As to the college’s current model, Granberg-Michaelson said, “We are simply not having a dialogue. We’re having a monologue, and that doesn’t help anyone.”

Alumni of a Michigan college that has a policy in place to discourage GLBT groups on campus are now pressuring their alma mater to drop the anti-gay measure.

Hope College, located in Holland, Michigan, has historic ties to the Reformed Church in America. A Christian tradition still resides at the college–embodied in part by a school policy from 1995 that states that the college “will not provide recognition, financial or logistical support for groups whose purposes include the advocacy or moral legitimization of homosexual behavior.” The fallout from that policy seems to have included a refusal on the part of the college to allow Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black to preside over a roundtable discussion of the movie, reported Michigan newspaper The Grand Rapids Press on March 16.

Black was later allowed to screen the film, however, at an area theater.

An array of Hope graduates, including Bruce van Voorst, a former correspondent for national publications such as Time and Newsweek, former ambassador Bill DePree, and a number of other clergy, journalists, and athletes have all put their names to a petition calling for the policy to be scrapped and for a panel on GLBT issues to be established.

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