With the addition of 50 campuses since the last report was released, the 2021 edition is the “most exhaustive update” to the Worst List since 2016, according to Campus Pride.
Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director Campus Pride, said the schools included on this year’s index are not merely “bad campuses” for LGBTQ+ students to attend but they promote environments that are extremely harmful to their mental health and physical safety.
“These campuses fundamentally are unsafe for LGBTQ students, and, as a result, they’re fundamentally unsafe for all students to go to,” Windmeyer told NBC News. “They promote an environment of hostility, of discrimination, harassment, toward a group of people, and who wants — when you’re trying to be educated — to have that type of negative learning environment?”
Many of the schools on the list also filed an amicus brief in Bostock v. Clayton County, the landmark court 2019 Supreme Court case that determined that federal laws banning sex discrimination apply to both sexual orientation and gender identity. These colleges argued that expanding protections to queer and trans people would prevent them from continuing discriminating against LGBTQ+ students, such as barring them from admission or preventing them from dating on campus.
Part of the reason why there were so many schools included in this year’s Worst List is because of a Trump-era policy that automatically made religious schools exempt from Title IX. Under the Obama administration, universities and colleges previously had to undergo an application process for Title IX exemptions.
It’s still unclear whether or not the Biden administration will stick with the Trump-era policy, according to Campus Pride.
“Biden has still yet to clarify if Title IX exemptions are mandatory or if he has an executive order that is going to make them mandatory, which I feel that if a campus is going to openly discriminate, then it should be mandated that they tell students and that they have a Title IX exemption on file with the federal government,” Windmeyer said.
Although the White House did clarify in June that Title IX protections extend to trans students, the Department of Justice also sided with religious colleges in a March lawsuit that seeks to ban the practice of religious exemptions as a whole. The lawsuit argues that religious exemptions are essentially a legally-sanctioned way of targeting a “politically unpopular group.”
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