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'Lavender graduations' gain ground
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-05-17-lavender-graduations_x.htm
By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
If you see rainbow-colored tassels dangling from mortarboards this college
commencement season, think lavender.
Echoing a tradition already established on many campuses for minority students and other groups, a small but growing number of schools are holding "lavender graduations" to honor gay and lesbian students.
"We're finally ... getting our names and faces out there," says Alex Ferrando, 22, who helped organize the inaugural lavender graduation last month at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Commencement was Sunday.
This year, lavender graduations are being or were held on more than 50 campuses, up from just a handful a decade ago. Among those launching ceremonies this year: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Hawaii in Manoa and Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.
Typically, lavender ceremonies — the color, like the rainbow, is of symbolic significance to gay groups — are organized by campus resource centers for students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender — LGBT, for short.
Specifics vary by campus. But most such events are part of an array of smaller receptions and awards programs preceding university-wide commencement exercises. One common theme: Participants receive rainbow-colored tassels to put on their mortarboards during formal commencement exercises.
And oh, what a difference a decade makes. When Ronni Sanlo organized a lavender graduation in 1995 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she says the goal was to honor students "basically for surviving what typically had been a hostile (campus) environment."
"Three students showed up, and there were maybe five people in the audience," recalls Sanlo, who now directs UCLA's LGBT Campus Resource Center.
The growing visibility of lavender graduations — including on many campuses the participation of university officials — suggests more universities see value in supporting their gay populations, says Shane Windmeyer, founder of Campus Pride, a national organization for LGBT youth. "Such an event shows commitment to the LGBT student not only in recruitment but also in retention and a connection into their status as alumni."
But such events are not universally embraced. Three years ago, University of California regent Ward Connerly sought, unsuccessfully, to bar the nine-campus system from funding separate ceremonies based on race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, arguing that such events encourage students to segregate.
Jason Mattera, spokesman for Young America's Foundation, a Virginia-based non-profit that promotes conservative ideals, says he noticed the trend while he compiled his group's annual list of commencement speakers. "If anyone wanted more proof of college campuses as leftist breeding grounds, here it is," he says.
LGBT students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., meanwhile, weren't interested in such an event, LGBT center directors on those campuses say. And while Whitney Mackman participated in commencement exercises Sunday from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., she chose not to attend the lavender graduation.
"Every part of me contributed to my successes, and I find it inappropriate to honor my accomplishments as merely a LGBT student," Mackman, 21, wrote in the student newspaper.
Yoshiko Matsui, associate director for student services at the University of Puget Sound, says she has "a lot of room in my heart" for that sentiment. But, she adds, "there are also people who ... need to see that the campus cares."