A day of courage, a day of diversity

Hillsdale is now—officially—politically diverse.

Last week, the Collegian reported on the re-birth of the College Democrats, a group that has not been active on campus for six years.

While we at the Collegian celebrate a bipartisan campus, we also are concerned for the group's survival. In last week's article, members of the newly-formed club voiced their desire to band together in the face of “persecution” from a close-minded campus. Identifying oneself as a Democrat, they said, was the equivalent of admitting to being a homosexual at colleges elsewhere across the nation.

Scores of other colleges already have a yearly tradition for this, however.

October 11 is National Coming-Out Day, and it is heralded by week-long celebrations in every enlightened institute of higher learning. During this week, GLBT (Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender) clubs set up information tables and host “diversity training.” They distribute “out-lists” so freshmen know which faculty and upperclassmen they can turn to for support. Some perform community service projects to show that “we're here, we're queer and we care about others.”

The purpose of the week is to make the campus aware of their presence, sensitive to their needs, and sympathetic to their plight. Coming Out is an incredibly difficult process, they say, because society's default assumption is that you are straight.

To ease this process, therefore, schools like Yale and the University of Michigan offer students lurking in the closet a chance to get out, and this becomes the crowning event of Coming Out Week. A large temporary closet is constructed on the quad and painted with rainbows and pink and purple triangles. Students walk in, then jump out into the open arms of fellow non-heterosexuals, are given a rainbow sticker and get their picture taken.

Once out of the closet, they are free, able to live openly and speak truthfully about who they are.

We do not want our fellow students to be denied this wonderful experience of liberation. Democrats at Hillsdale have been suffering in the closet for too long, and they deserve to be welcomed and celebrated the way GLBT students are on college campuses everywhere else.

Therefore, we propose that the college adopt the closet-on-the-quad concept to relieve their identity crisis. Every spring, to commemorate the founding of the Hillsdale College Democrats, club members would build a closet on the quad and paint it red, white and blue.

On Democratic Coming Out Day, brave young freshmen—and upperclassmen who had finally summoned the courage—would be able to step through the closet and get a t-shirt with the democratic party logo.

And, if an entire week of celebration and political awareness were built around this event—a Gala, even—the democrats at Hillsdale would come to realize that their campus is not quite the breeding ground of close-minded, dogmatic and potentially violent Republicans they imagined.

The Collegian would even take their pictures.