Not Unsafe, But Unwelcome: Miami Moves Towards Making Campus More Inclusive

By Madeleine LaPlante-Dube & Katie Nixdorf

Miami University journalism student

When it happened to Lindsay Adams, she was walking through the halls in her dorm. The Miami freshman, who had been exploring outlets through which to express her faith before college, converted to Islam at the end of her first semester. Feeling ready to fully personify her faith, Adams had just begun to wear her hijab in public.

She was passing by a group of male residents when she heard a shout from some anonymous Miami man in the pack.

"Allahu Akbar!"

"You know," says Adams now, sitting tight in her chair, her thoughtful brown eyes searching the room, then our faces, then the room again, "like, what the terrorists say when they blow something up."

*

When it happened to Thomas Gurinskas, he was in the classroom. The transgender Miami senior had recently changed his name publicly as part of his transition, and a student who had known him by his birth name demanded to know why he had changed it.

"She cornered me in a public space," says Gurinskas. "And I could really, like, not answer her."

Gurinskas, a Professional and Creative Writing double major, takes long pauses before he speaks, using loud silences to calm his nerves. He’s never done an interview about this. We test the audio to make sure our recordings of his voice work. We ask him to count up, and then we play it back.

"One, two, three…" the recording says. Gurinskas listens, surprised.

"I haven’t heard my voice recorded since I started hormones," he says. His voice is deep. Later, he would count for us again; this time, the gender-neutral bathrooms he knows of on campus. He counts them on one hand, naming their locations off the top of his head.

*

Miami University has long been recognized for its distinctive commitment to undergraduate teaching. In the past, however, its commitment to creating an inclusive campus was often a second priority, especially at the university’s top levels.

When Miami’s new president, Gregory Crawford, became part of the university community in July of 2016, he pledged to focus in on ramping up the values behind the university’s motto, "Love and Honor."

"Making the campus more welcoming has been, I suppose I would evaluate it as [Crawford’s] top priority," says Dr. Mike Curme, Miami’s Associate Vice President and Dean of Students.

According to Curme, commitment to diversity is one of the three promises necessary to create a welcoming environment, coming in alongside eliminating Miami’s drinking culture and creating a safer campus for past and possible victims of sexual assault. The two latter issues are slightly easier to deal with structurally, as the campus offers non-drinking events and has recently implemented a plan for servicing victims of sexual assault. When addressing the former, one runs into multiple obstacles, most notably in the form of unreported incidents.

For Gurinskas, letting things go instead of reporting them is simply easier.

"I hate confrontation," says Gurinskas, who, until he began his medical transition, had a difficult time being gendered correctly. "I’m much more likely to be irked and let it slide. I [don’t] want to make a scene out of anything."

Adams herself never reported the incident in her dorm, nor does she find it worth reporting smaller microaggressions, like when she holds the door open for a student and they choose a different door to go through.

"It’s just kind of embarrassing, I don’t know," she says, shrugging. "I don’t really know how to explain it. I mean it’s hurtful, but it happens."

But even when issues are brought to the attention of the administration, some students feel the university is moving towards change and support too slowly. Ancilleno Davis, founder of Graduate Students of All Nations and an active voice on campus for graduate and international student issues, echoes much of Adams’ attitude: a certain kind of helplessness.

"Usually when I’m speaking to the administrators, I really try to see things from their perspective," says Davis. "But I think a lot of it goes from being sad and disappointed to being frustrated, angry. And lately a lot of it, sadly, is resignation. You know, you’re just like, this is how it is."

When asked if incidents like those she and her peers experience make her feel unsafe, Adams shifts the focus to exactly Miami’s problem.

"Not unsafe," she says, "but unwelcome."

According to Curme, while there are resources and services available to students on campus, it can be difficult for students to feel empowered to access those resources when all they want to do is move on from cases of harassment. This makes it harder for the school to address students’ concerns, because most of the time, victims don’t see the necessity in expending any more energy in reporting incidents.

"You don’t think all the time, ‘Oh, there are faculty members and staff who care about me and there are offices that can assist with these things,’" says Curme. "Those aren’t the kinds of things that are going to be on your mind when you’re feeling like you’ve been assaulted in some way by one look or one shout or one nonverbal [cue]."

This taps into the inherent problem that the administration must address when attempting to tackle a beast as large and shifting as campus inclusivity. As Curme puts it, "How can you expect to respond to a problem if you haven't measured the degree to which it represents a problem?"

"Miami really needs to talk about messy stuff. And diversity is messy," says Rhonda Jackson, administrative assistant at the Women’s Center and current advisor for Spectrum. "Miami really doesn’t like to talk about messy stuff because it doesn’t necessarily make good publicity, but it is reality. And we’ve got to, we’re never gonna clean this up."

According to Curme as well as Cathy Wagner, Director of Miami’s Creative Writing Program, however, Miami has been having these conversations.

Part of the diversity and inclusion debate is built into UNV 101, a required class for all Miami freshmen that was made part of the curriculum three years ago. Among other things, the class addresses bystander intervention, meant to encourage students to speak up if they see someone being attacked, verbally or otherwise. And on top of a campus-wide diversity survey set to be sent out next year, faculty and administration seem to be at least discussing how to make campus more diverse at all levels.

"Everyone is human," says Davis. "Everyone wants to be loved. But at the end of the day we have different barriers to being loved and sharing that love of what we want in life. And that’s where the difficulty comes in."

Understanding those barriers is tied up in the educational and academic values of Miami as an institution. In order to have compassion, "You have to be aware," says Curme. "I think the key there is educating the entire student body that there are people on campus that feel marginalized."

Wagner makes the point that while there may be some instances of resistance, educating students on inclusion and diversity, especially on Miami’s 73 percent white, majority-conservative campus is not about converting mindsets.

"This isn’t about directly changing people’s politics or changing people's ideas," she says. "What it does is it opens up new worldviews and makes them available and people can compare, and think about it."

Photo: Miami freshman Lindsay Adams converted to Islam at the end of her first semester and, after converting, decided to observe hijab by wearing a headscarf.