Officials at the University of Oklahoma have announced plans to enhance inclusivity on campus by building a separate-but-equal student lounge which will segregate gay, lesbian and transgender students by themselves.
The idea for ostracizing students based on their sexual preferences came from an OU group called Queer Inclusion on Campus, reports The Oklahoma Daily.
“Queer Inclusion on Campus is an initiative of several students representing the issues that are important to the LGBTQ community,” OU senior Alexander Ruggiers told the campus newspaper. “We produced a document that we delivered to a lot of high level administrators about things that we wanted to see changed.”
The students behind the 20-page document had originally sought a resource center for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. Thus, the special, segregated study lounge amounts to a compromise.
“Through a meeting with President Boren and other high level administrators we reached a happy medium which was a new LGBTQ study area,” Ruggiers, a gender studies and English major, told the Daily.
“It’s going to be huge,” Ruggiers also explained. “I think it’s going to be used for a number of things, one, to have a sense of community, something that LGBTQ students have never had before.”
The taxpayer-funded school’s officially segregated study lounge will provide a safe space for gay students, OU spokesman Kasey Catlett explained.
Steering a bunch of gay students into one convenient place will also mean less harassment, predicted OU student David Martin.
“Having a safe place will help students be themselves, and provide the opportunity to reduce harassment,” Martin told the Daily.
Ruggiers and the members of Queer Inclusion on Campus note that construction of the segregated study lounge will not mean the end of their political battles.
A post on the group’s Facebook page lists 11 demands for segregation including scholarships only for gay students, “safer learning environments,” a new bureaucrat devoted to diversity and more gender-neutral bathrooms.
As Campus Reform notes, taxpayer-funded officials at OU have not announced when the school’s segregated gay student lounge open.
Earlier this month, OU administrators proudly rolled out a campus-wide mandatory diversity training program. Every incoming freshman at the public school will now be forced to complete five hours of school-designed diversity training under the new arrangement. (RELATED: U. Of Oklahoma To Force FIVE HOURS Of Mandatory ‘Diversity Training’ On All Students)
The massive blueprint for compulsory indoctrination on diversity comes three months after the OU branch of the national fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon was almost literally run out of town when a video leaked on the Internet of some members singing a racist song to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”
The notion of addressing prejudices by bringing back the separate-but-equal doctrine keeps popping up at colleges and universities. Last year, for example, staffers in the Diversity and Equity Center at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, Wash. sent a happy-hour invitation to all 300 employees of the taxpayer-funded school declaring that white people could not attend.
The email did have some advice for white recipients, though. “If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy, and white privilege to better our campus community and yourselves, please feel free to do just that,” it read. (RELATED: Taxpayer-Funded Community College BANS WHITE PEOPLE From Staff Happy Hour)
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