The University of New Mexico received a spot in the 2017 Top LGBTQ-Friendly Online Schools list published by the SR Education Group, an education research publisher founded in 2004.
Taitum Ridgway, a representative of the SR Education Group, said to develop this list they employed data from national nonprofit Campus Pride, which has worked with researchers to to generate standards and tools for assessing LGBTQ-friendly policies, programs and practices at higher education institutions.
These standards used to create the Campus Pride Index, which rates schools from one to five, were used to create the list, Ridgway said.
“We used their ratings in our list, because we believe their metrics to be valuable and trustworthy,” Ridgway said.
Although many aspects of LGBTQ-friendliness are related to a physical campus environment, there are other elements that spread through the curriculum and peer/faculty interaction and are therefore relevant to the experience of online students, Ridgway said, adding that the Campus Pride Index does an impressive job at measuring a wide variety of factors.
Although the Top Online LGBTQ-Friendly Schools is an unranked list, in order to be included, schools were required to offer at least 15 fully online degrees and score at least a three on the Campus Pride Index, Ridgway said.
The SR Education Group’s methodology required schools to offer at least 15 fully online degrees and score at least a three on the Campus Pride Index.
“We chose a score of three as the bar in order to highlight schools making an above-average effort, and in order to serve prospective online students, we set the degree offering requirement at 15 fully online degrees,” Ridgway said. “Additionally, we manually researched each school's annual tuition rate in order to provide standardized tuition data on the list.”
Many of the schools on this list have a dedicated resource center for LGBTQ students. This is one of the factors in the Campus Pride Index Score that impacted whether or not a school was included, Ridgway said.
Jaycee Camarillo and Ahtza Chavez, two program assistants with the UNM LBGTQ Resource Center, said that since mid-2010, the leadership of Director Alma Rosa Silva-Banuelos, combined with the training the center offers people on campus and also within the community, has helped UNM progress as a safer campus.
One of the trainings offered by the LBGTQ Resource Center, they said, is the safe zone training which has been offered for the last five years.
This training provides attendees with an overview of the gender spectrum, sexuality spectrums and terminology that goes over scenarios, it talks about how to be an effective ally for the community and a safe zone sticker is received at the end of this training, they said.
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“The vision was to be able to provide services and a safe space for members of the LBGTQ community,” Camarillo said.
The resource center will continue to focus on policies that make life harder or more difficult for people within the community, such as UNM’s ID policy, a policy that requires the gender listed on UNM IDs to reflect a student’s license, Camarillo and Chavez said.
Another goal of the LBGTQ resource center is to move out from its basement location to become more accessible to the student body.
“We could make a lot more positive impact on this campus and in this community if we were set up a little bit differently and it’s really just about the resiliency of the leadership and the staff that has been able to make that happen and bringing a lot of community to the campus,” Chavez said.
ASUNM President Kyle Biederwolf said the undergraduate student governing body is proud that UNM is leading the way for LGBTQ-friendly higher education practices in the country.
“We appreciate the work of the LGBTQ Resource Center, student groups like QSA, and efforts by the university's administration that are making our campus a more inclusive and accepting place for everyone,” Biederwolf said. “There is always more work to do, but we are proud that the UNM community is constantly taking steps to meet the needs of our diverse student body.”
Nichole Harwood is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Nolidoli1.
