Courtesy of the Brown School

Dr. Sue Stepleton

Stepleton joined Washington University in September of this year as director of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work’s new Policy Forum. The forum was created to encourage students and faculty at the University to contribute to the dialogue about the public policies surrounding social issues of interest.

“There’s just been a real passion here for getting the knowledge, the science, the research into the hands of those making policy decisions…We’re trying to figure out what is the action step that moves that kind of knowledge, particularly in the areas of public health and social work, into the policymaking arena,” Stepleton said.

Prior to accepting the position, Stepleton served 10 years as president and CEO of Parents as Teachers, an international organization based in Missouri that provides parents with research-based information about early childhood education and development strategies.

As CEO of Parents as Teachers, Stepleton spent a great deal of time in Washington, D.C., working with Congress and other federal departments in an effort to affect public policy.

“The business of young children is very political. Enormous amounts of federal funding go into early childhood, so affecting how that’s spent, that there are good decisions made, presenting why it’s important to keep those investments strong,” she said.

Before Parents As Teachers, Stepleton worked at the Edgewood Children’s Center in St. Louis, where she was also highly involved in public policy issues.

She personally enrolled as a graduate student in the social work school 39 years ago.

Stepleton views her experiences in prior positions leading naturally into the work she will be doing as director of the forum.

“The combination, the strength of a social work approach and a public health approach …is a really wonderful marriage of two ways of looking at children and families and what they need,” she said. “I will always be a committed child advocate myself and be very interested in those issues around young children, but it’s also very easy for me to extrapolate beyond that.

“Kids need to grow up in healthy communities, and that’s what the Brown school is all about.”

Stepleton has been passionate about social work and policy for her entire adult life. She recalls one child she worked with nearly 40 years ago, a five-year-old girl who had been sexually abused by her uncle.

“I can still see that child and remember what an impact it made on me that any child would be living with those kinds of things. So it was a no-brainer to move in the direction of ‘What could I use my professional life doing to make things better for children?’” Stepleton said.

Her experiences teaching led her to discover her deeper interests and strengths.

“I loved teaching, but it became clear to me fairly early on that I would like to be involved at the level that policy is set and organizations are managed,” Stepleton said. “Whether they are social workers or public health workers or teachers, they can only do their jobs effectively if there are good policies and management of organizations. It’s been a pretty consistent thread throughout my adult life.”

The forum will host events related to current issues in public policymaking, and encourage and facilitate the creation of “products” and research conducted by faculty and students.

Stepleton says that these “products,” such as policy briefs, white pages and monographs created by students and faculty, will be useful to policymakers.

The forum will also aim to foster an environment in the social work school and the University at large in which policy affecting social issues is a focus.

“In addition to events and products, we really hope to create at the Brown school a policy lifestyle…that means that people are thinking about impacting public policy no matter what they do,” Stepleton said. “Because of our two disciplines, social work and public health, we need to be thinking policy all the time, so we’re going to look for opportunities to make that happen.”

While the forum has begun planning some events for 2012, it is still in its preliminary stages of development.

“We want to do it right, we’re not in a hurry. We want to be really speaking to a need that exists, not just putting up events for the sake of events.”

Stepleton is enthusiastic about the work that lies before her as she returns to the University in this new position.

“I really come at this with a passion about how we use the resources of the University and the Brown school particularly to help policy move in the right direction.”

Grace Fung | Student Life

English professor Carl Phillips is nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry.

This is his fourth time being nominated for the award.

“Double Shadow: Poems” is Phillips’ 11th published collection of poetry. He was also nominated for his books “Speak Low: Poems,” “The Rest of Love: Poems” and “From the Devotions: Poems” in 2009, 2004 and 1998 respectively.

Although this is not his first nomination, Phillips said he continues to find the recognition flattering.

“Whether you win or not, it’s a nice trip to New York and they certainly take it very seriously,” he said. “In the past, when I’ve been nominated, I’ve always met some really interesting people.”

Phillips, a professor of English in the College of Arts & Sciences, said his book is really a continuation of his previous work, with the most recent book being the latest chapter.

“The book is about the differences between taking chances and being afraid to take chances,” Phillips said.

Phillips said that while he has written about the same theme for a long time, his latest book is different from the others in terms of the structure of the poems.

“The poems are very different in their shape—they’re a lot shorter and more spare,” he said.

Phillips advises that his students not be afraid to take risks. He thinks that they too often come into college with a set plan for their lives that excludes the possibility of risk.

“You go to college and you have this plan of your major and how you think your life will be in the future, but so many things come up that are unexpected,” he said. “Writers are people who take chances and who go out there and live a little unexpectedly. It scares them but in the end they seem grateful.”

Vincent Sherry, professor and English department chair, said much about the quality of the Washington University writing department.

“The consistency of the recognition of his work is clear,” Sherry said. “It’s significant for our creative program, which is very highly ranked, now eighth or ninth in the country, and recognitions like this are a big part of that.”

Phillips is one of the University’s three tenure-stream professors in the writing program, which is considerably small compared to other universities’ programs.

“It’s really quite extraordinary that we’ve attained this ranking—some places will have 15 professors, and we’ve done it with three,” Sherry said.

Sherry credits this success to the “consistency of excellency” that the professors in the program exemplify. In addition to Phillips, the writing program features award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang.

Sherry added that the rising rank of the writing program and the continued recognition of its professors have led the English department to consider creating a writing concentration for English majors, the logical next step in the development of the program.

Phillips said he will not linger on the recognition provided by his nomination, but continue to focus on his current projects.

“As much as it’s nice to be nominated, I think the most important thing is to write the next poem,” he said. “That’s much more important than prizes and winning and losing and all that.”

As chief counsel, Legomsky will provide legal advice to immigration officials and serve as a member of the Department of Homeland Security leadership team. He will manage a staff of 160 attorneys.

Legomsky has previously served as a consultant for the Clinton and Obama administrations, the United Nations and numerous international governments.

At Washington University, Legomsky was the first director of the law school’s Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute. In addition, he served as chair of the Judicial Board and as a member of the University City Board of Education.

The professor is also known for his works on national and international immigration, refugee and citizenship law and policy. His book, “Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy,” has been used at 175 law schools nationwide, according to the School of Law’s website.

All interviews with Professor Legomsky on the topic of his appointment have to be pre-approved by the Department of Homeland Security. The department did not respond to Student Life’s inquiries.

“Washington University has done so much to shape my professional and personal development,” Legomsky said in a law school press release. “After 30 years here I’ll sorely miss my wonderful colleagues and students.”

James Harrang | Student Life

Professor Lan Yang sits in her lab in the engineering school. Dr. Yang is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for her early career research. She will receive the award from President Obama next week in Washington, D.C.

President Barack Obama will present the award to Professor Yang and 93 other recipients in the White House.

President Clinton established PECASE in 1996. It is the highest honor that the U.S. government gives to researchers early in their careers. Recipients include professors and members of other research communities.

Professor Yang is the fourth University member to win this award. Between 1999-2001, assistant professors in civil engineering, biomedical engineering and psychiatry and radiology in the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis received the PECASE award.

Yang earned the award for her research on microlasers on a silicon wafer and the development of photonic devices for uses ranging from optical communications to ultra-sensitive biochemical sensing.

“It’s a very great honor to receive the Presidential Early Career Award,” Lan said. “With the support provided by PECASE, we will continue to explore the use of novel photonic devices…with applications in environmental engineering, energy and biomedicine.”

Faculty members in the School of Engineering voiced excitement about Yang’s award.

“I am pleased that the president has honored Lan with this special award for her world-class record of achievement,” says Ralph Quatrano, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science. “She is a model for other assistant professors, and I have great confidence in her potential for continued future success…this award brings great visibility to Lan and her innovative work—and to our school and University.”

Other faculty members are joining in celebrating her success.

“It is a great honor for a young researcher, and everyone in the department congratulated her. We are all proud of her; we are glad that her achievement is recognized by the White House,” said Hiro Mukai, professor of systems science and engineering.

Members of the department said that the award will help Lan to extend her interdisciplinary research.

“The award will enable her to expand her projects and attract additional excellent students,” Department Chair and Eugene and Martha Lohman Professor Arye Nehorai said in a statement. “We are very proud of Prof. Lan Yang’s achievements and the prestigious award she received from the president for her research.”

Yang received her B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China and her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology. She joined the engineering school in 2007.

She currently runs a 12-person Micro/Nano Photonics Lab. The lab focuses on silicon-chip-based ultra-high-quality micro-resonators made from spin-on glass.

In every model, the gender coefficient was negative, indicating that after controlling for discipline group, rank and experience level, women on average are paid less than men in all schools on the Danforth Campus. The data were analyzed using a logarithmic model to obtain a linear regression. This may introduce a level of distortion. All data are presented as reported in the Danforth Campus Gender Pay Equity Report, May 2010.

The Danforth Campus Gender Pay Equity Report, May 2010, which analyzed the 2008-2009 salary information of both tenured and tenure-track faculty, concluded that female professors make less than male professors across every school located on main campus.

A separate report released in July concluded that female professors at the Washington University School of Medicine also earn less, on average, than their male counterparts.

The University is now working to ameliorate this inconsistency, according to Ann Prenatt, the University’s Vice Chancellor for Human Resources.

“The compensation gap that is described does need to be corrected,” Prenatt wrote in an email to Student Life.

According to Prenatt, Provost Edward S. Macias is working with the deans of each school to bridge the salary gap.

“Each of the deans is well aware of the data,” said Shelley Milligan, associate provost. “There has been good progress made with that.”

The report for the Danforth Campus breaks down faculty pay by department and level of professorship.

The report also shows that among the university’s 635 professors, only 177 are women.

In the medical school, 357 of 1289 professors are female.

The study used a number of models to analyze the data. Each model showed that on average, female professors earn less than their male counterparts.

The variable of rank was not controlled for in all models. Higher ranked professors earn more than lower ranked professors.

Many students expected there to be little correlation between salary and gender.

“I think it should be equal for both genders,” senior Alice Gu said. “I am surprised in the sense that Wash. U. is such a liberal campus. I thought they would have adjusted.”

Still, others do not find the report surprising.

“Women tend to make less in most professions,” senior Elizabeth Klein said.

Members of the University community hope that the information from the report will serve as an impetus for change.

“The deans want to address this issue—they paid a lot of attention to the report and want to address the issue it raises,” Macias said. “We take it very seriously. We will try to get pay equity.”

Evan Freedman | Student Life

Bob Hansman is an associate professor in the architecture school and the founder of City Faces, an art instruction program to inspire children living in the projects. Hansman experienced homelessness first-hand in his early adult life.

Student Life’s Evan Freedman sat down with Hansman to talk about his story.

What was the situation surrounding your experience as being homeless?

I was in my early to mid twenties. I was undergoing cancer treatment at the time which made it all but impossible for me to find employment, because when I would fill out my medical history, which you did back then on employment forms, nobody would want to hire me when they could hire someone who’s more likely to still be alive in a year. So on top of dealing with cancer I was dealing with unemployment because of the cancer. I was estranged from my family, so I went to a small town because I thought I might be able to find a job there, but it didn’t pan out, and that’s when I started walking the streets looking for dropped change and trying to make friends who would smuggle food to me. It was just amazing to hear people look at me and say “go get a job” when that was exactly what I was trying to do and being blocked from doing it. People don’t realize the kind of choices people have to make between long-term and short-term. If you live a fairly comfortable life you can afford to make long-term decisions. If you are trying each day to find enough to survive, you make very short-term decisions. If you haven’t found enough change by the end of the day to buy something nutritious to eat, what do you do? Do you buy something awful like an ice cream cone just to get something to eat that day, or do you not eat at all that day so that the next day you might find more change and be able to afford a hamburger?

What are the common misconceptions regarding homelessness?

People think of homelessness as a character flaw rather than a temporary condition… we have grown up with a very judgmental idea of homelessness, we either judge them as being totally damaged and deficient, either mental illness or something like that or they’re just lazy. Those are the two default settings we have for understanding homelessness. It’s either totally not your fault or it’s largely your fault. What I tell my students is that during the Great Depression, people understood the fallacy of that because a lot of people found themselves unemployed and homeless and it clearly had nothing to do with their character, it was clearly circumstantial, but we’ve forgotten that.

Somewhere this gets mixed up with our sense of ethics. I always hear from students “I was told this about homeless people, I was told don’t talk to them, I was told never give them money because they’ll just try and spend it on beer,” you hear all this moralistic judgmental stuff directed at people that in the middle of winter are wondering if they’ll be alive in the morning. If I was going to give them anything, I didn’t feel it was my role to say, make sure you don’t spend this on a beer. We expect homeless people to have strength and values that even we don’t live up to. I tell my students that I find it offensive to say to someone, “you may freeze to death overnight, but I’ll make sure you don’t have a beer before you do.” Who are we? One of the things I remember having to deal with was other people’s assumptions about me, and most of them were absolutely wrong. They assumed that I was not looking for work, they assumed all sorts of things. All these abstractions like “why don’t you get yourself a job,” or “why don’t you pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” those are just abstractions that mean very little when the rubber hits the road.

We don’t spend much time listening to homeless people, it’s one more population where it’s a “them and us,” it’s one more population where we talk about them rather than talking to them. We get our ideas about the homeless from people that probably have never been homeless, it’s just crazy.

You were just a couple of years out of school when you became homeless. Is this a potential reality for students currently in school?

It’s definitely something students these days don’t really think about! At least beginning to understand that this is within the spectrum of possibilities, maybe it’s not a likelihood, but it’s certainly a more foreseeable possibility then we’ve pretended it was for a long time, maybe that in itself will foster a kind of compassion. I hope no one ever has to go through it, but understanding that there’s a nice gray line that connects you and homelessness, it’s not a them and us, these categories blur. Given that we’re having one of the worst economic situations since the Great Depression, you’ve got all the home foreclosures, we’re getting a whole new class of people that are either homeless or being threatened with it. You would think people would then begin to say, “oh, maybe it wasn’t just their fault”.

When you think of that time in your life when you were homeless, do you feel ashamed or embarrassed?

No, not at all. I use it as a learning experience, both for myself and for other people. I think there’s a lesson worth learning in all that, because we think we have these two separate worlds and suddenly they come crashing together, to me, it’s very important that it gets told. The question is why do things have to become so personal before we can we really understand or care about it? Life is short, you don’t have time to make every issue personal, so how do you begin to educate yourself and mature yourself about these things?

Do you feel stronger having gone through that experience?

You feel stronger and weaker both. You just feel more, I don’t think you feel a particular direction, I think you just feel things more deeply. I have a hard time separating out what people would call the good times in my life and the bad times in my life because they’re identical. I tend to say, did something have meaning or did it not have meaning, not whether it was good or bad. Did I grow from it, did I learn from it?

The hard part for me is that even though I’ve gone through these things, they fade with time, and even I have trouble hanging on to what I learned, so then I try to imagine how much harder it must be for someone else who has never been through it, they’ve just sort of visited, they’ve heard about it, they’ve done a service project, they’ve talked to homeless people, they’ve volunteered at a homeless shelter, but they’ve always been able to come back home, they can get in their car, come back to campus and sleep in a warm bed, safe. It’s very abstract for them, no matter how much they put their toe in the water. And it’s not to blame them, but only to describe the situation. Until you’ve said “I can’t go back home, I can’t even go inside, I’m out here for the night,” you won’t even begin to get it.

How do you feel about giving money to homeless people? What should students do as they walk to school each morning and see the same people asking for change?

It varies, you get a sixth sense after awhile having done it myself, I usually will give them something, sometimes some more than others. It’s an individual judgment. I’m not just saying that you indiscriminately throw money at anyone who asks for it. I will generally just stop and talk and get a better sense of who this person is and let them get a better sense of who I am because we all have assumptions about each other.  Being homeless is dealing with one humiliation after another, but I think the worst one is when people won’t even look you in the eye.

Not knowing what we’re talking about doesn’t keep us from being judgmental. It’s almost like the less we know the more judgmental we are. Honest to god, I would not wish the things I’ve gone through on anyone, but another part of me wishes that everybody would go through it so that they would finally know what they were talking about.

Josh Goldman | Student Life

An artists rendition of one of the twin Mars Rovers sitting on planet's surface.

According to Raymond Arvidson, the James S. Mcdonnell Distinguished University Professor and director of the laboratory, the Mars rovers were expected to last for roughly 90 days into their mission. The rovers still remain operational on the planet almost seven years after they landed.

“We are reconstructing the ancient environment,” Arvidson said, “The long-term objective is to find places on the planet that are most likely to have had life, because they are warm and wet, and send future spacecrafts to look for signs of life.”

Spirit and Opportunity were dispatched to opposite sides of the planet to gather data. Each rover collects information differently.

Opportunity’s role is to look for and measure the numerous craters that appear all over Mars’ surface. The rover is currently in the Intrepid meteorite impact crater, which is about 22 meters wide and a couple of meters in depth.

“Craters are like nature’s drills. They show what lies under the surface,” Arvidson said.

The rover examines the ancient rocks, ripples and signs of argon to understand the geographic information of Mars in relation to when water existed on the planet.

Opportunity has traveled a total of 24,946 meters since it first landed in Mars. The original planned travel distance for the rover was 600 meters.

In March 2009, Spirit lost contact after becoming embedded in volcanic sands. But the sandy spot that the rover is stuck in turned out to be filled with volcanic ashes that allow the scientists to track ancient volcanic activities 3 billion to 4 billion years ago. According to a CBS article, the Rover found seepage of water in the ash, which suggests that the water seepage is relatively recent and not due to volcanic activity.

As the rovers continue to operate, the recent change in U.S. administration and its new policies regarding space exploration have not affected the rover missions. The federal government continues to fund the rovers’ research.

“The majority of the cost goes to building these rovers,” Arvidson said. “It’s relatively inexpensive to keep the rovers going.”

A new large rover, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), is scheduled for launch in November 2011 and for landing on Mars in August 2012. The objective of this rover is to look for organic molecules based upon the data sent by Spirit and Opportunity.

MSL is the next step in accomplishing Spirit and Opportunity’s long-term goal of finding signs of life.

Speakers came from as far as the University of Sydney to discuss economic subjects ranging from intellectual property rights to North’s contributions to institutional economics. Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, delivered the keynote Friday night titled, “Institutions and Challenging Presumed Impossibilities and Panaceas.”

The speeches were free and open to the community, but the meals and receptions required invitations, which were extended to the speakers and North’s colleagues, friends and former students.

“I think it was worthwhile because as an economics major, I was able to hear people who are big in the field. We had a preview of what was coming out,” said senior Ross Barthold, who attended the lectures.

The conference was hosted by the University’s Center for New Institutional Social Sciences, which North founded in 2001 based on his work in applying economics to enhance the independent development of nations. The center offers a certificate program for doctoral students interested in developing societies, provides incentives for students to begin careers in policy-making, and holds annual international workshops to apply new research.

“It’s not clear to me what they’re going to say about the role of religion in this election. It’s being downplayed right now,” said Randall Calvert, the director of the American Culture Studies program, who is also on the Center’s executive committee. “It’s not like there aren’t candidates out there who take a strong religious stance, it just hasn’t been the main thing that people are reading and talking about.”

Gerald Early, director of the Center for Humanities, will host the forum, which will take place in room 200 of the Charles F. Knight Center at 4 p.m. The panel will consist of three leading scholars of the relationship between religion and politics: Shaun Casey, associate professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary; Melissa Rogers, director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University’s divinity school; and Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Calvert said he has noticed only in the past one or two years what might be the beginning of a coalition shift, turning the focus away from contentious social issues, where debate about religion was once perhaps more prominent. Now, he said, economic issues have taken the forefront.

“Ironically, as we talk about the current election and the issues that are most important in it, the social issues have played a smaller role than in the last several elections,” Calvert said.

Religious studies professor Daniel Bornstein, who is a member of the center’s executive committee, shares a similar view.

“One of the things that seemed less prominent has been the use of religion particular to pass judgments on social issues. I’ll be curious what the panel has to say because I had the impression that religion didn’t play a very big part in this election,” he said.

Damion Talcott, a freshman who plans to attend the forum, said he detected more discontent and anger in the recent political climate toward the government as a whole than specifically religious debate. While Talcott considers religion to have profound importance on the political decisions of individuals, he doesn’t know how much salience the issue has had in the public lately.

“My personal values based on my religion affect my ideals and what I decide on certain issues,” Talcott said, “but as a whole, I don’t think religion had a huge effect on this election, as it has in the past.”

Despite some confusion and curiosity about what exactly will be addressed at the forum, there is widespread support for the initiative taken by the new Center on Religion & Politics to explore and compare the two, a pursuit that, according to many, has been absent on this campus in the past.

According to Bornstein, one of eight religious studies faculty members at Wash. U., there is no professor whose work is focused on religion in America. He hopes that the five new faculty members the center intends hire with its $30 million endowment will bring diversity to the program and other departments of the University in that respect.

“This won’t be a duplication of resources that we already have on campus but will in fact give us something new and very much needed,” Bornstein said.

Washington University professors and students alike seem optimistic and supportive of the initiative to open the dialogue about the relationship between religion and politics, which Calvert said has developed somewhat of a stigma.

“There’s been an increasing incivility to political discussion, particularly in areas that touch on religion and politics, where some religious leaders have asserted that certain political positions or policies are right,” Calvert said. “The idea is that this has damaged political discussion and made it less legitimizing or less integrating than it should ideally be.”

There are high hopes on campus that the Center on Religion & Politics will take steady steps in a positive direction to overcome the barriers of stigma associated with the topic, both on the Washington University campus and in the public discourse, beginning with today’s forum.

“People are speaking not just as scholars, but also on matters of current political importance,” Bornstein said. “The hope is that the center will do something more than just chase the news cycle, thinking in longer terms and creating a forum in which people can talk civilly about matters of great civic importance.”

In an op-ed submission to the Post-Dispatch, Isaac Katz reflected on his personal struggles, and he criticized his father, Jonathan Katz, for his attacks on homosexuality.

Isaac Katz’s coming out was an unexpected development for Jonathan Katz, a tenured physics professor whose public statements have drawn intense opposition on campus and elsewhere. Jonathan Katz has since removed a controversial essay from his University website in which he attacked homosexuality.

Isaac Katz decided to disclose his sexual orientation publicly after news outlets reported that several gay teens committed suicide in recent weeks. He wrote about his own depression and attempts at suicide and offered reassurance to gay teens in his op-ed submission.

The younger Katz recalled his father’s homophobic views and wrote that when he told his parents over the summer that he was gay, his father said that he should “deny who I am rather than to engage in an act so abhorrent as to love another man.”

Isaac, who graduated this spring from the University of Pennsylvania, referred to his father’s controversial 1999 essay titled “In Defense of Homophobia,” in which the professor declared, “I am a homophobe and proud.” Katz posted the essay to his physics department website, but as of Sunday, the essay had been removed.

In late 2003, Katz added to the essay in response to protests over the exclusion of sexually active gays from University blood drives. In his response, Katz wrote: “In order to satisfy their demand for full acceptance by society, the homosexual movement demands to kill some transfusion recipients by infecting them with AIDS, or to kill patients who need transfusions by making it impossible for blood banks to collect blood.”

The piece ignited debate on campus in 2005 after a Student Life columnist questioned why the University condoned the posting of the essay on a University-sanctioned server.

The column prompted nine letters to the editor and two op-eds in a single issue, leading Katz to add another postscript with an analogy between gays and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

While the University hasn’t endorsed Katz’s statements, it did allow him to keep his essay on his University webpage, citing free exchange of ideas as a core component of academic freedom.

Katz made headlines again this summer after his controversial writings led to his removal from a team of scientists tasked with helping clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu appointed Katz to the post in May.

Katz did not return phone calls from Student Life on Sunday.

In his op-ed submission, Isaac Katz wrote that he did not think that his father should have been removed from the scientific panel.

“I don’t believe that anyone’s personal opinions have any impact on whether they can help fight oil spills” the younger Katz wrote. “To me…it is undeniable that removing him from the team for reasons unrelated to his scientific knowledge, academic credentials or intellectual capacity was a mistake.”

The younger Katz wrote that he does not want his coming out to serve solely as a family scandal. Rather, he wants to send a message to gay teens that, in the words of gay columnist Dan Savage, “It does get better.”

The Washington University Pride Alliance aims to make the struggle for gay teens and young adults easier. Adrienne Sands, co-president of the group, discussed the importance of creating a secure environment for gay students.

“It’s important to create a safe space, a safe community where people feel comfortable,” Sands said in an interview.

Promoting this open environment, Pride Alliance is participating in National Coming Out Day, Monday on the main quad between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.

With additional reporting by Puneet Kollipara.