Princeton launches third sex-based campus center
Princeton University's new Gender + Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC) is set to launch this semester.
While the university already has a Women’s Center and an LGBT center, the GSRC is designed to help students apply classroom gender theory to their careers, community, and public policy.
Princeton University is launching a Gender + Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC) this fall to “engage all members of the Princeton community through education, training, and programming on gender and sexuality.”
The university already has a Women’s Center, which opened in 1971, and an LGBT center, which became official in 2005. But Dean for Diversity and Inclusion LaTanya Buck said the new center is necessary because students’ identities and college experiences have “evolved over the years.”
“Under the umbrella of a new center for gender and sexuality — and with the energy of a renewed commitment to improve understanding and facilitate belonging for all students — we will be better able to carry out our mission to eliminate discrimination and injustice at Princeton based on sex, gender and sexual identity,” Buck said in April.
The GSRC aims to create “deep community and partnership with the gender and sexuality studies academic program,” bringing classroom theories into everyday life.
“This is an exciting time because what’s happening at Princeton is something that I think is not happening anywhere else — truly a building out of a co-curricular program that’s in deep community and partnership with the gender and sexuality studies academic program,” GSRC director Kristopher Oliveira said in a news release. “My goal, and one of my hopes, is that we’re able to establish a national standard for what these centers are able to accomplish.”
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Oliveira also hopes the GSRC will provide internships and opportunities that show students how to put their “theoretical ideas” into practice through community organizing, non-profits, public policy, and other career paths.
“My hope is that this co-curricular model creates opportunities for students who are learning all these incredible theoretical ideas in the classroom,” Oliveira said. “We can bring those into space and place, and put that work into practice, so the students are thinking about community organizing, or that they’re looking for non-profit experiences, or potentially even public policy that might shape and influence the social world.”
The center launches in late September.
Campus Reform reached out to Princeton University and the Gender + Sexuality Resource Center for comment but did not hear back in time for publication.
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