Leading Your Academic Department Toward Inclusion: How to Ensure Faculty are LGBTQ+ Competent

During my six years at the University of Connecticut, I had the opportunity to interact with many different faculty members across our campus community. This was particularly true during my final two years, when I coordinated our Rainbow Center’s Out to Lunch (OTL) Lecture Series. The OTL Lecture Series—our center’s largest and most attended recurring program—hosted fellow academics and community advocates, whose work dealt with contemporary intersectional issues and topics related to the LGBTQ+ community. While the OTL Lecture Series had served as a key fixture to the Rainbow Center’s programming for many years, we soon identified that it had missed opportunities in one key demographic on our campus: faculty.