A decade ago, on any given Friday at Goshen College, students, staff and faculty could be seen across campus wearing the same dark purple cotton T-shirt.
The front carried a question in canary yellow Times New Roman font: “Where is my LGBTQ prof?” The five words hinted at a much larger policy discussion happening in GC Board of Directors meetings.Until 2015, a section of the GC Community Standards documents stated, “The Mennonite Church USA Confessions of Faith places intercourse within the convent of marriage between a woman and man, and therefore employees are expected to follow this understanding.”
Simultaneously, the GC Affirmative Action Plan was stating its commitment to hiring “without discrimination on the grounds of race, color, sex, national origin, age, physical disability, or other factors which cannot be lawfully used as a basis for a decision.”
The college had been frequently determining its relationship with their LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, transgender and queer) community “in various ways for more than 40 years,” said a 2015 GC press release. It also stated that the board had been “considering these questions carefully over the past several years.”
These T-shirt wearers had one goal: persuade the board to update the existing hiring policies to include anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ faculty and staff.
In 2011, they published an open letter addressed to the GC community at gcopenletter.org.
Its student-authors and community supporters called it the GC Open Letter — and they had yet to know of its lasting impact.
On July 18, 2015, when the Board of Directors had officially updated the institutional Non-Discrimination Policy, the letter had been signed by nearly 1,800 people.
This year, Advocates hosted a Homecoming reception on Saturday to honor the 10th anniversary of the college’s hiring policy. The reception included statements and reflections from GC Open Letter leaders, early board members and current teaching faculty.
The reception ended with an art showcase by Cara Paden ’15, an open letter organizer. She opened with a quote from her classmate and open letter co-leader, Abby Deaton Shetler ’15: “The ancient Greeks had two words for time, ‘chronos’ and ‘kairos,’ the latter signifies a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens.”
Paden’s “living” art installation includes a handmade quilt, with diamond-shaped rings of dandelion fabric expanding from the center. It also includes the original origami “kairos” cranes from a 2015 Positive Purple Pep Rally.
At the beginning of February 2015, open letter leaders asked supporters to begin folding 1,739 purple origami cranes. The number of cranes signified the amount of signatures the letter had received since its publication.
On the evening of Feb. 19, 2015, a day before the scheduled Board of Directors meeting, student-organizers began setting a “backdrop” for their Positive Purple Pep Rally.
In the morning, almost 150 GC students, staff and faculty lined the Church-Chapel fellowship hallway to cheer on GC board members as they made their way to the meeting. Above them, tethered by translucent fishing line, thousands of origami cranes hung in clusters of 10 to 20.
Deaton Shetler “didn’t feel like it was good to just throw them away” given the pep rally’s success. And so, Shetler “carried them with her from house to house for like eight years,” said Paden. During Shetler’s most recent move, Paden offered to take the cranes and make an art piece.
Knowing she would need them to present her art installation at this year’s reception, Paden gently packed the 1,739 origami cranes into multiple 13-gallon trash bags and made her way to Goshen.
“I believe that the moments in which we created these cranes were not linear. They didn’t happen one time and were done,” Paden said. “Someone in the past held and folded this paper with the hope that change is possible.”
Jewel Lehman, Advocates adviser, called the reception “a joint effort,” and thanked Marlene Penner, chair of the GC gender and sexuality working group; facilities and alumni for their help in making the event possible.
After the reception, Stefan Baumgartner ’15 and Abby Shetler ’15, GC Open Letter co-leaders, and Paden recounted their moments of hardship as student-activists.
“I actually have a memory that I recently dredged up,” Paden said. “I did an interview for The Record, and they did a ‘for the hiring policy’ and then an ‘opposed’ section. I didn’t even read the opposing section because I was just so angry.”
She believed her lack of experience in conflict as a young adult, coupled with the contradicting messages from administration, made the open letter particularly intense. Her classmates echoed this sentiment.
“It was interesting because you got this sense that the administration as a whole was very supportive of the LGBTQ community on a personal level,” Shetler said. “That was the frustration. We felt like if there is all this support, why can’t we just do it?”
The shirts, designed by Pax Ressler ’11, an early Open Letter leader, used GLBTQ rather than LGBTQ. This confused Paden and Baumgartner, even now.
“Pax was going to have [the shirts] say, ‘Where’s my gay professor?’ Then they were like, ‘Oh, we should be inclusive,’” Shetler clarified.
Although these purple T-shirts colored a majority of campus, their message didn’t go without backlash. Baumgartner recounted a moment when a fellow student, Ryan Smith ’17, had purchased and distributed 10 yellow T-shirts with purple letters that said, “Peacefully, I support the Goshen College hiring policy.” Baumgartner called it “violence in a different way.”
“That was a hard moment. As a queer person on campus, to see the opposition so visually was very anxiety-producing,” he said.
Despite its opposition, the hiring policy and the open letter are now a part of GC’s history towards LGBTQ+ inclusion.
“[The hiring policy change] didn’t happen quickly.” Baumgartner said. “I got emotional seeing some of the people in [the reception] who wore those shirts every week. Knowing that these people are here in my corner.”
