No one at all familiar with campus trends could be shocked by the student poll showing that 38% of Brown students identify as LBGTQ+, twice the level of a decade ago and five times the national rate.
The findings are plainly in the ballpark, and not just for Brown.
Nearly all US colleges are seeing the same trend, along with their general turn left.
Some suggest this is just “true” identities coming out of the closet as social stigma vanishes.
We doubt that’s the only reason: The Ivies, at least, have been plenty gay-friendly for decades.
(“Lesbian in college” was long an observation that gays and straights made with some wryness.)
No: It’s pretty obvious one contributor is the fact that identifying as something other than a standard heterosexual is trendy now.
It doesn’t even have to mean much: Adopting a label needn’t require doing anything.
Indeed, a “bisexual” identity (an alternative that’s risen conspicuously: up 232% in the Brown poll, vs. just a 26% rise for gay) points more to a confusion or curiosity than to a certainty.
But any new label can make your life easier with administrators, faculty and fellow students. It could help lily-white rich kids escape the worst “privileged” category, for starters.
Heck, for Asian-American teens applying to one of these schools, it might end-run the racist schemes that have kept so many out.
(Harvard wouldn’t dare rate a nonbinary Asian kid as “lacking personality”!)
Set aside how some kids may be doing themselves mental harm here, and this is mainly just another sign that most of academia has fallen off the deep end.
You can still get a fine education at many of these pricey schools, but that’s no longer what they’re really about.