K.C. Potter lives on a farm in rural Tennessee these days, but the 80-year-old retired college professor and administrator has been seeing some excitement lately. Potter, the dean emeritus for residential and judicial affairs at Vanderbilt University, was recently declared a Trailblazer by the college for his longtime efforts to help LGBTQ students, Brad Martin reports for The Hickman County Times.
Potter, who is gay, created a policy at the school that protects LGBTQ students from harassment and mentored gay students. In 2008, the college established the K.C. Potter Center, which houses the university's Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Life, Martin reports.
"I was humbled," Potter told Martin. "And I felt maybe it should have been named for somebody else, or a group . . . There were a lot of courageous students that I dealt with over the years."
Potter said he began advocating for LGBTQ students' rights because he saw how homophobic the culture was during much of his 33-year career, which began in 1965. The culture was so toxic that Potter didn't come out of the closet for years. But after a string of suicides from gay students, he began holding weekly support meetings for LGBTQ students in the late 1970s and from that, the drive to create a policy protecting them was born. Read more here.
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/33uvNih Retired Vanderbilt dean, now a farmer, lauded for helping LGBTQ community at the school - Entrepreneur Generations
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