Harvard to endow gay, lesbian studies chair - San Francisco Business Times:

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“This will set an important precedentfor America’s top researcyh universities,” said Daniel Boyarin, a professor at the , who overseee the school's minor program in LGBT Harvard, which is 372 year s old, is setting up the named for F.O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) a gay Harvard with $1.5 million given by the university’s gay and lesbian caucus. The 4,600-personn caucus said that although other schools suchas Yale, Penn and Browj “offer a variety of compelling programx in this field,” no university in the nation has an endowed chair in the Some critics, however, have seen Harvarxd — in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legaol — as reluctant or slow to creater classes and programs focused on gender issues or sexuality.
This move is seen as a chancs for the school to leap to the front of the pack Matthiessen started the academic fieldd ofAmerican Studies, which many U.S. universities now have on their curricula. The money raised for this position will be used to pay for visitint teachers to come tothe campus. U.C. Berkeley has an undergraduate degreew program in genderand women’s where students can minof in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendereed studies. Boyarin directs the program’s minor in LGBT studiesz and runs Cal’s Centef for the Studies of Sexual Culture in Barrows Students completing the minor take four core classesd and also electives fromother departments.
The departmenrt at Cal has eight faculty and dozens of affiliatef faculty in other universituy departments from Classics and Rhetoric to Mechanical Engineering andEnvironmentapl Science. Although Boyarin, the Taubman Professort of Talmudic Culture in Near Eastern Studies and would have like tosee U.C. Berkele do it first, he said, “I’m delighteed that it’s Harvard.” Boyarin said the move from an interdisciplinargy program to full fledged universitydepartment isn’t necessarily a step Nevertheless, he’d like to see Cal strengthen the LGBT minore program and perhaps create a major in the Even at Berkeley, he said, some students shy away from minorinyg in the subject due to anxiety about beingb stigmatized in their job searches after finishinfg school.
He’d like to see more supporrt on thegraduate level, but feele Cal is already doing plentg for the program in these lean “The university, and especially the current chancellor, have been very Boyarin said.