Residents of Grace Pearson Scholarship Hall at KU will hold a town hall Monday evening for students to share testimonies of how gender-inclusive housing has helped them feel safer on campus.
The town hall comes after KU’s decision to remove the gender-inclusive assignments at the hall next year. Residents of the hall have repeatedly protested the decision.
Meghan Arias, a resident of Grace Pearson and organizer of the town hall, said the event is meant to support trans and nonbinary students who have been harmed by KU’s decision to remove gender-inclusive housing. A flyer for the event describes it as a space for “listening, learning and solidarity.”
“In addition to testimonies from such residents, we hope to initiate a discussion with Housing about the importance of transparency between an institution such as KU and its student minorities,” Arias said.
The town hall starts at 7 p.m. Monday, April 21 at the Ecumenical Campus Ministries building on KU’s campus, 1204 Oread Ave.
The protests against the decision have taken multiple turns the last few months.
Junior Anthony Alvarez, a KU student and proctor for the hall — a position similar to a resident assistant — said he was fired in March for helping to hang a banner protesting the decision and speaking to the media about the policy change.
And residents of the hall have halted one of their protest activities — posting a banner that reads “We’re all Jayhawks” outside the hall every night — after an email sent by KU Housing last week warned students their housing contracts could be cancelled if they continued. The email came after dozens of residents were called into student conduct hearings about the protests.
Residents said they stopped putting up the banner because they felt it was no longer accomplishing their protest goals, not because they felt that what they were doing was wrong.
Lawyers have argued that KU selectively enforcing the rule on decorations could be a First Amendment violation.
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Cuyler Dunn (he/him), a contributor to The Lawrence Times since April 2022, is a student at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Lawrence High School where he was the editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, The Budget, and was named the 2022 Kansas High School Journalist of the Year. Read his complete bio here. Read more of his work for the Times here.
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