Virginia Tech's Board of Visitors launched the school into an uproar last week when it voted to eliminate race, gender and other factors from consideration in admissions and hiring. The board also struck out all references to sexual orientation from its non-discrimination policies.
Hundreds of Hokies demonstrated on campus last Thursday, and the school's student government has asked the ACLU for assistance in filing suit. Meanwhile, state media outlets seem to be convinced that the Third Reich is back in business and have spent the past week unjustly vilifying the Board.
Most of the quotes appearing in news coverage of the issue have come from people with distorted views of what has happened. Here's an example: Kim I. Mills, the education director of the Human Rights Campaign -- a national gay rights organization based in Washington, D.C. -- says the new policy questions Virginia Tech's "commitment to providing a safe learning environment free of discrimination" ("Governor Criticizes Va. Tech Policies," Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 14).
Whoa there. Whether or not a school promotes a "safe learning environment" is completely separate from the school's admissions policies, which may or may not be discriminatory. Mills' real concern with Tech's new admissions and hiring policy is that it makes no reference to sexual orientation, only to "an applicant's disability, age, veteran status, political affiliation, race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religious belief or gender."
Last time I checked, high school students were not required to disclose their sexual orientation on college applications. The idea that gay or lesbian students will be rejected from Virginia Tech solely based on their chosen sexual lifestyle is laughable. For this to happen, gay and lesbian candidates must somehow indicate on their applications that they are gay or lesbian -- perhaps in the essay section -- and the admissions committee must be stacked with homophobes.
The Board's exclusion of sexual orientation from the new anti-discrimination policy is merely a huge public relations faux pas. Including references to sexual orientation in the policy would have a descriptive rather than a prescriptive purpose, and gay rights activists like Mills should recognize this. Virginia Tech's admissions process already treats gays and lesbians equally, and including a reference to non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation merely describes what is already occurring.
Others up in arms about Virginia Tech's new admissions and hiring policy have even less to gripe about, but this hasn't stopped them from doing so. Jane Lehr, the principle organizer of the student protests at Tech, had this to say to the Board of Visitors: "[W]e will not tolerate your homophobia, your racism, your sexism, your classism
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