Finding “Safe” Campuses: Predicting the Presence of LGBT Student Groups at North Carolina Colleges and Universities

Abstract

A key indicator of a supportive campus climate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) college students is the existence of an LGBT student organization. This article integrates the research on high school LGBT policies and programs with social movement studies of campus activism to examine the characteristics associated with the existence of university-approved LGBT groups on North Carolina campuses. Drawing on data from the National Center for Education Statistics, campus Web sites, and other sources, logistic regression is used to examine the importance of public opinion, campus and community resources, and the institutional context in predicting the location of these student groups.

Keywords:

• campus climate
• gay and lesbian
• student activism
• colleges and universities
• college students

Notes

1. I use the term LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) to reflect the most common terminology in the literature and among the North Carolina campus groups. However, some student organizations were less inclusive, usually leaving out transgender students, and others were more inclusive, referencing queer or questioning in addition to LGBT.

2. The states with antidiscrimination laws including sexual orientation by the end of 2010 are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2011).

3. Although I emphasize the ways in which campus and community climate shapes the programs and policies available for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, research also demonstrates a reciprocal effect where LGBT student groups improve campus conditions (e.g., Goodenow, Szalacha, & Westheimer, 2006).

4. Although two-year colleges and for-profit institutions are excluded from the analyses, searches were conducted of their Web sites for evidence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) student groups. None of the schools had LGBT student organizations in 2008.

5. To increase the reliability of the results, both a student research assistant and I coded the presence (or absence) of student groups on each Web site. Any coding disagreements were examined by us together and a final, joint decision was made. Overall, coding the dependent variable was fairly straightforward and less open to interpretation than coding the characteristics of the groups might have been (Krippendorff, 2004).

6. The activities of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) student groups in North Carolina greatly vary, including education, activism, emotional support, and social events. Recent scholarship questions the artificial discipline boundaries separating the study of volunteer associations, social movement organizations, and interest groups (e.g., Andrews & Edwards, 2004). Therefore, I argue social movement theory is useful in explaining the location of LGBT student groups, regardless of the level of political activism involved.

7. Groups were only counted if they were recognized by the university as an official student group and listed somewhere on the school Web site. Any colleges and universities with unofficial groups or groups in the process of petitioning for recognition were coded as lacking lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) groups. By relying on Web sites to locate student groups, there is the possibility that I missed official groups. This is a challenge with content analysis, in general; you can only code information that has been communicated (Krippendorff, 2004). I am less worried about LGBT groups that are purposefully excluded from the Web site because it implies a lack of safety or acceptance that makes those campuses more similar to schools without groups than those with them. Missing groups due to Web site maintenance issues is more concerning. However, in a separate project on North Carolina public universities and their peers, Wisdom (2010) called each institution to document the LGBT programs on campus. The few contradictions between her results and mine were caused by the formation of new groups since I collected data or errors on the part of her respondents.

8. The percentage of students that are Black captures most of the racial and ethnic diversity on North Carolina campuses, and is almost a mirror image of the percentage of White students (correlated at –.95).

9. I tried other measures of economic need, including the percentage of students receiving grants and the percentage receiving any type of financial aid. None of the alternate measures were significant.

10. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) histories stress the importance of bars in creating and maintaining a community (D'Emilio, 1983). However, I also examined several other measures of the LGBT community, including the number of social movement organizations in the surrounding city and the total number of listings in The Gayellow Pages (Green, 2007) for that city. None of the alternative measures changed the substantive results of the analyses, and models with the number of LGBT bars had the best explanatory power, so I selected it as my indicator of community presence.

11. The existence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) student groups could just reflect higher levels of student involvement on campus. In other words, LGBT groups exist because every possible form of student organization exists—a result of being a “joiner” or “activist” campus. To test for this possibility, I controlled for the number of student groups on campus per capita. The variable was not significant in any of the models, and its inclusion had no effect on the substantive results. However, it did reduce the number of schools included in the analyses by two, due to missing data. Therefore, I present the models without the count of student organizations per capita.