Around New England

Harvard Doing Nothing To Cure ‘Toxic Space’ for Homosexual and Transgender Graduate Students, Activists Say

November 27, 2018

Harvard University offers no paid staff to assist and advise graduate students who are homosexual, bisexual, or transgender and also doesn’t sponsor events for them, activists say.

The crisis became apparent to a doctoral student last May when she sat at a table for a student fair as a volunteer to describe offerings available to homosexual, bisexual, and transgender students and realized that every other table was manned by a staff member or student who was being paid.

“I kind of reached my breaking point,” said Madeleine F. Jennewein, according to The Harvard Crimson. “Every single other table was like a paid person who had an office, and then there’s me, trying to make it seem like we have resources.”

The university’s graduate program has hired two diversity fellows but none specifically focused on students who are attracted to members of the same sex or who identify with a gender other than the one that corresponds to their biological sex.

Student activists say Harvard has fallen behind Brown, Cornell, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all of which offer paid staff offering advice and support, according to The Harvard Crimson.