Can U. of Tennessee Students Keep a Staple of LGBT Life Afloat?

Walk toward the main library at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and you can’t miss the Pride Center. A bright rainbow flag stands on the lawn in front of the building where the center makes its home. Nine more colorful flags — representing different sexualities and gender identities — decorate the facade. They share space with a vibrant orange Pride Center banner, adorned with rainbow stripes and a simple message: “You belong here.”

“Even if you’re too scared to walk into the building, you can see every day that we’re not going anywhere,” said Audrey Parker, a rising junior here who has been active as a center volunteer. “We’re here with you, silently fighting just to exist.”

But two months ago, a new law gave that fight fresh urgency and dimmed the center’s future. Republican state lawmakers stripped $436,000 from the university’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion for a year and diverted the money to engineering scholarships for minority students. The lawmakers said they were acting in response to two posts on the Pride Center’s website — one about using gender-neutral pronouns, the other about avoiding faith-based language — that set off national controversies over political correctness.

The legislation forced the diversity office to close for the 2016-17 academic year. (Its future beyond then is uncertain.) The law didn’t explicitly mention the Pride Center, but because the center operated under the diversity office, university leaders said it had to close, too. The space lost its part-time director, its graduate assistant, and its budget.

That was a huge setback to many students on the campus. When the Pride Center opened, in 2010, it was the only LGBT office at any of Tennessee’s public universities. Most flagship institutions nationwide now have such a center, as do about half of the universities in the Southeastern Conference, to which Tennessee belongs.

At many of those institutions, the centers play a significant role in campus life: They provide resources and programming for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students and employees, as well as training for the broader campus community. And in the aftermath of tragedies like the mass shooting last month at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., the centers have taken on crucial support roles.

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So when the Knoxville campus’s Pride Center faced extinction, a handful of students stepped in. The Pride Ambassadors, as they are called, had been members of a leadership-development program offered through the center. Just before the center shut down, the ambassadors applied to become an independent student organization. Now they are trying to find a way to continue the center’s work — without university money or staff members.

This summer the students are juggling classes and part-time jobs with a new set of tasks they hadn’t planned for: raising funds, meeting with administrators, hosting events, running the center’s social-media accounts, recruiting new student volunteers, and sketching out a plan for the center to operate with a staff of undergraduates and a budget built on donations. They’ve raised $10,000 through a crowdfunding campaign since mid-May.

While the students scramble, university leaders are toeing a fine line. They say they want to support the Pride Ambassadors and signal that the university welcomes all students, but they must also make clear to lawmakers that the institution is respecting the letter and spirit of the new law. That’s why the center can’t be a university office this year, they say.

“The Pride Center is really important to us,” said Margie Nichols, a university spokeswoman. The center’s budget has been stripped for only a year, she pointed out. “We don’t want the funding to be taken away forever. To protect the Pride Center, we want to comply with the law.”

But administrators’ words are ringing hollow with students who say the center has a responsibility to continue its important work this year. Chesnea Skeen, a rising senior and a member of the Pride Ambassadors, put it this way: “It feels like they’re trying to shove us back in the closet, honestly.”

‘They Are Stepping Up’

For a university with nearly 28,000 students, the Pride Center is small. The space, nestled in a building that dates to the 1940s, used to be a two-bedroom dormitory suite. An old air-conditioning unit roars from a window near the entrance. There’s a small lounge with a front desk, a couch, and a couple of chairs, as well as two cramped meeting spaces off to the side, one of which doubles as a kitchen.

When the center hosts events, such as movie nights, most students sit on the floor. “We’re packed in here like sardines,” said Johnathan D. Clayton, a member of the Pride Ambassadors who will graduate next month.

Students say the influence of the Pride Center extends far beyond its size. On average, 40 to 50 students used the center every day during the past academic year, said Donna Braquet, the center’s founder and former part-time director. She’s also an associate professor and biology librarian at Tennessee.

Mr. Clayton, who is 30, enrolled as an undergraduate in 2004, before the center existed. The climate for LGBT students then was “awful,” he said. He left college for a few years. When he returned, he said, the center’s presence had helped improve the climate.

Still, “if you’re not a cis, straight, white, Christian male, you face harassment on this campus pretty regularly,” he said. “The center, to me, is a safe place to go and relax and not have to worry about everything that we have to worry about when we’re outside of these walls.”

Other LGBT students agree that the center is a bright spot on a campus that isn’t always welcoming. The university received two out of five stars in the Campus Pride Index and ranked fifth in the Princeton Review’s 2015 list of least LGBT-friendly colleges.

The turmoil of the past year may have raised more doubts about Tennessee among LGBT students. Last August, Ms. Braquet wrote a post for the Pride Center’s website that she said had been designed to educate the campus about gender-neutral pronouns. Many conservative news outlets construed the post as a statement of university policy, and anger spread. State lawmakers and others called the incident “political correctness run amok,” and they successfully pressured senior administrators to take down the post and apologize. That marked the start of months of scrutiny from lawmakers over the university’s diversity efforts.

“We know that we historically have lost students to other institutions that have better support for their LGBT-student population,” said Beauvais Lyons, a professor of art who is co-chair of a new Faculty Senate task force formed to untangle the new law’s requirements.

Around lunchtime on a recent Thursday, three students — Mr. Clayton, Ms. Skeen, and Ms. Parker, a fellow Pride Ambassador — and Kristen Godfrey, who graduated in May and was formerly the center’s graduate assistant, gathered in the center’s lounge. Ms. Braquet sat in one of the meeting rooms. She created the Pride Center in 2010 and had served as an official part-time director since 2013, before losing that job when the diversity office was defunded. Since then she has continued to serve as the ambassadors’ faculty adviser, and she’s trying to help students make plans. But there’s only so much she can do.

A poster lay across the table in front of the students, detailing every event that the Pride Center held during the last academic year. Several of them were crossed out with a marker, and others were edited. What remained was the programming that the students believed they could put on this fall and spring, given their limited resources.

Movie nights made the cut. Ally Week — an annual series of workshops and events for supporters of the LGBT community — did not. Pride Week, in October, became Pride Day. The weekly discussion groups that the center sponsored for students of different sexual orientations and gender identities? Still a question mark.

The hours of operation are also under discussion. During the past year, the center was open 57 hours a week. That schedule will probably be cut in half this fall, Ms. Skeen said. And while the center usually opened during final exams so students had a place to relax and study, she doubted that would be the case anymore.

Another significant challenge for the Pride Ambassadors is turnover. Come this fall, out of 10 members, Ms. Skeen will be the only one with a full year of experience under her belt.

The ambassadors program was designed to be an educational opportunity, Ms. Braquet said. “When they signed up, they didn’t sign up to run a center,” she said. “They signed up to make friends and to learn how to be a leader.”

“I’m so proud of them, because they are stepping up,” Ms. Braquet said. “But what a burden.”

Administrative Limbo

In the meantime, the most pressing short-term concern for the Pride Ambassadors is which university office will “house” the Pride Center this fall. That designation will allow the center to have a few work-study students and an administrative liaison, whose role will probably involve handling the center’s gift money, signing work-study time sheets, and serving as a point person for ambassadors’ questions and concerns.

Senior officials have given students two options: the office of the dean of students or the office of multicultural student life.

“We’re awaiting their response about which one of those they think may work,” said Vincent Carilli, vice chancellor for student life, in an interview last week.

At a 90-minute forum the previous evening, the ambassadors had solicited feedback on the two choices. About 30 students, faculty and staff members, and alumni showed up. Several argued that the office of multicultural student life made sense as a home for the center: Its lower profile, they said, could make the center less susceptible to outside attacks. But that office is already understaffed, others argued, and the Pride Center would be an additional burden.

Attendees spent much of the time posing question after question to the ambassadors. How will you be able to use the money you’ve raised? Why couldn’t Ms. Braquet stay on as a volunteer director? Will you have to pay your new liaison? If so, how much?

“I really feel for the students, who are trying to hold it together with their bare hands right now,” said Misty G. Anderson, a professor of English who attended the forum.

Near the end of the event, Ms. Skeen rested her head on Mr. Clayton’s shoulder. She had taken a final exam earlier that day, and she said she couldn’t study for it because she had been planning for the forum. But the barrage of questions was nothing new, she added. Whenever the ambassadors meet with administrators, she said, they leave with more questions than answers.

Ms. Skeen expressed frustration with Mr. Carilli and other administrators. State legislators introduced the first bill targeting the diversity office in January, she pointed out. Why didn’t campus officials have a plan in place for the Pride Center months ago?

Trying to form such a plan would have been impossible, Mr. Carilli said, because the bill’s language and intent changed multiple times before it became law.

Since the Pride Center isn’t mentioned by name in the law, it’s not entirely clear how the university should proceed. Mr. Carilli said that the university’s general counsel hadn’t yet issued guidance clarifying the institution’s obligations under the law. Officials are reviewing the language, he said, as well as the legislators’ intent.

Also because it is not named in the law, Ms. Braquet said, many students probably don’t yet realize that it has lost its institutional support. “It might be a shock to them in the fall,” she said, “when they come back and it’s not what it was.”

Still, Mr. Carilli said, the center’s future is far from bleak. In some ways a center run by students has more independence than one run by the university, he said. The new law bars state money from being spent to promote gender-neutral pronouns, he said, but the ambassadors face no such restrictions and can “do whatever type of programming they believe is germane to their mission as a student organization.”

Nor is Mr. Carilli concerned about the center’s finances. Ms. Nichols, the spokeswoman, said a university account holds several thousand dollars in gifts that Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek, who announced last month he was stepping down, has collected for the center. The administrative liaison will handle that money, Mr. Carilli said.

He recalled a meeting with the ambassadors last month at which they described how painful the center’s loss had been. “It was real,” he said. He paused. “It was heartbreaking for me to understand some of their personal stories.”

‘We Feel Guilty’

The week after the Orlando shooting was hectic for Ms. Skeen.

She and her peers organized a “gathering of support, healing, and peace,” met with administrators for several hours, and presented at the Faculty Senate’s Pride Center forum, all while making time for classes. During the meeting with administrators, Ms. Skeen said, students were asked to decide on the center’s administrative home within 48 hours.

This summer, Ms. Skeen said, she’s had virtually no time to take care of herself. “We feel guilty for asking to take some time for ourselves,” she added, “because the center’s waiting for us to open its doors.”

A number of supportive professors say they hope eventually to shoulder some of that burden. Faculty leaders have formed a steering committee that could help oversee the Pride Center. The committee isn’t an official university body yet, said Mr. Lyons, the art professor, but its role could involve handling things like money and time sheets. “You can’t just have a space and have it run by the Pride Ambassadors with no staff or faculty oversight,” he said.

For the time being, however, the ambassadors feel as if they’re pretty much on their own. “It’s funny, because UT always talks about how ‘We want our students to graduate’ and ‘We want to make sure that they feel supported,’” said Ms. Godfrey, the former graduate assistant. “Now the administration is literally saying, Run a center, and we hope you graduate.”

Last Thursday Mr. Clayton, Ms. Skeen, and Ms. Parker left the center in the early afternoon, as a new round of summer classes began that day. But within a few hours they were back to gather their materials for freshman orientation. They’d be staffing the Pride Ambassadors table for much of the evening.

When new students stop by to chat, Ms. Skeen tries to stay as positive as she can. She expects that quite a few LGBT freshmen chose the University of Tennessee in large part because of the Pride Center.

But she knows she’ll get a lot of questions about what’s going to happen to the center this fall. Right now, she’s not able to answer many of them.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.