These students have been living outside their president's office for more than two weeks. This is the reason for their sit-in ...
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00:00We're in a sit-in right now that's gone for 10 days, because we want gay professors and gay staff.
00:17Here we're in the stairwell. There's lots of nice things. We have some lovely protest signs that
00:20we've hung on our banners. We also have a big flag that says queer and Christian. This is a
00:27gender-neutral forum, and our school doesn't have those. And then we have a COVID test sign up,
00:32because we're making people get tested for COVID very frequently, because we want to make sure
00:36everyone's safe. Here's like a cool little bed setup that people have made outside someone's
00:39office. The reality is that we do have queer faculty and staff. The problem is just that
00:59they can't talk about it, or they'll get fired, or they can't be in a relationship, or they'll get
01:05fired. And it's just a constant danger to them. The messaging is so strong, because it has to do
01:12with whether or not you are welcomed back into a community. Because queer people can graduate
01:17from this university, but we can't be hired back. And once we've paid to have our degrees,
01:24and we've gone and learned from this university, then we literally have an expiration date,
01:28and we're not allowed to come back if we live into our identities.
01:59The goal is to sue the Board of Trustees because of their breach of fiduciary duty.
02:03And that's a really fancy way of just saying that the board is not acting in the best interest of
02:08our university, because the homophobic hiring policies are affecting way more than just who
02:12gets to work here. They're affecting our admissions rates. They're affecting whether
02:16or not student teachers get accepted to specific schools where they get to have their training.
02:21It affects the mental and emotional health of students and everything like that. One thing
02:26that our university takes a lot of pride in is being something called ecumenical. And if you
02:30don't speak religion, then that just means that we celebrate a bunch of different ideas about what it
02:35means to believe in God. And so in order to fully honor and participate in an ecumenical culture,
02:43if you're going to use the big word, you have to invite all people who hold different viewpoints
02:48to the table. And when you refuse to hire gay faculty and staff, then you refuse to bring
02:53a perspective to the table, which is just really problematic.
02:59And so we're trying to change that because it's not right.