One of the world's most respected universities is taking a significant step to throw off its stuffy image - creating America's first-ever professor of LGBT studies. The Massachusetts institution will create the role following a US$1.5 million (NZ$2.3 million) gift from the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus, which has over 4,600 members. "For 25 years we've been in somewhat antagonistic position to the university, pushing it to recognise lesbian and gay rights," Harvard philosophy don Warren Goldfarb told The Guardian newspaper. "Its recognition of the professorship marks a totally new sense of the relationship." The F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality is named after a prominent Harvard literary professor who was seminal in the early days of American studies in the 1920s, and who had a male partner.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News Staff
First published: Thursday, 4th June 2009 - 9:31am