Jim Andris, Facebook

Initiative to Include Homosexuals into the SIUE Affirmative Action Plan

The efforts of Students for Gay Liberation (SGL) were to have a synergistic influence on awareness of the lack of homosexual rights on the campus at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIU-E). In particular, and though many were eventually working behind the scenes to help him, one young assistant professor, James Andris, launched a relentless campaign to raise awareness of the need for protections of gay rights in the affirmative action plan then being developed. He was the sole "out" professor to do this, even though he knew of more than fifty gay and lesbian faculty members.

Andris and his then domestic partner, David Jonathon Miller, had taken Larry Whitsell, President of SGL, into their home as a student roomer. Andris had many conversations about gay rights with Larry and his student colleagues as they planned Gay Awareness Week and afterwards. Andris met and talked to national figures Franklin Kameny and Barbara Gittings about the problems faced on his campus while those two were speaking and guiding workshops at SIUE. It would not be inaccurate to say that the students raised the professor's consciousness sufficiently to awaken him to the need for action.

On Feb. 6, 1974, John S. Rendleman, the colorful and effective Chancellor of SIU-E, issued an important memo to the University community with subject, Affirmative Action Policies. Rendleman reminded the community of the charge given the Affirmative Action Task Force in December, 1973 to develop a written Affirmative Action Plan, of the University's standing commitment to assisting minorities, and that the commitment now includes "matters involving prejudices founded in sexual considerations as well as those involving matters of race, religion, color, or national origin." It was a detailed memo that announced the appointment of important people, that signaled that a major effort was underway, and that left no doubt that the University intended to root out discriminatory practices in hiring, firing and in its daily business. It certainly was welcomed by women and minorities on campus.

There was a lot of work to do, and people worked hard and sincerely on this process. Procedures and forms for recruiting minorities and women had to be developed and put in place, and people had to be trained and encouraged to use them. Effective grievance procedures had to be improved and dissmeninated. The campus community, administrators, faculty and students had to be educated and sensitized to a, for some, new range of problems, issues, and expected changes in behavior. Countless hours of meeting times were spent and reams of paper printed and disseminated. If no one had also raised the question of where was gay rights in all of this, still, a lot of good needed to be done and was eventually done.

But someone did raise that question tirelessly, consistently, and in the end, with some degree of effectiveness. That person was James F. Andris, and this story is necessarily focused through his eyes, because those were the eyes that saw the enormous problem and set out with strong odds against him on a solitary quest to a distant goal.

Andris had read the Feb. 6 memo from Rendleman carefully, and had been trying to get a clarification as to whether the phrase "sexual considerations" included a concern for gay rights. Chancellor Rendleman had made his staff member, John Paul Davis Chairman of the Affirmative Action Task Force, and eventually, Andris was able to arrange a meeting with him to discuss this issue. Davis, an attorney, took a legal view of the situation: the matter was still being litigated, and he thought eventually gay rights would become a protected category. He also informed Andris that the President's Office would not clarify the phrase "sexual considerations" unless there was support from the Faculty Welfare Council of the University Senate.

On June 21 Andris sent a detailed memo to Dickie Spurgeon, Chair of the Faculty Welfare Council. It is a dense and carefully argued memo the purpose of which

is to call to the attention of the Faculty Welfare Council the fact that gay rights are not currently adequately assured by the Affirmative Action program at SIUE, and to propose that the Faculty Welfare Council take the position that gay rights are protected by Affirmative Action. Subsidiary purposes are to tke the position that this situation is morally wrong, to review the history of my attempts to clarify the status of gay rights, and to propose steps to rectivy the situation.

 

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