On Dec. 13, 2024, Ana de Freitas Boe, English professor and coordinator for LGBTQ+ services, received an email that her previously approved course release for the following academic year as the coordinator of LGBTQ+ services at BW was denied.
As coordinator of LGBTQ+ services, Boe oversaw semesterly safe zone training with staff organized through the LGBTQ+ Task Force, which works to ensure BW is supporting LGBTQ+ students. She also oversaw training with resident assistant and orientation leaders, teaching them how to welcome students.
“It’s all of these little ways in which [BW] let[s] people know we see you. We recognize you. This is a place where you can be yourself,” said Boe. “I think if those went away, it would be a much, much more emotionally impoverished place for LGBTQ+ students at BW.”
Boe also worked closely with BW Pride Hive, the LGBTQ+ undergraduate student organization at BW that plans events and keeps an open space for the community and allies to meet.
With Boe’s course release being denied, BW Pride Hive, “were like, oh shoot, we don’t have any adults helping us out,” said Skyler Bruno, vice president of BW Pride Hive and third-year arts management major. “That’s terrifying because we as students can only do so much.”
Jena Parks, BW Pride Hive president and fourth-year English and marketing major, said, “without that push from [Boe], there’s just not going to be as much talk, there’s not going to be as much community involvement during a time that there really needs to be.”
The decision was the result of the university’s plan to manage the budget deficit as of October 2024. This resulted in the formation of the Academic Efficiencies Task Force, who had to find ways of saving in the financial budget.
In this process, they developed two criteria for determinig whether to keep a position: the role is legally or contractually required by accreditors, grantors, the handbook or other rules, or the activity can be tracked to a direct source of revenue generation.
With this position vacant next year, it’s unclear what the campus may look like for LGBTQ+ students, given the already low statistics regarding mental health among LGBTQ+ students.
According to the Trevor Project’s “2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People”, 60% of LGBTQ+ young people reported that they have felt discriminated against in the past year due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Interim Provost Linda Chase said, “I don’t want anybody to think that just because somebody, a faculty member, submitted for reassigned time and it was denied, that doesn’t indicate that we don’t value any particular student.”
The LGBTQ+ Task Force will continue next year and “[the university] will support through reassigned times when we can, wherever we can,” said Chase. “And this is an area that is on my radar.”
