Minnesota State University - Mankato

MSU boasts multi-cultural understanding and tolerance, but showed nothing but intolerance for those who were peceived as gay or eccentric in any way, for those males especially those who would refuse to conform to the macho frat boy role in dress and behavior.

When I met with the Dean Of Student Affairs to discuss stopping two students who were sexually harassing me he said that "unfortunately the community here is not tolerant of those who are perceived as gay." Eight years later in the year 2,001 the university discovered that this same Dean of Student Affairs was not really a dean--he did not possess the MA in Education that was required for him to do his job. The degree he had claimed to have had was supposed to have been from the same institution he was working in: Minnesota State, Mankato. He had been working at the school for twenty years when the Registrar discovered, when verifying his status on the board to select a new university president, that he didn't have the minimal credentials to do his job. What is more is that he is still there: they changed his job title to Director of Student Affairs and lowered his pay a little.

While I was at MSU there was another scandel with a male Drama teacher who had been a peeping Tom in the women's dressing room. As far as I know he is still teaching there. So women drama students beware.

I have also been dismayed that the humanities departments that I got my degrees from were indifferent to my plight. Despite a 4.0 GPA in Spanish I was constantly overlooked for graduate TA jobs. Generally the curriculum in the English Department is highly sexist: biased towards Strong Girls In Childrens Lit classes and censoring great liberal writers like Nabokov--no lit classes that might deal with gay male writers, plenty of conservative feminism of the 7th Heaven variety--for the the little house on the prairie, little women variety majoring in literature. A lot of talk about multi-culturalism and sexism but sans substance, sans action, sans everything.