Osprey Roundtable shows students are made uncomfortable by campus preachers and speakers
March 19, 2019
A recent survey conducted by Student Government finds that students are overall uncomfortable with the presence and speech of the preachers and speakers on campus.
Conducted by the University and Student Affairs Committee, 662 students completed the survey. Among this number, it was concluded that 83.9 percent of the students are made uncomfortable by preachers and speakers, with 47.9 percent responding that they are “very uncomfortable” with the matter at hand.
238 of the students polled wrote in answers on how they experienced being approached by a campus preacher and/or speaker. The majority (57 students) said comments about their leggings, shorts, and dresses were made, while 54 said words like “Nazi feminist”, hoe, and adulteress were used towards them.
29 students wrote in that LGBT-related comments were said, such as comparing gay men to pedophiles and making direct harassment of same-gender couples. 16 said they heard comments about non-Christian religions such as being called a “Dirty Jew” and other comments about hijabs and Islam.
Seven students reported being followed to class and to the parking garage, and 11 reported that the preachers/speakers made sexual comments about their bodies or about sex in general.
The survey also shows that “non-Christian students (excluding atheists and non-religious people) were significantly more likely to be harassed” than Christian students. Of Christian students, 36.5 percent reported being directly harassed, compared to 64.4 percent of non-Christian students.
51.3 percent of women also reported being directly harassed while 38.2 percent of men reported harassment. Out of the 13 transgender and non-binary students who filled out the survey, 10 reported to have been directly harassed.
In analyzing whether straight or Lesbian, Gay and Bi students were more likely to get harassed, they found that of 120 LGB students who answered, 65.8 percent reported being directly harassed, compared to 43.3 percent of the 453 straight students who answered.
The USA committee found that there was only one statistical significant difference in the comfort level between men and women.
The results of the survey will be released on Student Government’s website.
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Karen Rhodes • Mar 19, 2019 at 11:33 pm
As an alumna (post-bacc, ’12), I am disturbed by the revelations in this article about direct harrassment of people on campus (“Osprey Roundtable shows students are made uncomfortable by campus preachers and speakers,” 19 March). It seems to me that the administration has a responsibility to assure the safety of people on campus — students, faculty, staff, visitors, and alumni — and that this responsibility is obviously not being discharged. The First Amendment is not absolute. “Freedom of Speech” does not carry with it the freedom to harrass, insult, and certainly not to threaten with impunity.
These people, whose purpose is only to disrupt the peace of the campus and provide intolerable botheration to individuals, should be banned from the campus.
Seems to me that in some cases, some individuals might even have cause to sue these bothersome so-called “preachers” for slander.