‘Gender Blind’ Dorms Top List of 2003 Campus Follies



By Jim Brown and Jody Brown

A campus outreach group has released its annual list of what it calls “the top ten most shameful events” in America's educational system. The group says the incidences of “bias and political correctness” continue to weigh down that system.

The Young America's Foundation has put out its “Top Ten Campus Follies” for 2003. At the top of the list was Wesleyan University in Connecticut, which offers what it describes as a “Gender Blind” dormitory floor for students who are not sure what sex they are. According to YAF, students who ask for the floor will have roommates appointed without regard to their sex &#0151 “perceived or otherwise.” The rooms will be set aside for “students born with ambiguous genitalia or who don't identify with their physical sex.”

The #2 folly involved a Columbia University professor who at a teach-in regarding the war in Iraq said he would like to see “a million Mogadishus” &#0151 a reference to the 1993 ambush and murder of 18 American soldiers in Somalia. Others on the list included college students being forced to pen anti-war letters to President Bush; a teenager receiving a five-day suspension for drawing a stick figure of a U.S. Marine shooting a Taliban fighter; and an all-female college replacing feminine pronouns in its constitution with gender-neutral ones so that transgender students would feel more welcome on the campus.

YAF's Rick Parson says Wesleyan University and several other schools on the list have shown little embarrassment over their behavior. Most of them, he says, are sticking by their actions.

“A few schools backed down &#0151 not necessarily [those] on our 'Campus Follies' &#0151 but in the past year, they [were] confronted with what their actions have caused or [told] the implications of their actions and they backed down,” Parsons says. “But they had to be taken to task for it first &#0151 and that shouldn't have to be.”

According to Parsons, incidents such as those noted among the “Campus Follies” should serve as a warning to prospective students and their parents, as well as to alumni and university donors. “[B]efore they decide to go to school there or donate or whatever…they should look into what's being taught on campus [and] what types of actions administration officials take with different points of view, whether it be liberal or conservative,” he says.

The equivalent of a celebratory food fight even made the list. Coming in at #7 was a decision by the University of Arizona president to ban the tradition of throwing tortillas at the school's commencement ceremony. The school official considered the tradition disrespectful to many of U of A community members who are Hispanic or American Indian. The ban came despite a statement from the campus Chicano/Hispano Student Affairs group that they viewed the tradition as celebratory and not intended to offend anyone.

See the entire Follie list here.

(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)

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