By SUSAN JONES
The Senate’s Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Discrimination Advocacy Committee (EIADAC) got more details last week on the new LGBTQIA+ Steering Committee that hopes to begin working in earnest in January.
Angie Bedford-Jack, co-chair of the committee and interim director of strategic operations for the Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, said the steering committee was formed from the “top down.” It was convened by Clyde Pickett, vice chancellor of equity, diversity and inclusion, and “very much has the seal of approval of the chancellor,” she said.
Some of the things the committee plans to do may look similar to grassroots efforts over the past few years — the LGBTQ Task Force put together by students in 2020 and the Transgender Working Group formed in 2016 — but Bedford-Jack said the new group’s official position, “I think is going to have the potential to impact the work that the committee does.”
The committee — co-chaired by Todd Reeser, the Dietrich School of Arts & Science’s associate dean for faculty affairs and a professor of French and Italian — is in the process of forming, and Bedford-Jack said they want to find people, “that have the ability to move policy and practices forward in their respective areas, to make sure that this is not a situation where we are just generating ideas and have no kind of power to move them forward.”
Two members will come from the Senate — one from EIADAC and one at-large. There also will be representatives from the Student Government Board, Staff Council and Pitt Queer Professionals, an affinity group for faculty and staff, along with direct appointments by Pickett. As for student LGBTQIA affinity groups, Bedford-Jack said they’re still trying to figure out how to get “representational appointments without having somebody from every single student group, because that would wind up being a lot of people.”
The initial goals of the committee are to do a review of current practices, initiatives and recommendations that have already been made, including those of the LGBTQ Task Force. The task force, which included faculty, staff and students, issued a report in 2021 calling for a new physical center and staff hires dedicated to the LGBTQIA+ community on campus. Protest groups at recent Board of Trustees meetings have continued to demand these goals be met. The University has followed through on another recommendation from the task force — a dedicated website for LGBTIQA+ resources and opportunities.
Another goal is to develop an allies program for the University. “Anybody that’s been around here for a while knows that we previously had an allies program run out of student affairs,” Bedford-Jack said, “It has been dormant for quite a while and I know that there is a lot of desire and need to see that redone.”
An ideal member of the committee should be “somebody who has a commitment to LGBTQ inclusion and belonging, and a desire and ability to engage in meaningful work in between meetings,” Bedford-Jack said. “We do very much intend to do work in between the meetings and not come together once a month and share ideas and then walk away until the next month. And I realize that not everybody has that capacity.”
Bedford-Jack said there are a number of “very pressing needs that spurred this committee into formation.” But those issues will evolve and new ones will develop, “so I don’t see this being something that’s stood up for a couple of years and then dissolves. There will continue to be that need.”
Members of the Senate committee were supportive of the LGTGQIA steering committee’s formation. Bridget Keown, co-chair of the committee and faculty member in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, said, “I think the strength and the dedication of a lot of our grassroots organizations have made it very easy for the University as a whole to backslide.”
Ally Bove, the committee’s other co-chair and a faculty member in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said that gender neutral bathroom access continues to be a problem, particularly in buildings that Pitt leases. Any new Pitt construction or major renovations are required to have gender-neutral facilities, but leased buildings, like Bridgeside Point where Bove is located, often only have male and female bathrooms.
Committee member Victoria Grieve, assistant professor in the School of Pharmacy and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies department, said she recently heard that a friend’s partner turned down a faculty appointment to Pitt, “specifically citing that she didn’t feel safe on our campus being trans. … Getting in diverse faculty and diverse students is meaningless if the experience is so toxic that they can’t survive here. It just doesn’t seem like much has been done to consider that, outside of some very basic gestures that are ultimately meaningless.”
Bedford-Jack said that often LGBTQIA issues “are incredibly complex problems that require, I think, complex solutions in some cases. There are very specific things that we could do to begin to chip away at them. And maybe we get so hung up on the complexity of them that we don’t do the simple things to begin to chip away at them.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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