For those professionals who work with financial aid or LGBT students in need of merit-based financial aid, the Point Foundation is accepting applications until March 1, 2008. Please see below for more information.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Point Foundation Opens 2008 Application Season; New Application Cycle Begins
LOS ANGELES, CA -- Point Foundation (Point), the nation's largest scholarship-granting organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students of merit, announces the opening of its 2008 application season. Students who will be enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programs for the 2008-09 school year are eligible to apply for the prestigious, multi-year scholarships. The application deadline for this year's scholarships is March 1, 2008.
Point's rigorous selection process for its prestigious scholarships is highly competitive and requires demonstrated academic excellence, leadership skills, community involvement and financial need. Particular attention is paid to students who have lost the financial and social support of their families and/or communities as a result of revealing their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. The selection process begins with on-line applications and concludes with face-to-face interviews with selected finalists in April. Point Regent and Selections Subcommittee Chair Shelley Fischel comments, "The application and selection process is rigorous but rewarding. To be part of this process is both a great honor and a great responsibility."
Monday, January 7, 2008
Great Article from The Observer
Provided by Will Simpkins:
From the issue dated December 21, 2007
OBSERVER
Members of the gay community on my campus occasionally ask me to show my sympathy with them by displaying a sticker on my office door that depicts the rainbow flag and says, "Safe Space." I always decline, uncomfortably suspecting that my reasons are misunderstood. This essay is my explanation, written because I suspect that others are wrestling with the same complexities that I have faced.
Human beings have the intriguing capacity to think about both survival and beauty. The difference between the way we think about the two involves the concept of interest. When our survival is involved, clearly so is our self-interest. Our political system is based on the idea that self-preservation is the only trustworthy human inclination, and we have come to distrust those who claim to support a cause with which they cannot be personally identified. Thus we find ourselves giving more credibility to cancer patients than to their doctors, or to victims of crime than to criminologists.
Beauty, however, has no immediate purpose and can thus be said to be disinterested. Students quickly explain that the passion they exhibit for music, say, originates in its capacity to transport them to another world, not to help them in this one. They find that even love, which has a component of anticipated help and is thus part of the survival arena, contains a sense of ineffable wonder on discovering what seems like an alternative universe.
It is not difficult to see why survival concerns tend to eclipse beauty concerns. First of all, notwithstanding Nietzsche, it is difficult to deny the primacy of survival, without which we could hardly pursue beauty. In addition, many survival interests are easy to identify: Racism, sexism, and homophobia are clear threats to the survival interests of the groups they target.
Higher education today is increasingly preoccupied with the survival needs of this or that group. If an academic endeavor does not have a clear and powerful interest, it is dismissed as frivolous or opiating. Art is often created not to be beautiful but to make a political statement, like the dance composition by a professor in my university's theater department that explores "the horror of wrongful conviction."
I am not so naïve as to believe that survival interests do not prevail in the world outside the university. And clearly our students deserve the tools they will need to prosper in what can be a mercenary environment. However, that does not mean that the university cannot also be a haven from the priority of survival, a place where we can celebrate disinterestedness. Indeed, I sense in my students a frustration that the university tends to replicate an environment with which they are quite familiar. In my course on aesthetics and politics, for instance, students are delighted to encounter existential challenges, not in tendentious art, but in the erotic alternatives of romanticism.
What I oppose, therefore, is not the safety of gay students, but the feeling of safety experienced byall students when they encounter the interest paradigm. A "safe space" sticker promotes a sense of comfort probably unintended by its promoters. It advertises the person displaying it as someone predisposed to a popular agenda, rather than an instigator of unusual, even unsafe, considerations.
To be sure, my concerns are less relevant for housing advisers and financial-aid officers, for instance, and I would wholeheartedly support stickers on their doors. But the job of a professor is different in two significant ways.The first is connected to the issue mentioned above: that survival has prevailed over beauty, and that survival interests are often easier to identify. In fact, we equate identity with demographic and morphological characteristics. We are much more likely to consider ourselves (or someone else) Latino, gay, or female than we are to consider ourselves Kantians, Italophiles, or Presbyterians. I think that is because our interests regarding race, gender, and sexuality are both clear and important to us from childhood.
However, we should not be satisfied when our identity is defined so narrowly. So I try not to reinforce those obvious interests for my students. Students from minority groups are often perplexed when they encounter professors of their own ethnicity who are nonetheless very different from them, or from their expectations. A Latino professor fascinated by the waltzes of Strauss represents a wonderful complication to students' concept of interest and identity.
So when students — gay or straight — enter my office, I want to represent to them an interest that they may not have encountered or contemplated. I do not want a sticker to make my already difficult mission any harder.
The second difference in a professor's job is the responsibility to expose students to disinterested projects, those that reside in the realm of the beautiful. The reason Plato banned artists from his ideal republic was not his revulsion against the beautiful, but his assertion that true politics is the pursuit of the beautiful; he did not want beauty segregated. Justice, then, in its best form, is disinterested. In fact, it is beautiful. Socrates' star pupil, Glaucon, distinguishes himself by resisting self-aggrandizement in the imaginary republic, and his nobility is reflected in my students' nagging disappointment with a university experience that does little more than sharpen their demographic sensibilities. Superficially daring, that is profoundly safe pedagogy. Beauty, which inspires the transcendence of conventions and expectations, is safe for no one.
Thus by displaying the sticker, I would be betraying my gay students, not assisting them. I would be exempting them from the disorienting but essential epiphany that neither they, nor I, can be certain of their full identity. It would also preclude our sharing those beautiful exchanges of the fanciful and transcendental. Safety is a much more complex issue in a classroom than it is in a motor vehicle, and the best classes are those in which seat belts are occasionally unbuckled.
So if a student, gay or straight, craves a safe and secure recapitulation and celebration of popular identity taxonomy, my office is not the place to visit.
Timothy J. Lukes is a professor of political science at Santa Clara University.http://chronicle.comSection: The Chronicle ReviewVolume 54, Issue 17, Page B5
From the issue dated December 21, 2007
OBSERVER
Putting Space Between Beauty and Politics
By TIMOTHY J. LUKESMembers of the gay community on my campus occasionally ask me to show my sympathy with them by displaying a sticker on my office door that depicts the rainbow flag and says, "Safe Space." I always decline, uncomfortably suspecting that my reasons are misunderstood. This essay is my explanation, written because I suspect that others are wrestling with the same complexities that I have faced.
Human beings have the intriguing capacity to think about both survival and beauty. The difference between the way we think about the two involves the concept of interest. When our survival is involved, clearly so is our self-interest. Our political system is based on the idea that self-preservation is the only trustworthy human inclination, and we have come to distrust those who claim to support a cause with which they cannot be personally identified. Thus we find ourselves giving more credibility to cancer patients than to their doctors, or to victims of crime than to criminologists.
Beauty, however, has no immediate purpose and can thus be said to be disinterested. Students quickly explain that the passion they exhibit for music, say, originates in its capacity to transport them to another world, not to help them in this one. They find that even love, which has a component of anticipated help and is thus part of the survival arena, contains a sense of ineffable wonder on discovering what seems like an alternative universe.
It is not difficult to see why survival concerns tend to eclipse beauty concerns. First of all, notwithstanding Nietzsche, it is difficult to deny the primacy of survival, without which we could hardly pursue beauty. In addition, many survival interests are easy to identify: Racism, sexism, and homophobia are clear threats to the survival interests of the groups they target.
Higher education today is increasingly preoccupied with the survival needs of this or that group. If an academic endeavor does not have a clear and powerful interest, it is dismissed as frivolous or opiating. Art is often created not to be beautiful but to make a political statement, like the dance composition by a professor in my university's theater department that explores "the horror of wrongful conviction."
I am not so naïve as to believe that survival interests do not prevail in the world outside the university. And clearly our students deserve the tools they will need to prosper in what can be a mercenary environment. However, that does not mean that the university cannot also be a haven from the priority of survival, a place where we can celebrate disinterestedness. Indeed, I sense in my students a frustration that the university tends to replicate an environment with which they are quite familiar. In my course on aesthetics and politics, for instance, students are delighted to encounter existential challenges, not in tendentious art, but in the erotic alternatives of romanticism.
What I oppose, therefore, is not the safety of gay students, but the feeling of safety experienced byall students when they encounter the interest paradigm. A "safe space" sticker promotes a sense of comfort probably unintended by its promoters. It advertises the person displaying it as someone predisposed to a popular agenda, rather than an instigator of unusual, even unsafe, considerations.
To be sure, my concerns are less relevant for housing advisers and financial-aid officers, for instance, and I would wholeheartedly support stickers on their doors. But the job of a professor is different in two significant ways.The first is connected to the issue mentioned above: that survival has prevailed over beauty, and that survival interests are often easier to identify. In fact, we equate identity with demographic and morphological characteristics. We are much more likely to consider ourselves (or someone else) Latino, gay, or female than we are to consider ourselves Kantians, Italophiles, or Presbyterians. I think that is because our interests regarding race, gender, and sexuality are both clear and important to us from childhood.
However, we should not be satisfied when our identity is defined so narrowly. So I try not to reinforce those obvious interests for my students. Students from minority groups are often perplexed when they encounter professors of their own ethnicity who are nonetheless very different from them, or from their expectations. A Latino professor fascinated by the waltzes of Strauss represents a wonderful complication to students' concept of interest and identity.
So when students — gay or straight — enter my office, I want to represent to them an interest that they may not have encountered or contemplated. I do not want a sticker to make my already difficult mission any harder.
The second difference in a professor's job is the responsibility to expose students to disinterested projects, those that reside in the realm of the beautiful. The reason Plato banned artists from his ideal republic was not his revulsion against the beautiful, but his assertion that true politics is the pursuit of the beautiful; he did not want beauty segregated. Justice, then, in its best form, is disinterested. In fact, it is beautiful. Socrates' star pupil, Glaucon, distinguishes himself by resisting self-aggrandizement in the imaginary republic, and his nobility is reflected in my students' nagging disappointment with a university experience that does little more than sharpen their demographic sensibilities. Superficially daring, that is profoundly safe pedagogy. Beauty, which inspires the transcendence of conventions and expectations, is safe for no one.
Thus by displaying the sticker, I would be betraying my gay students, not assisting them. I would be exempting them from the disorienting but essential epiphany that neither they, nor I, can be certain of their full identity. It would also preclude our sharing those beautiful exchanges of the fanciful and transcendental. Safety is a much more complex issue in a classroom than it is in a motor vehicle, and the best classes are those in which seat belts are occasionally unbuckled.
So if a student, gay or straight, craves a safe and secure recapitulation and celebration of popular identity taxonomy, my office is not the place to visit.
Timothy J. Lukes is a professor of political science at Santa Clara University.http://chronicle.comSection: The Chronicle ReviewVolume 54, Issue 17, Page B5
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