Self-segregated graduation ceremonies are the new campus craze: 218 universities now offer separate ceremonies for LGBT students.
A list of all 218, compiled by the left-wing LGBT rights organization Human Rights Campaign, spans dozens of states and includes many elite institutions.
The list features nearly all of the Ivy League universities — such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Brown — as well as several universities hit by the recent college admissions scandal, including Stanford University, the University of Southern California, the University of California Los Angeles, Wake Forest University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Georgetown University.
Evergreen State College, which made headlines in May 2017 over its infamous “Day of Absence” where white students and faculty were asked to leave campus, also offers an LGBT-only graduation ceremony.
This is a rising trend: In 2001, only 45 universities offered these special ceremonies.
These graduation ceremonies are known as “Lavender Graduations,” and are designed “to honor lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and ally students and to acknowledge their achievements and contributions to the University,” according to Human Rights Campaign’s website.
Lavender is a significant color to the LGBT movement because “it is a combination of the pink triangle that gay men were forced to wear in concentration camps and the black triangle designating lesbians as political prisoners in Nazi Germany.”
Lavender graduations, like similar identity-themed graduations, are intended to “provide a sense of community for minority students who often experience tremendous culture shock at their impersonalized institutions,” and celebrate the achievement of “students who survived the college experience.”
The first lavender graduation was put together in 1995 by Ronni Sanlo with the blessing of the University of Michigan.
The Human Rights Campaign notes that these graduation ceremonies typically take place a week before university-wide commencement events.
Lavender graduations are only one aspect of the new trend of self-segregated college ceremonies, orientations, and dorms by race or sexual orientation. For example, more than 75 colleges hosted blacks-only graduation ceremonies this year.
A new report by the National Association of Scholars analyzed the new trend of self-segregated graduations, known as “neo-segregation.”
“Neo-segregation inculcates in young people the readiness to cling to a victim identity at the expense of becoming a positive member of the larger community,” the report states. “No doubt a large portion of the racial grievance politics we see in society at large these days is the carefully nurtured product of campus neo-segregation.”
Troy Worden is a recent graduate in English and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was president of the Berkeley College Republicans in 2017.
