would be inexpensive and uncontroversial, and they should be attainable if both sides cooperate.
“Our demands are very reasonable, and some of the demands have been around for more than six years,” GU Pride co-President Scott Chessare said. “[The resolutions] are really something [University President] Jack [DeGioia] could decide immediately. It’s just a question of putting a line in the budget.”
While GU Pride’s goals are realistic, they become much more difficult to achieve if the organization continues to be consistently confrontational in its interactions with the University. Marches on the President’s office and issuing ultimatums to administrators sent a strong initial message, but administrators are much less likely to act if they risk looking like they are caving to student pressure.
In order to meet GU Pride’s demands by the deadline, the University should bring in an outside mediator to defuse the tension. Councilmember David Catania (I-At Large), a gay Georgetown alumnus who helped GU Pride negotiate the original resource center agreement in 2001-2002, would be a good choice, or an administrator who isn’t directly involved in the process.
But improving tolerance on campus should not be just a head-to-head standoff between the administration and GU Pride. All students should show their support for an LGBTQ resource center and increased diversity training by e-mailing DeGioia at president.georgetown.edu to show that these are mainstream demands that the University should take seriously.
GU Pride has set November 9—the two-month anniversary of the hate crime—as the deadline for meeting their demands. If the University fails to act by this date, GU Pride should look to more direct means of enacting change. But for now, striving for a mature and productive dialogue will be more effective than putting on a show.
