Purpose

1)      To provide a support group for all members of the campus community who have concerns regarding issues of sexual orientation. This includes people who identify themselves as lesbian, bisexual or transgender; people with family and friends who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender; and others who are interested and supportive.

2)      To provide and educational forum which will inform the campus on issues pertinent to this group and which will foster tolerance and understanding by promoting campus dialogue through films, discussions, and lectures.

Rationale

  Meredith College states in its mission that, in keeping with its Christian backgrounds, we are a college which strives to foster integrity, personal growth, independence, justice and compassion. Spectrum will help Meredith achieve this mission.  Presently, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students sometimes face hostility on campus.  More often, however, we face ignorance, a blanket if silence and not wanting to know, an assumption that everyone is straight.  However unintended, the climax encourages people to hide who they are and even lie regarding aspects of their lives that are routinely shared among their straight peers.  All this means that Meredith is not yet a community for everyone – not as long as some members are encouraged not to talk about their family, their partners, their lives.  There are costs to the closet: it is impossible for any individual who must conceal a part of her identity to invest fully in friendships, in the classroom, in campus leadership.  For students figuring out who they are, there is fear.  As yet Meredith offers few ways to alleviate this fear because at Meredith there are no visible role models, no known places of support and safety – much less people whit whom to share the joys and the good things.

Given this last of visibility, there is need for a place where people can meet, a place that promotes dialogue.  Thus fear, in trying to reach each other, the group has been identified as part of counseling services, as if being gay needs to be kept confidential.  This also sends the message that being gay is an illness.  And any flyer that has been proposed had to be obscure that no one recognize what the group was about.

  This climate negatively affects straight on campus as well.  It limits how much students can know about their friends.  It denies students the free exchange of ideas which is crucial to an academic institution and hinders students’ ability to educate themselves.  In out I-2000 strategic plan, Meredith affirms: “There is a growing recognition that the next century will present Meredith graduates with a more diverse human environment.  The lessons of inclusiveness, learned while in College, will help Meredith women succeed in an increasingly diverse world… Co-curricular activities should compel students to examine personal and social values.” Silence and intolerance undermine this effort.

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