When politics trumps purpose

As no sponsoring group or organization was apparent on the designs, I approached one of the volunteers wallpapering the Frist bulletin boards and inquired as to the source of the posters. I was told that two arms of the University — the LGBT Center and SHARE — had sponsored the campaign. Taking in all of the varying posters and recognizing some of the featured faces, I was struck by the power of the campaign and impressed by its success.

Upon a moment’s reflection, however, I was also taken aback by the ubiquitous “Stop Ignorance” phrase used at the bottom of each poster. I could not help but think that campus opponents of same-sex marriage, such as myself and many of my good friends, were implicated, if not by design then by association, in this imperative. Indeed, no other conclusion can be reached, given that the director of the LGBT Center, Debbie Bazarsky, is on the record as declaring that such opposition is “offensive and homophobic.” Considering this, I became more than a little offended that the University was branding my compatriots and me as “ignorant” for our political and intellectual views.

But I do note write today to condemn the LGBT Center’s Princeton Preview poster campaign. Indeed, it would be irresponsible to do so. Despite my misgivings, the campaign was an important and successful method of implementing the center’s mission to “create a safe and supportive academic environment” for the LGBT community. This is why the center exists; this is why the center is an important part of our campus community and culture.

It would severely hamstring the LGBT Center’s ability to pursue its legitimate, indeed vital, goals of reducing and eliminating harassment of students across the spectrum of sexual identities if such public awareness campaigns were curtailed. On this campus as on all others, harassment of members of the LGBT community, through verbal and other means, does occur. It is a problem — one that concerns the campus community as a whole — that the LGBT Center and the University ought to have some significant latitude in combating.

The director of the LGBT Center, however, has hampered the efforts of her own initiative by conflating political and intellectual dissonance with true harassment. In so doing, the center has severely diluted the effectiveness of its important and legitimate anti-harassment campaigns.

The problem is not merely that the LGBT Center has engaged in political activism (though the appropriateness of a branch of the University administration advancing partisan policy is questionable) but that it has gone to the extreme of placing political disagreement with the definition of “homophobia,” a term commonly recognized for describing such problems as the use of offensive epithets and physical intimidation against the LGBT community. It is no longer possible to discern where LGBT activism concerning political issues ends and concerning harassment begins, precisely because the center and its director have eliminated the distinction. And so the power of a visually compelling and generally effective campaign, such as the recent posters, is diluted as the campus social issues to which it is addressed are overwhelmed, or at least crowded, by political implications.

By conflating eminent professors and sincere students with would-be hecklers and harassers, the LGBT Center has made it difficult, if not impossible, to attack the latter without implicating the former. That is to say, the center has made it impossible to isolate the true and troubling problems of campus harassment against real or perceived members of the LGBT community in its activism. By her political grandstanding, Bazarsky has impaired the ability of the LGBT Center to pursue its mission of a “safe and supportive” University culture and community.

It is important that Princeton University have an LGBT Center to provide the particular types of support needed by students who identify with various minorities in the sexual spectrum on campus. These students face particular challenges, far too often including harassment at the hands of fellow community members, that the Center has pledged to combat. But the center and its director have placed political and intellectual dissidents in the same crosshairs. They have diluted attempts to deal with a true campus problem, denied themselves the support of political opponents in this mission by isolating and attacking them and taken a step toward squelching the intellectual diversity on which this University thrives.