Walking through the University of Northern Colorado’s campus, there are pride flag banners on lamp posts, pride flags on doors and almost every building has a pride flag hanging on the wall. UNC is a school that prides itself on how accepting it is of its students who are a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. UNC was acknowledged by the Campus Pride Index with the “Best of the Best” awards for a LGBTQ-friendly campus.
In early September, a student had been filming her professor at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University because she was discussing the “gender unicorn” with her English class. The student stated that President Donald Trump does not recognize more than two genders and signed an executive order stating as such. The president of the university fired the professor because what she had been teaching wasn’t approved. The professor was never asked to change the content in her class.
“I think campuses have proven to be centers of, you know, thinking and ideas, that’s kind of the point,” said Indie Howe, a junior physics major. “So, if anywhere, I feel like things, such complicated social things, should be talked about at universities. So I think people getting fired for it is just bizarre. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Conversations about academic freedom are developing rapidly because of this termination. Here at UNC, gender studies professors are more than confident in their positions on campus.
“I have found the institution at UNC so far very, very supportive. Very much invested in protecting academic freedom, protecting some of our initiatives, some of the initiatives that I care about, so I found that very, very supportive,” said Chris Talbot, professor and program coordinator of the gender studies program.
Dr. Harmony Newman previously worked as the coordinator for the gender studies program, now occupied by Talbot. She now works as the chair of sociology and the chair of the faculty senate, which allows her a firsthand perspective on the goals of our administrators, like the school’s president, Andy Feinstein. Her administrative positions, paired with her tenure as a professor at the university, introduce a new perspective.
“I know, for example, that we just had the state of the university address and Andy reiterated the standing commitment to DEI in his address, and I have seen firsthand that our administration, our upper administration and our board of trustees, which, this is not the case for even other Colorado universities, much less outside of Colorado, want to hold on to our values,” Newman said.
Miles McCormick, a freshman psychology major, is non-binary. They said the situation worries them concerning getting a job. They want to be able to freely express themselves, but if professors are getting fired for talking about the existence of non-binary people, where are the safeguards for non-binary people themselves?
“It feels so dystopian that someone can lose their job for talking about something that happens to people every day,” McCormick said.
Sydney Gilbert, a sophomore environmental sustainability major with a minor in English, said that they are attending UNC because of how accepting the university is of its queer students. The university has multiple clubs, resource centers and flyers for any queer UNC students that have questions or wants a community.
“It’s definitely a community I can feel safe in,” Gilbert said.
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