One of the most significant democratic achievements of the twentieth century in the U.S. was certainly the dramatic widening of access to higher education. When the century began, three percent of high school graduates went to college. Those students were overwhelmingly wealthier, male, white, and elite. Today, 75 percent of students who graduate from high school now go on to college. This new pool of students is drawn from a far broader economic spectrum. The students on campus today are majority female, one-third students of color, and 40 percent first-generation college students. While the long march to full inclusion is far from over, it is now fairly commonplace for colleges and universities to applaud the diversity of their student body and to consider diversity an educational asset. But not all diversities are equally valued or understood. No one knows that better than the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) students in college today.

LGBTQ students remain largely invisible on many campuses. On other campuses, when they are visible, they often are subjected to ridicule, ostracism, or even physical violence, simply for being themselves. In student affairs literature and research, LGBTQ students are one of the most understudied, overlooked, and misunderstood groups on campus. This issue of On Campus With Women hopes to begin to highlight some of the work that is currently being done on, about, and for LGBTQ students through articles that reveal elements of the emerging body of research that can inform policies and practices that will help LGBTQ students thrive.

Ronni Sanlo's article puts this in clear statistics that should make all of us in higher education wince. Less than 20 percent of colleges and universities have non-discrimination policies to protect LGBTQ students and college employees, for example. It is no wonder that LGBTQ students, according to Sanlo, are victimized at four times the rate of the regular population. Or that this population is at great risk of depression, alienation, suicide, harassment, and physical violence. Or that one-third of LGBTQ students drops out for a semester--and sometimes out of college altogether--because hostile, unsafe environments disrupt learning.

LGBTQ Checklist
The checklist included here is designed both to acknowledge the work that many campuses are already doing and to help other campuses identify places to start in order to make their campuses more inclusive. It is a familiar list forged through the arduous, sustained work of the past forty years as colleges and institutions began to figure out how to create more equitable, affirming environments for men and women of color and for white women. It begins with the non-negotiable expectation of physical safety and moves up from there to what any viewbook trying to attract prospective campuses would want to claim: this is a campus in which you will be welcomed, challenged intellectually, and educated for an intercultural workplace and world, refine one's sense of individual and social responsibility, and discover who you are and can become.

It is a list that includes monitoring whether students not only remain in school, but also thrive while they are there. It incorporates creating inclusive climates in which every student is valued, much as every person is acquitted value and worth in a democracy. But it goes beyond attending to the needs of LGBTQ students themselves. It is also a matter of presenting to all students the accumulated bodies of knowledge in varying and often unfamiliar subject areas. The intellectual scholarship produced in the last twenty years in particular about sexuality and human history has been prolific. Many disciplines are already exploring and embracing these new questions, perspectives, or discoveries whether in literature, science, psychology, history, politics, health professions, or business. As is the case with diversity more generally, it is not simply who is in the classroom but also what is studied. Regardless of the profile of the student body, the curriculum ought to include this scholarship and ways it challenges and expands fields of inquiry.

The smart institution also knows how to deploy diversity to enhance student learning. That should also be the case in engaging LGBTQ students with others. We know from diversity literature that students' cognitive, moral, and intellectual development is enhanced when students are engaged with ideas and people whose perspectives disrupt the autopilot thinking that gets most of us through a day. The engagement across difference, even what may be difficult or ultimately uncongenial differences, can--when structured appropriately--produce deep learning. And gaining the intercultural skills to live and learn through and in the midst of the world's multiplicities is a necessary civic skill that functioning democracies depend upon.

Diversities Within and Between
The map to creating an inclusive institution is not unknown territory for higher education. But it will require institutions to acknowledge that diversity includes LGBTQ issues, intellectual frameworks, and people too. It will also mean recognizing the diversity among as well as between groups. Not all of the people of color, for instance, recruited for a given school are straight. Some of the women nurtured to be scientists are lesbian. A proportion of those first generation students are bisexual. A deeply religious person can be transgender. For all of these students, higher education at its best is called to create a learning environment in which everyone is encouraged to discover who they are, what they think, and how they will act in the world. We need everyone in the mix to do that, not just some of us. Academic excellence hinges on it.