The response below is in relation to a recent blog post by GVSU faculty member, Tim Penning, currently being shared by GVSU students, staff, faculty, and alumni. The response was penned by Steering Committee Chair, Kyle Felker, and supported by the rest of the Steering Committee. The original blog post can be found here: https://pierpoints.wordpress.com/2023/06/01/a-christian-perspective-on-rainbows-pride-and-love/

LGBT Faculty & Staff Association Response

Professor Pennings' statements are familiar territory for LGBTQIA people.  Most of us have heard them our entire lives, sometimes from friends or family members who also professed to love us.  The pat assumption that our relationships are shallow, purely sexual, and don’t involve any actual feelings.  The comparison of our relationships to pederasty, and ourselves to thieves and criminals.  The only real surprise to me was the allegation that the rainbow flag is “cultural appropriation,” and that we stole it from Christians because rainbows are mentioned in the bible. This was so absurd I laughed out loud.

Absurd or not, Professor Penning has every right to believe it if he so chooses.  He also has the constitutional right to say it in a public forum without fear of governmental interference-that is free speech.  What’s at issue here, though, isn’t freedom of religion or free speech.  It's the integrity of our work culture, and the safety of LGBTQIA staff and students.  Professor Penning's stated views are in direct contradiction to professed university values.  How are queer students supposed to see something like this and feel safe in his classes?  What about LBGTQIA faculty members, for whom professor Penning may have an evaluative role in their tenure hearings?  Or LGBTQIA staff members who may have to work with him?  How are those people supposed to feel safe, especially in situations where he may have power over them?

I wish I could say that I was surprised and shocked that a professor at GVSU not only holds homophobic and transphobic views, but also apparently feels comfortable sharing them with students, co-workers, and the world at large.  Sadly, I cannot.  Over the past five years I’ve become more and more concerned over multiple indications that GVSU work culture is much more hostile to LGBTQIA people, in particular transgender people, than anyone seems to want to acknowledge.  Issues surrounding hostile workplace environments surfaced on a focus group the FSA did with membership as far back as 2019.  Our most recent climate data shows that 29% of faculty and staff who responded and identified as trans or nonbinary experienced discrimination based on their gender identity, and 12% of respondents who identified as LGBTQ experienced harassment based on their sexual orientation.  The latest report from the employee ombud’s office notes that LGBTQIA visitors to the office  “appear to be leaving the university due to their experiences. The LGBTQIA+ community felt they were treated differently because of their identity, struggled to cope with poor supervisors, described a lack of empathy and understanding within their departments, and possessed an increased fear of retaliation for speaking up or giving critical feedback.”  In a follow-up focus group conducted just last year with LGBTQIA employees, the facilitators noted in their final report: “trans people we spoke with had more challenging experiences both at GVSU and in the community. They described experiences that made them feel unsafe and exposed in the GVSU community.”(page 14).

This is also only one in a string of recent incidents where this hostility to the LGBTQIA community has surfaced on campus.  In April, a conservative students group “Lakers for Liberty” invited Riley Gaines, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, to give a talk here on campus.  Their facebook page boasts that this was the “largest, most successful political speaking event at GVSU since 2016.”  After that talk, two students who had been attending attempted to crash the counter-protest put on by LGBTQIA students and staff in the form of a dance party, which was taking place two floors down from the Gaines talk.   Although there was copious security arranged by campus administration to shield the Gaines talk speaker and attendees from potential violence, the counter-protest had no such security.  It is only because two LGBTQIA staff members were present, and prevented these students from entering the event, that we avoided what could have been a very ugly, potentially dangerous incident.  This communicated very clearly to everyone involved who got to be safe on this campus, and who did not.  Earlier that same week, a speaker invited to GVSU for a Transgender Day of Visibility event had to be moved to a new hotel because someone vandalized their car in the hotel parking lot.

Add to that the LGBTQIA employees, most of them trans, I myself have personally known who have been bullied and abused, whose careers have been endangered, whose well-being and dignity have been compromised.  Many of them have left GVSU, traumatized and disgusted.  We have lost gifted scholars, talented teachers, and dedicated staff members who worked hard to educate and elevate students, and to enrich the campus community.  Meanwhile, those who perpetrated discrimination and abuse, in whatever form, are,  like professor Penning, still here.  To my knowledge, most never faced any disciplinary action of any kind.  Some have even been promoted.  

So, as I see it, the issue here is not “we have a homophobic professor.”  It’s that we probably have far, far too many homophobic and transphobic faculty, staff, and students who are far more comfortable here than their LGBTQIA counterparts.  Our lived commitment to diversity is uneven at best, despite what we may profess.  This is merely one more visible symptom of a deep underlying sickness.  How many more will it take, I wonder, before we do something about it?

Kyle Felker

LGBT Faculty & Staff Association

Steering Committee Chair