Running Head: CAMPUS CLIMATE 1

The Importance of Campus Climate in Regards To Race, Sex, and LGBTQ

Student’s Name

Institution

Date
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Campus Climates in Regard to Race

Understanding the campus climate for campuses has become a crucial focus for many

institutions of higher learning. In contemporary times, race exists as both a subject of social

identity and long-standing social structures. Diversity and inclusion are some of the significant

crucial factors that help in determining the strength of a campus climate on students. Apparently,

diversity has numerous implications in higher education (Woodford et al. 2015). For several

years, the outlined objective of diversity in the campus was to help students from

underprivileged populations’ predominantly racial minorities who had gone through inequities

that prohibited them from joining college at rates relative to their populaces.

How students observe their campus climate determines their learning as well as growth

results. Having a healthy campus climate where students experience helpful staff, faculty,

teachers, and fellow students are more expected to have progressive and excellent learning

outcomes. On the other hand, undesirable campus climates are the ones where students undergo

severe discrimination, opposition, harassment, the pressure to conform to stereotypes and

adversative educational outcomes (Quaye et al. 2015, p.27). Therefore, the proper understanding

of how campus climate influences different groups in the student populace is vital to their

success.

Woodford & Kulick (2015) discusses that different university campuses have dedicated

themselves to confirm that they know and understand the diversity of their students’ populace.

The majority of these institutions have effectively registered an assorted student body, although

different studies propose that there is diversity among students, and they do not necessarily have

similar campus experiences. Students coming from the racial and ethnic settings especially the
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Latinos, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans who typically register in predominantly

Caucasian colleges and universities, frequently experience unhealthy educational climates.

Additionally, this group of students, who are the minority in these institutions, will discover that

there is minimal support and experience an unfriendly campus climate, and thus, they join the

campuses with a prejudiced outlook concerning the features of the institution life. Consequently,

the racial groups typically have an elusive high cognizance of discrimination and hence, their

prejudices are usually confirmed by their experiences while on campus.

Recent studies disclose that African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans students

have a high chance than Caucasian students to have stress to adapt to apparent racial and tribal

stereotypes in terms of academic performance (Young & McKibban, 2014, p.376). Moreover,

these ethnic groups undergo a lot of pressure to reduce explicit racial-ethnical group

individualities like the mode of dressing, behavior, and language for them to be acknowledged.

The pressure to lessen these characteristics is observed more with African-Americans, Asian-

Americans, and Latino campus students, respectively. In the faculty, African-Americans reported

more cases of racism than Latinos. Caucasian campus students recounted reasonable treatment

by like all the campus stakeholders like lecturers, staff, and faculty compared to the other

minority groups. This is an excellent example of how racism is evident in campus climate, and

the minority groups are much affected especially in their academic performances.

Referring to Lundy-Wagner & Winkle-Wagner (2013), there are a lot of racial and tribal

group dissimilarities prevailing on campuses concerning discernments as well as experiences of

the social climate. The African-Americans group consistently reports ongoing through negative

experiences compared to the other group of students. They correctly observe massive faculty

racism, hostility, high pressure to adapt to stereotypes, undesirable educational outcomes, less
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fair treatment by the school fraternity than the rest of the groups on campus. Therefore, this

critically shows why joining a historically black institution of higher learning offers higher

educational achievements, a positive academic self-perception as well as improved cognitive

growth for African-American students.

Assessing Campus Racial Climate for Staff and Faculty

Generally, university campuses in the United States have been subject to racial bias

where some race seems to be favored in job appointments and other critical sectors. For example,

the campuses have been controlled by white students, staff as well as faculty, white

administrative management and advisors (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017).

However, in the past twenty years, the number of students of color joining the colleges has been

tremendously increasing. Correspondingly, the number of white undergraduate students has

grown. The rise in racial and cultural diversity steered to an upsurge in the necessity for a

comprehensive campus climate (Stone et al. 2014). The issue of campus climate is a broad term

that encompasses several issues like racial and gender equity as well as the equity for

unjustifiable or minoritized populaces. To heighten and advance the campus climate to include

all the campus students regardless of their race or gender, climate assessment need to be

explicitly connected to racial diversity.

Campus Climates in Regard to Sex/Gender

In a campus setting, there are diverse groups of students. Gender is one of the aspects that

categorizes and identifies the students. Over time, gender differences have been experienced in

institutions and the disparities affects the students’ performance typically. Ward, et al. (2014)

claims that gender differences regarding campus climate focus on the discernment of sexual
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harassment particularly the harassment of women and not harassment as a gender issue. Usually,

on campuses harassment is viewed as unfavorable but not always observed as a gender issue.

According to recent studies, a high number of females are around 75% who experience

harassment than their counterparts’ male students who occupy approximately 25% (Griffin et al.

2016). The study demonstrates that over time, women have suffered a lot through discrimination,

violence, and other vices not only in the campus climate but in society in general. Two-thirds of

the female students believe that there are subjects to harassment due to their gender, whereas

one-third of them think that they are subject to harassment due to their race. Moreover, the

research conducted on the male students found out that the males recognize that harassment

occurs in proportion due to race and religion. The study results thus suggest that gender is more

noticeable than competition regarding the harassment subjected to women.

In contemporary times, women of black origin are attaining educational achievement at

more excellent rates compared to the other gender groups. The rise in college degree

achievement in the last era has outdone women of other racial or ethnic groups’ at most academic

levels. However, this achievement is generally characterized by exclusive encounters that some

females of black origin face on their campuses as they pursue their degrees. Presently, most of

the black female students attend mainly white colleges. Therefore, it is essential to determine

how these female students remain academically motivated and persistent despite the gender-

related problems they usually encounter (Young & McKibban, 2014). Generally, the literature

recommends that this group of students require a lot of individual strengths as well as cultural

resources to gain and sustain academic achievement.

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Campuses experience distinct challenges in terms of sexual orientation and affinity. Due

to these challenges, LGBTQ students can be prohibited from taking part in campus activities and

thus affecting their full educational potential. Although some local laws and campus policies may

be existing, there lack federal legislation that tends to protect discrimination of people against

their gender such as LGBTQ students. So, the campus climate should emphasize acceptance,

attitudes, and behaviors regarding the presence of LGBTQ students in the campus setting.

Critical researchers have analyzed the campus climate, and the majority of these studies

are done concerning race and racial matters on campuses. Only a few researches have assessed

the association concerning campus climate, sexual and gender minority students. Nevertheless,

some of those studies including the campus climate study concerning racial perspectives

established that LGBQ or sexual minority students, as well as gender minority ones, observe the

campus in a more undesirable manner unlike their non-transgender and heterosexual

counterparts, and this makes their recognition for being quite tricky (Lundy-Wagner & Winkle-

Wagner 2013, p.51).

There is a significant need for the interaction between race and gender principally for

black female students’. On campuses, there are female students from minority groups who are

also subject to racial harassment. This is one of the worst campus climate experiences for a

student. These female students under this concept thus face dual oppression. Therefore,

consideration of both oppressions as constituents of dual abuse is vital before an actual change

can happen.

The prevalence of gender-related harassment especially for women reported in several

studies in this work, leads to an assumption that colleges remain hostile backgrounds for the
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majority of women students. Therefore, owing to the association between campus climate and

student’s learning results and precisely the association between women’s insights of unfriendly

environments and decrease in cognitive consequences during their initial years in campus,

student organizations as well as student’s affairs experts must center on initiatives and programs

that tend to address campus climate for the female students (Banks & Banks, 2019).

Campus Climate in Regard to LGBTQ

The literature of Garvey et al. (2017) alleges that in recent years, there have been

increased occurrences experienced in colleges in the country involving some form of

homophobic assaults on the LGBTQ community. This group is comprised of lesbian, gay,

bisexual as well as transgender and queer students. Some dreadful incidences have been reported

in colleges where students have committed suicide. For example, the disturbing story of a

teenager known as Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after discovering that one of his

friends had secretly shared through the internet a sexual experience Clementi had with another

boy. This story together with other related cases in the country done by gay teenagers led to the

school officials along with other stakeholders to start efforts and programs aimed at

strengthening anti-bullying programs. Bullying has been there, and it is still there in schools.

Individuals regarded as ‘different’ are typically the objects of mistreatment, aggression, and

ferocity and in most cases, LGBTQ students are usually bullied the most than any other non-

dominant social group (Young & McKibban, 2014).

After the occurrence of such cases where students have been bullied up to the point

where they are committing suicide like Clementi’s case, school administrators where the event

happened must be bound to reveal about the quality of life for LGBT students around the school.
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Moreover, in reflecting on their experience on campus, the campus climate is one of the critical

things to consider. Campus climate as previously described is the assessment of the school

environment and how it relates to interpersonal, educational as well as professional relations.

Under this concept, the weather is the experience of persons or groups on campus together with

the quality and scope of interaction amid those diverse groups or individuals. Therefore it is

essential to assess campus climate since, in an unhealthy school environment, students feel

lonely, marginalized and insecure. If the campus climate is morbid, different negative things are

experienced like lack of respect for others, and thus, communication between different groups is

either hostile or missing (Garvey et al. 2017, p.806). LGBT students are one specific group that

is frequently affected by unhealthy campus climate since they are regularly the targets of bigoted

insolences.

In contemporary years, assessments and examinations of campus climate for LGBT

students have increasingly gained momentum, and it is being implemented in several colleges

and universities. The evaluation for these students started in the 1980s for example, at the

University of Massachusetts. It began after a crucial discovery that there were several LGBT

students in the institution who were being harshly treated by their fellow students (Oliveira,

2017). Consequently understanding the situation of the campus climate for LGBT students is

usually regarded as the first significant step to ensure that these students' needs are being fulfilled

effectively. Furthermore, the assessment rather than assessing whether LGBT students are being

harassed or bullied also entails other imperative things considered when evaluating campus

climates such as the existence of LGBT subjects in the syllabus and the accessibility of resources

to LGBTQ students.

Improving Campus Climate for LGBT Student’s

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Garvey et al. (2017) insists that there are several practices which if executed, will lead to

a healthy campus climate for LGBT students. Some of these practices include the establishment

of LGBT resource hubs, developments to the educational environment and the creation of safe

zone programs. Their detailed analysis is as follows:

Resource Centers for LGBT Students

LGBT resource hubs have not been in existence for a long time on university and college

campuses. However, considerations of their short existence period, the centers have experienced

a tremendous change in their mission statements as well as how the general society perceives

them. Initially, these centers emphasized mostly on sexual identity matters, and their initial

efforts was providing support provisions to the lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals and, most

importantly, enlighten the campus fraternity on LGBT students’ experiences.

According to Woodford et al (2015), one of the distinctive elements of LGBTQ students

is the discrimination they typically experience that is due to apparent and presumed gender

distinctiveness or sexual orientation. Discrimination targeting LGBTQ students has become more

surreptitious. This is because of the society increased condemnation against the group where they

are perceived as evil and morally wrong. According to the latest studies about one-third of

college and university students experience harassment on campus, and when it happens, it is

generally in the form of pejorative. To respond to this worrying tendency, most schools have

established LGBTQ resource hubs and other facilities meant for cultivating the campus climate

for LGBTQ students (Zamani‐Gallaher & Choudhuri, 2016). These centers also aim at actively

engaging all the campus students on the matters of diversity, specifically as they relate to the

eminence of LGBTQ individuals.

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As a demographic, LGBTQ student consists of a distinctive student populace since they

represent an invisible minority. This group tends to be hidden for it is hard for an individual to

recognize them by just looking at their faces. An individual’s gender, as well as sexual

orientation, cannot be identified through their physical appearance, and hence the invisibility of

their minority status. The issue of darkness according to many studies, makes it difficult for

researchers to conduct adequate research of the LGBTQ group as most of them hide their

identity and thus hard to locate. However, over the past few decades, LGBTQ visibility has

increased despite the undesirable insolences towards gender and sexual subgroups (Linley ET

AL.2016). This is often due to the rapid rise of rights and social acceptability in society.

Oliveira, (2017) literature discusses that LGBTQ resource centers offer a variety of

programs as well as services like giving information and recommendations to other agencies,

disaster intervention, community service, and discussion groups among others. Professionals

term these programs and functions as the most fundamental and useful for an active LGBTQ

resource center. Therefore, it is evident that the LGBTQ population is increasingly becoming

open as many campuses continue to recognize the necessity of the resource centers for this

group. Meanwhile, LGBTQ students are existent in every school; irrespective of whether they

are visible, the institutions need to be subtle to the essentials of LGBTQ students.

Student’s Organizations for the LGBTQ

Campuses need to provide various opportunities for LGBTQ students to participate in

supplementary activities while feeling content in their identity. The fear of harassment and

discrimination makes several LGBTQ persons adopt a shallow profile on campus. Student

organizations are useful in providing leadership opportunities and, more so, allow member
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students to grow practical skills like public speaking, among others. Some of the leading LGBTQ

students organization comprise of QuEST (Questioning Established Sexual Taboos) and GSA

(Gay-Straight Alliance). LGBTQ student organizations accomplish several roles on campuses

like providing networking opportunities and resource libraries that offer educational as well as

social programming (Oliveira, 2017).

Moreover, these organizations can function as political party-political groups that can

mobilize to attain equality on campus and in adjacent communities. They can also provide some

well-informed remarks on how the political contenders may influence LGBTQ students. Another

significant role of these organizations is enlightening the campus fraternity on matters

concerning sexual orientation, harassment and other problems that LGBTQ students face due to

discrimination. LGBTQ student organizations are an essential factor in refining the campus

climate, and thus recommending these organizations needs to be operative as possible.

Safe Zones

Safe Zones are typically referred as Allies on some campuses. Safe Zone differs

according to schools mainly in content, and they commonly consist of a network of students,

staff, and faculty who provide some support to LGBTQ students and provide a haven for those in

need of some crucial areas. According to Lundy-Wagner & Winkle-Wagner (2013), Safe Zones

have their mission, which most commonly comprises giving support both confidential and

perceptible to LGBTQ students, generating an atmosphere of acceptance and care, nurturing

student growth, and, most importantly, lessening the prevalence homophobia and heterosexism

on campuses.
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Woodford et al (2015), argues that is significant for the persons who wish to classify

themselves as allies to the LGBTQ organization on their campus to be enlightened on how to

become a useful ally. Safe Zones provides education programs to its members and those who

wish to identify themselves and join them. The programs allow LGBTQ students to be glad of

their identity, and to feel more contented and supported while in the campus settings. The most

important thing that Safe Zone needs to address is teaching its members on how to handle the

glitches they face on campus like heterosexist language and conduct in group-level relations and

possibly offering them a chance to practice using those strategies (Ballard et al. 2008). This

would more advance the Safe Zone program's capability to progress the campus climate for

LGBT students. The majority of Safe Zone participants have some stickers somewhere to

identify themselves, like on the face or some badges Since posting a Safe Zone sticker can result

in backlash from homophobic students, the participants should be well-informed on how to

respond to the attacks that might ensue after classifying themselves as allies.

Conclusion

Diversity, as well as inclusion, are very significant features of campus climate. As seen in

this paper, several research studies have resolved that students ‘experience in the campus

environment influences both learning and growth results and more so, discriminatory settings

hurt student learning. Moreover, these studies support the significance of a diverse student body

as well as faculty on improving students’ learning outcomes. Positive campus climate influences

students’ development and learning outcomes as the students feel acknowledged, are free to

express themselves, and intermingle with the staff, faculty, and teachers freely without some

interference like harassments, racism, discrimination, and violence. On the other hand, adverse
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campus climates where students typically feel insecure and experience discrimination and

harassment obstruct their educational achievements and positive effects.

The issues of diversity, inclusivity, equality, and intersectionality are some of the

significant factors affecting several campuses across the country. Having higher visibility for the

majority of minority groups like racial, sexuality and gender, it comes out that these affirmative

terms are imperative in supporting the shifting student demographics of the campuses. One group

that has come to the limelight on the issue of campus climate is the LGBTQ students. A

distinctive feature of this group is the discrimination they go through, which is usually the effect

of an apparent and presumed sex identity or orientation. Most campus environments do not tend

to favor the LGBTQ students because of the increased harassment and discrimination from their

fellow students, and these vices, on some occasions, bring adversarial effects like suicide and

even death.

However, as described in this paper, there are numerous ways and programs which some

campuses have already implemented such as the establishment of LGBTQ resource centers and

Safe Zones. Many studies have regarded campus climate issues in terms of racial and ethnic

identity. However, the problems affecting campus climate also occur relatively to gender sexual

orientation and in other interconnecting characteristics of personality. All students are capable of

engaging positively both academically and socially when they are in healthy surroundings where

resources are structured to enable their success. Therefore having a healthy and favorable

campus climate will be useful for students of all aspects to achieve academic and personal

achievements. Moreover, the campus climate is essential as it attracts many students and

increases retention.
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References
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