And when you speak, its like fire
Our day on Messiah College was a wonderfully productive day. Out of 13 schools, this was the 4th school to let us on campus. The first thing we saw after getting off the bus was a group of women, it was wonderful. Many members of the administration are women and the president is a woman, which just does not happen at schools like this. This is the only college we are visiting (either bus) that has a woman as a president, it was amazing.
We started off the day with us having breakfast with various members of the Messiah community, which included both students and faculty. Our table spoke with the Provost for quite a while and we gave him various hypothetical situations and his answers were not promising. We asked him about a celibate gay couple of campus, a gay married couple, a gay couple holding hands on campus, etc. He did not seem to have any absolute answers of what would happen to these couples, which illustrates once again that these policies are not only discriminating, but also are incredibly vague and no one knows what they mean.
Around this time, we had two groups split off from the group and go to two different classrooms. One group went to a sociology class to discuss the Equality Ride as a social movement and one went to a Literature class to discuss Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”. I was not in either of these groups, but from what I hear from riders and students, they went very well.
We then had a tour of the campus and then talked with our tour giver, Louie, for a while and then went to lunch and spoke with more students. We spent the rest of the day speaking with students and at 3 we had a panel discussion where 2 Riders and 2 members of the Messiah community spoke. For the first time on our experience, a student was on the panel discussion for the school. The 4 panel members spoke for a while and then the students were able to ask questions and the panel would answer them. Good questions were asked overall, however I feel that there were better questions that were overlooked. After the panel discussion, we found out that an underground GSA was forming at the school, which is AMAZING, I really hope they can get it off the ground.
The group Repent America was on campus and had their usual terrible things to say and had a few signs, however the students seemed to not be impressed with them, which was refreshing to see.
We had a debriefing with the administration and looked at the day and we all felt that the day was very productive. After the debriefing, we went to the ‘restoration house’ and had a potluck with lots of great community members, alum and students. The mix was really neat to see and I think that it was good for the students starting the GSA to see the alum and be able to talk to them.
Photos were not allowed on campus, so a few pictures can be found here.
Love,
Adam.