To the Princeton Community,

I wrote an article for the April 24th edition of The Nassau Weekly, in which I criticized the degree of involvement that Princeton Professor Robert George has with conservative student groups on campus. The article was published in the Nass as planned, but with substantial edits that I believe significantly distorted the messages I was trying to convey. I do not stand behind the version of the article that appears in the Nass, and I wish that the byline did not bear my name.

I asked my editors to run my original version of the article on the newspaper’s website, and they have agreed to do so. I will link to that version when it is online, and until then, I am posting it here. Please read this version instead of the one that appears in the Nass, and encourage others to do the same.

Thank you,

Emily Rutherford

Every year since ninth grade, I have written a long and conflicted post about why I do not observe the Day of Silence, an event held at many high schools and colleges around the country where students take a vow of silence for the school day in order to mark the less visible and involuntary silencing that many LGBT students undergo every day.

It just hit me that Princeton, as far as I know, does not observe the Day of Silence.

I have my reasons for not remaining silent—to put it simply, I’m a writer; I make action through words, and I always felt like someone needed to speak up for the silent—but the DoS is still a strong indication of how active and organized a school’s LGBT community is. My high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance managed to engage tons of LGBT students and allies every year in the DoS events, despite the high level of homophobia, despite repostering the DoS posters on a daily basis because intolerant people would tear them down. In all of my classes every year, there was at least one person who was silent. Universities do DoS too: it was founded at the University of Virginia, and continues all over—I remember that the UCLA DoS got covered in the LA Times last year. But not Princeton. It’s supposed to be Pride Week at Princeton, but you wouldn’t know it. If you just walked around campus, you would barely realize there were any gay people at Princeton at all—and Pride Week should be the one time when you know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there is a gay community on a campus.

I don’t know whether a Day of Silence would be successful at Princeton. I notice the contrast from high school here, where students actually volunteer to speak in class. Kids have organizations to run. They have interviews. They’re not going to be silent on Friday. But it reminds me how hard it is to change an institution with a long history of prejudice and marginalization. And how sometimes, on rare occasions, I get this tiny dark feeling deep inside me that I picked the wrong university.

I am in the midst of a dilemma. It’s not a large dilemma, but it’s one where I honestly don’t know which side I’m leaning toward. It’s about whether to apply to be an LGBT peer educator at school next year.

When I first got the email from the LGBT list soliciting applications, and when I saw the posters around campus that were similarly soliciting, I immediately dismissed the idea from a personal standpoint. It’s not like I think having LGBT peer educators is a bad idea, or that they don’t serve a purpose by providing a resource for students, especially freshmen, who have questions—it’s that I couldn’t see myself in that role. As a self-described radical in my sexuality as well as in my politics, I’ve often found myself at odds with the mainstream of sexuality movements, and wasn’t sure how I would reconcile that with the curriculum that the peer education training would teach (not that, to be fair, I’m fully aware of what that curriculum is). I’m also, to be frank, reasonably conflicted about my own sexuality—I wasn’t sure it would be intellectually honest of me to be on a panel wherein I implicitly suggest comfort with my identity when that doesn’t entirely exist. I rationalized this decision: I think basically everyone I know is aware that I’ve got a one-track mind about sexuality issues, and that I know a lot about queer theory and queer politics for someone whose knowledge is all informal, and that I’m totally happy to talk about anything regarding sex. I figured that I make myself as accessible as any peer educator where LGBT issues are concerned.

But then, this morning, I read this article in the Prince:

Though many University students spend Saturday nights out on the Street in search of their next hook ups, Peter — a gay undergraduate — has found a safer and more discreet meeting place. Peter, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, said that during his time at Princeton, he has hooked up with “about three guys” he met through posting personal ads on Craigslist.

On a campus that Peter said is “less accepting of gay life” than Harvard or Yale, some gay Princeton students like Peter turn to online venues like Craigslist in search of sexual partners. Posts on the site dating back one month showed 176 results matching the search criteria “Princeton,” “18-30” and “men-seeking-men.” Thirty of these results included the word “student,” and many others made reference to the campus or the University in some other fashion. A similar search on the site for Harvard students yielded just nine posts, while one for Yale students generated 22 responses.

The article goes on to say that, among other things, Peter was kicked out of two eating clubs for dancing and making out with other guys (which certainly wouldn’t generate a response if the contact was heterosexual), and that there are tons of closet cases here doing the same thing, posting ads that say things like ““Be a PU undergrad and discreet.” And I mean, I know that most of the gay people at Princeton are in the closet, but what is this, 1965? Institutionally speaking, the framework is such that it is very possible to be out at Princeton in a way that it might not be somewhere where there aren’t, for example, LGBT peer educators. Yet people aren’t, and I think the gay community here, though it exists, is seen as very distinct from the undergraduate student body as a whole: frequenting certain eating clubs, establishing certain social circles, clearly delineating which spaces (clubs, teams, religious groups, etc.) are safe, and which are not.

This is a huge problem, in my opinion. Space should not be so divided and it’s in the best interests of everyone, LGBT or not, to foster an environment where all LGBT people feel able to come out. Reading this article was genuinely troubling to me—and then I realized that if I wanted to do something about this situation, there was a totally obvious course of action: apply to be a peer educator. I remember my experience freshman week at the LGBT peer educators’ study break as underwhelming and not very informative, but maybe that’s because the first people I met here, even before I matriculated, were through the framework of the institutionalized LGBT community. Maybe being a peer educator could make a difference to some confused and closeted freshman who’s looking for that community, or who wants to be able to come out to her friends, or who wants to meet people with whom she can build LGBT community outside of the institutional framework. I mean, it’s certainly the easiest and most straightforward thing I could do to help more people come out at this very, very closeted campus.

But that still hasn’t resolved the situation. I don’t know what to do, and I’m really quite troubled about it. What do you think?

I’m sure this obsession is getting tedious, but I happened, by complete coincidence, on the following from the Princeton University Residential Living Policies Guide:

HIV Infection
The following excerpts are from “Guidelines for Students Regarding HIV Infection.”

Fundamental to Princeton’s response to HIV infection and other chronic illness is the commitment to respect the rights and reasonable concerns of everyone, including those individuals living with these conditions.

Accommodations for Students Living with HIV

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination protect students with disabilities. Under these acts and University policy, HIV infection is considered to be a disability. As with all disabilities, Princeton University will make reasonable accommodations for students living with HIV.

Peers of Students with HIV

Peers of those students who are HIV infected are expected to continue to carry out their academic responsibilities in a normal fashion. Should a student experience fear or anxiety with regard to interacting with a fellow student who is known or perceived to have HIV disease, he or she should contact a member of the Princeton University Health Services staff for information on HIV disease, or the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students for information about accommodating other requests. Students who wish to transfer to another residence to avoid contact with a fellow student who is HIV infected or perceived to be living with HIV do not have a right to such reassignment.

For further information, please refer to the “Princeton University Policy on HIV Infection” and the complete “Guidelines for Students Regarding HIV Infection” available through the Office of the Associate Provost for Administration, 3 Nassau Hall, or the Office of the Director of Clinical Services, Princeton University Health Services.

UPDATE: Here’s another fun tidbit: “An undergraduate who is to be married during the academic year must inform the Housing Department and provide his or her marriage license before the agreement is terminated.” I call heterosexism on the married student housing.

“The Orange Bubble” is what people call Princeton, sometimes, because the school’s colors are ridiculously orange and black, and because Princeton has a way of insulating one from the real world. Its campus is suburban, in an awkwardly affluent community that bears little resemblance to most other suburban or rural college towns. Its students tend to have little interest in the outside world, or are so hyperscheduled that they don’t have a space for the outside world in their calendars. This was starkly apparent to me today.

My morning lectures today: in my sociology class, racial inequality in America and the legacies of slavery and segregation; and, in my gender and sexuality class, AIDS—a topic which, as my previous posts will attest, I am very shaken by. At lunch, however, I picked up a copy of the Daily Princetonian, as is my wont. Front page, above-the-fold news? The crazies who inhabit the Internet are angry that Princeton’s admissions rate went up by 0.54%. The piece was both an example of inadequate journalism and just general ridiculousness, quoting the most disgusting of comments that were vaguely sexist about University President Shirley Tilghman and Dean of Admissions Janet Rapelye, and complaining about grade deflation as usual. All of this is absurd, and has always been absurd, and there was nothing new about my usual lunchtime rant to my friends about people who are stupid, but today it seemed to contrast so starkly between my morning lectures.

In the afternoon things just magnified. In my journalism class, one of my classmates read a (really excellent) piece she’d written for the class, about a Berkeley co-op that she’d encountered when a spring break trip she took through Princeton’s community service program visited there. I was mind-boggled by how it must have been for this Princeton community service group to encounter all the unusualness of the Berkeley co-ops, and how alien it must have seemed. I think the author of the piece certainly didn’t let that come across when she introduced us to the co-op’s inhabitants, which was great. But I couldn’t help wondering about the culture shock.

To me, it is Princeton who is out of step with reality. I’ve grown up in this sheltered environment with this really specific idea of what’s sensible and sane and right. In a way, to me, the nudity and veganism practiced at the co-op in the piece are less weird than bitching about grade deflation or the fact that this university isn’t an old boys’ club anymore. But I’ve been wondering for hours now how skewed that perception is. What part of my day was the reality check? I still don’t know.