We would like to commend the students of UW-Platteville for letting their voice be heard, and discouraging the Student Senate from moving forward with a constitutional amendment that would combine the Gender Issues Director and Diversity Issues Director executive board positions into one. We also commend the Student Senate for listening to their constituents and being willing to rethink their proposal.

Clearly the gender issues on this campus are somewhat different from those on other UW System campuses because of the greater percentage of male students.

For that reason, we’re the only campus in UW System where women are a targeted recruitment group. However, on campus and off, whether in Platteville or other locales, gender issues are very different from most other diversity issues in how they manifest within power structures, for the simple reason that most of us grow up around people of both (or, less often, multiple) genders.

Whatever our particular sexual orientation may be-straight, gay, bisexual, questioning-our most private partnerships are intimately intertwined with our notions of how we experience gender. In contrast, many of us don’t necessarily grow up around people of different races, social classes, ethnicities or national origins, must less live in mixed-race or mixed-nationality households. Some of us do; many do not.

The ways we learn, celebrate, denigrate or examine gender in popular culture, intertwined as it is with young people’s developing sexual identity, are very different from how racial, class or ethnic identities develop. Violence based on gender has similarities to racial violence (mainly, being crimes of power based on hatred), but there are also very significant differences.

The number one unreported violent crime on campuses across the country is date rape. Also, we’re the only campus in the system where women are a targeted recruitment group, have had homophobic graffiti the past two years and continual and often accepted sexual slurs that are usually directed at women. We definitely need to keep the position of Gender Issues Director.

At the same time, we’re also a campus that is finally increasing the number of recruited and RETAINED students of color, and engaging in an on-going meaningful campus dialog about the construction of race and ethnicity in U.S. society.

We’re also in an ongoing process of internationalizing our campus and urging students who are here to consider studying abroad. We tell our students that they need to be comfortable with and respectful to all people, and that the work force they’re going into will not look demographically like the one here in Platteville.

It would be a travesty, in the midst of this, to combine the Diversity Director position with another one, just as it would be to combine the Gender Issues Director with another position.

Because of this, we again commend the students of UW-P for deciding that you did not want to take this step backwards. Watching the active student input as this issue was brought before the student body helped ensure that this regressive step wasn’t taken. For many of your mentors and teachers on campus, watching your input was positively inspirational.

Your participation in Student Senate and in electing Senators who would listen to your voice made all the difference.

Dr. Carol Sue Butts, Provost and Vice-Chancellor; Deirdre Dalsing, Chair, University Women’s Council; Teresa Burns, Director, Women’s Studies Program; Tammy Salmon-Stephens, Senior Director, Women in Engineering Program; Deb Schulman, Assistant Athletics Director; Patricia Foster, Director; Patricia A. Doyle Women’s Center; Lyn Bouck, Director, Women in Industrial Technology Program; Kate Kelley, Director Human Resources