Groups work to bring gender center to campus
Proposals to bring a gender equity center to Central Michigan University's campus have been submitted for the past three years.
Some of the goals of the proposed center are to provide support to the campus and Mount Pleasant community on gender issues, offer gender-related programming, direct students to resources, raise awareness and provide a place for registered student organizations and other students to collaborate.
Supports of the center want to urge President George Ross to approve a proposal. North Carolina senior Jamila Ayoubi, who created a petition collecting signatures in favor of the center, plans to keep collecting signatures until at least the middle of April. The proposed gender equity center would be a place for gender-related programming, education, referral services, advocacy and community building.
“This is not something a group of students and faculty just dreamed up for CMU, it is common across universities,” said sociology faculty member Mary Senter, who helped craft the proposal.
A proposal was submitted for 2014-15 and 2015-16, in addition to the current proposal for 2016-17 submitted by the Office of Institutional Diversity. In this year's and last year's proposals, $73,150 was requested of one-time funds and $151,000 of base (recurring) funds. For the 14-15 proposal, no detailed amounts were noted, which typically happens when the request came in late or was incomplete, said Joseph Garrison, director of financial planning and budgets.
“Neither the proposal nor the need for this center is going away any time soon,” Ayoubi said.
The center could also serve as a meeting place for registered student organizations, Senter said.
“I envision the center as being a community and organizing space, one in which students, faculty and staff can collaborate to tackle feminist and other social justice issues on our campus, meet for student organizations or simply hang out among like-minded people," said Royal Oak senior Kai Niezgoda.
Resources related to gender issues are spread out across campus and can be difficult for students to find, Senter said. A study conducted in fall 2015 by the Center for Applied Research and Rural Studies on the climate for women and LGBTQ students on campus found that of the 402 students surveyed, 18.2 percent knew how to contact CMU’s Title IX officer and 23.4 percent knew where the Office of Civil Rights and Institutional Equity is located.
“If you really want people to report problems, they have to know where to go,” Senter said. “You’re never going to get 100 percent (of students to say they know where these resources are located), but what this means is that there’s this issue of offices, but no coordination.”
A random sample of undergraduates were asked questions over the phone. Nearly 30 percent of students surveyed said sexism is a problem at CMU. About 40 percent of students surveyed said CMU doesn’t give enough attention to women’s issues.
“You’d want 100 percent to say ‘none' (when asked if they've had a negative experience because of their gender),” Senter said. “You might’ve had a negative experience (on campus) but it should have nothing to do with being a woman. Very few people said they had many (negative) experiences (because of gender), but more than 40 percent of women say they’ve had some negative experience because of their gender.”
Graduate student and application programmer Kevin Daum, who is taking a grant writing class and searching for external funding for the center, said the main effort is gathering and coordinating all the groups that are interested in the center and informing more people about it.
The university community can access the university's budget calendar and people who submitted proposals can ask about the status of those proposals, but there isn't currently a formal system for people who submitted proposals to check where the proposal is at in the process, Garrison said.
The president and the cabinet typically discuss the requests in mid to late January, but at this point, they don't know what funding will be available because enrollment projections, state appropriations and other factors have not yet been determined. Garrison said they can put initiatives on a list of what they want to fund, but it's not truly approved or funded until they know what funding is available.
Often, he said, requests aren't necessarily denied, they just aren't funded at the time. It doesn't mean they can't ever be funded.
Ray Christie, Senior Vice Provost and co-chair of the Budget Priorities Committee, said no decision has been made regarding the most recent gender equity center proposal.
When a proposal is submitted, the person or group who oversees the proposals in that area reviews the proposal and can fund the request by reallocating funds, forward the request to the vice president of that area, or not support it.
If the proposal is forwarded to the vice president, the vice president reviews the proposals from their unit. The proposal was received and submitted along with three others to the Financial Planning and Budgets office to be forwarded to the president's cabinet. Reasons for a decision not yet being made include uncertainty about fiscal year 2017 revenue because of fluctuation in state appropriations, tuition rates and enrollment, Christie said.
"The president and cabinet review proposals and have four options: funding an initiative by reallocating university funds, not supporting the request due to competing priorities, forwarding the request to the Budget Priorities Committee for feedback or using any new funds available, if applicable, to approve the request," Garrison said.
The Budget Priorities Committee, which provides feedback but does not make decisions, reviews proposals that are forwarded by the cabinet for additional feedback. The gender center proposal has not been referred to the Budget Priorities Committee to date.
"Other initiatives are often competing priorities with one another," Garrison said. "They're often very great ideas or programs but the reality is that with fewer and fewer high school graduates in the state of Michigan, there's not as much certainty with respect to enrollment."
A petition to form the center has collected more than 100 signatures in the past two weeks.
