Virginia Commonwealth University
Office of the President
P.O. Box 842512
Richmond, Virginia 23284-2512
Phone: (804) 828-1200
Email: president@vcu.edu

October 11, 2014

Dear Dr. Rao,

It is time to stop patting yourself on the back. Your recent proclamations on gender were impressively progressive on the surface, but that initial impression totally dissolves upon a closer critical reading of your text. Allow me to explain, because I don't believe you realize your own deep biases.

On October 6, you sent an email to the VCU student and faculty body reading as follows:

Seeing as this update to school policy was to give us the, “full faith and credit [we] deserve," (in dubious quotation marks), I will also give you, "the deference and respect your degrees and title entitle you to," (in similarly dubious quotation marks). Your doctorate does not entitle you to speak to us in this way. Neither do your wealth and privilege.

I was initially pleased when I received this email on the same day that Virginia's Attorney General announced he would be acknowledging the Supreme Court of the United States' decision to overturn Virginia's 2006 constitutional marriage referendum. The message was strong in its opening two paragraphs, although the LGBT community does not want "similar" benefits packages to heterosexual spouses. We want identical packages to heterosexual spouses. The reason the 2006 Marshall-Newman Amendment had to include the phrase, "relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage," in its banishment of same-sex partnerships was due to the fear that a ban on simple marriage would leave room for LGBT couples to find happiness and fulfillment elsewhere in some "separate-but-equal" faux-marriage. And the obvious motive of Virginia's uneducated Christian electorate was not to protect the institution of marriage from LGBT couples, but to zealously prohibit all forms of legal unity among LGBT partners and their families, identical or approximate. The LGBT community called this bullshit, and the Supreme Court agreed. Just as we do not want approximate marriages, we do not want approximate benefits. Our spousal benefits must be identical to all other spousal benefits if we want to consider this issue legally settled. This email is now five days old. We still have not received the promised information on, "how the benefits will be implemented." It should not take five days to settle on the word, "equally."

After the initial two paragraphs, things begin to slip away from reasonableness. You add, as an afterthought, an addition to the school's anti-discrimination policy that includes sexual orientation and gender identity. As far as I am able to determine, the text you are amending only exists on the About Us page of the VCU Office for Institutional Equity. You mentioned no specific proposition to change VCU's Student Code of Conduct or the Title IX Student Sexual Misconduct Policy, documents with actual punitive measures for violators, to include protections for LGBT people. These documents not only still exclude our Trans* comrades, but also lack any reference to sexual orientation at all.

My right not to be discriminated against is not an afterthought to me. It's not a cherry to place on the sundae of marriage equality. Even though the Commonwealth of Virginia does not require you to add protections for LGBT people to the school's discrimination policy, they did not prohibit the school from making those changes. This could have been done long ago, and there is still much more to do from what you have proposed. This is a clear case of too little, too late. And progressive celebrations of that treat morsel offered to our community are held under a misconception of how non-revolutionary this policy change actually is.

This deeply flawed email is not where the apparentness of your lack of gender education stopped.

Yesterday, this email was sent to the student and faculty body from Dr. Melissa Exum, Vice Provost for Student Affairs, although, strangely and sinisterly, the email came from the address policedept@vcu.edu. This police-issued email set out a mandatory course for all students to complete regarding sexual misconduct and discrimination to be completed in less than a month. (During midterms, no less!) There is a right way, a wrong way, and a bunch of very stupid ways to teach nondiscrimination and respect. A mandatory online course prescribed by a police department with academic punishments instituted for noncompliance is an extremely stupid way to teach nondiscrimination and respect for several reasons:

1. Students will resent any mandatory course added to their workload mid-semester.

2. Students will not learn to appreciate the necessity of these programs while they are resenting its assignment.

3. Police departments should never assign academic coursework. Period. And fuck you for letting that happen.

4. Online courses of this variety are fairly unanimously seen as a formal annoyance and not an educational opportunity.

5. Reading policy text and answering questions proving it has been read is a demonstrably ineffective form of education.

6. This online seminar will not solve the problem that the U.S. Dept. of Education's Office for Civil Rights was unable to conclude that VCU was in compliance with Title IX in July 2014.

Aside from these direct failures, this announcement further highlighted your ignorance (and the general ignorance of the rest of your administration) on gender issues as it equated the struggle of LGBT persons to be recognized as equal citizens to the struggle of women to exist in a male-dominated culture without constant fear of harassment and rape. This conflation occurs in the intoductory sentence, "As President Rao indicated in his recent email communication, Virginia Commonwealth University is committed to student success and providing a safe and healthy campus environment." Both of these fields of issues are extremely important in their own regards and deserve not to be lumped together and conflated with each other. Beginning an email about sexual violence towards women by patting yourself on the back for the recent lackluster email about gender identity and sexual orientation nondiscrimination is dishonest, offensive, and, at best, a complete non-sequitur. It sends the message that you believe all issues regarding non-male non-hetero/cis-normative peoples can be condensed into one bitter pill to swallow quickly and get out of the way.

Rather than saddling students with an hour of seminar work to assuage the insurance and legal departments of the university's administration, these changes in education deserve to be more permanent, more transformative of the university's policies, and more deeply integrated into the school's curriculum. The perceived need to teach your students not to rape people cannot be satisfied by this policy. If you truly believe we need to be taught not to rape, or even that teaching everyone not to rape will somehow stop rapists from raping, this needs to be integrated into the core of our education in every class. The professors must take control of this education by integrating it into their lesson plans. History professors should add focus to the historical presence of violence against women. Philosophy professors should discuss liberation philosophy and feminism. Mathematics and business professors should discuss the ongoing discrimination against women in the STEM fields. These curriculum-integrated lessons on gender and sexual discrimination would be respectful and effective and would reach a larger percentage of the student population without them resenting the program, unlike the new mandatory police-issued online training course.

Sincerely,

The VCUlgbtAC

P.S. - The Virginia Commonwealth University Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans* Anarchist Collective is a thing now. Get used to it.