Purdue Gayduation

On May 13th of this year, Purdue is planning on holding its first annual “Lavender Graduation”  for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and transgendered graduating seniors. The ceremony is meant to recognize the accomplishments of those graduating seniors in the GBLQA community during their time at Purdue. The ceremony is organized by Purdue’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion and will include graduating seniors, their families, as well as a guest speaker. 

Holding special ceremonies and activities for individuals who belong to groups which have faced adversity in the past has become common place for diversity offices at universities and at some businesses. Diversity offices often attempt to overcome discrimination perpetrated against groups in the past by essentially holding events which go out of their way to accept those disadvantaged groups. However, ceremonies which divide people into groups according to a relatively narrow set of personal characteristics only further reinforces the notion that some people are different from normal.

There is a debate to be had over the goal of diversity programming and what form of diversity we should pursue in our society. Which is a more important goal, celebrating differences or finding commonality? It has been quite some time since we decided (as a society) that separate can never be equal, and in order to ensure equality, we had to treat everyone without regard to skin color; but today diversity often means the opposite. Instead of treating everyone the same, we should treat everyone by the characteristics and groups to which they belong. Purdue’s diversity office appears to agree with the latter; by organizing separate graduation ceremonies they are saying a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered individual needs special recognition, protection, treatment, or benefits. 

In grade schools every year, students are often taught that America is a melting pot. Our citizens come from all over the world and contribute something to our culture, however eventually everyone becomes part of a single common culture and identity. This is contrasted with how diversity is often administered on college campus and some businesses, where individuals are divided by race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, etc and treated according to those qualities. This patchwork version of diversity fails to celebrate common culture or qualities people and communities posses.  Instead, it views people not as individuals, but as classes of people organized by narrow qualities. 

Encouraging diversity in colleges and employment does have some legitimacy. When talking of the creation of a national university, George Washington hoped that by bringing together students from different parts of the country, those students would “discover that there was not just cause for those jealousies and prejudices, which one part of the union felt against one another.” From Washington’s point of the view, the purpose of bringing together people of different backgrounds was to demonstrate that the differences we commonly recognize are not as important as what we have in common.  Washington may have considered geography as the biggest source of prejudice in the county; however, the sentiment is equally valid in regards to race, ethnicity, sex and sexual orientation. 

From an educational standpoint, there is also value in having individuals of different backgrounds with different points of view in the classroom.  People from a wealthy background have something to learn from those who are poor. Oftentimes we have something to learn from people of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. However, the presence of different points of view is not a reason to reduce people’s identities to single adjectives: black, white, gay, straight, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Pastafarian. Yet this is what is accomplished when we organize events by these characteristics.

Graduation and Commencement should be a time when students come together and celebrate their accomplishments as students and graduates at Purdue. It is inevitable that different groups will have separate celebrations in addition to the activities organized by the University, but it is inappropriate for Purdue to carve up the student body into separate groups for separate graduation activities.  Any benefits Purdue’s diversity office could hope to accomplish for gay and lesbians students are undone by separating those students from the rest of the student body during a time when they should be joining together with everyone else in a time of celebration. The Office of Diversity should focus on accomplishing only the latter.