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The University of Vermont GLBTA student group's recent public awareness campaign was marred by acts of theft and vandalism.
During the week of April 11-17, a rainbow flag, officially sanctioned chalking, and posters advertising events of the group Free to Be: GLBTA were all removed from various locations around campus.
Although GLBTA students have interpreted these actions as bias incidents, the university police cannot classify them as such until they can be certain of the intentions of the vandals.
To mark the beginning of visibility week at UVM, the student group hung a rainbow flag outside the Billings Student Center on campus. The flag was stolen, and the fiberglass poles supporting it were found, as one student put it, "hacked to the ground."
Gary Margolis, Director of Police Services at the University of Vermont, issued a statement to the GLBTA community about viewing removal of the flag as a bias incident. It said that "we are bound by the laws of the State of Vermont and as such, with the information we currently have, this theft cannot be called a bias crime no matter how 'clear' to us the suspects motives may be — while one can make an emotional argument for or against the knowledge/motivation of the thief, there is nothing to support a legal argument either way."
Students viewed removal of the flag and vandalism of the flagpoles as an effort to silence them, an example of the lack of safety they feel on the UVM campus and a call to action to continued activism on the campus. Jackie Weinstock, faculty advisor for Free to Be: GLBTA, asserted that "there is no discounting the damage done by this act of vandalism; it has clearly been experienced by the GLBT students on campus, whether proven or not, as a bias incident."
For the second year in a row, Free to Be: GLBTA also found their "chalking" of the campus with visibility and pride statements removed - even though they correctly had filled out all necessary paperwork for permission. At a meeting with the students, members of the facilities department characterized the erasure as accidental.
As a final frustration, students found that every poster advertising queer visibility week on the redstone campus was torn down almost immediately after going up. One UVM student stated that "the queer posters were the only ones ever to come down."
