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Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
Oct 20, 2010
The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire will take administrative action against a professor who sent a derisive e-mail to a student calling LGBT people the “walking wounded.”
The e-mail was a response to senior Crystal Kazik’s request for faculty support in promoting the Eau Queer Film Festival, an LGBT event that she helped to organize. Tony Hilton, chair of the university’s information systems department, wrote back: “I decry attempts to legitimize (homosexuals’) addictions and compulsions. These, our fellow humans, deserve our best efforts to help them recover their lives. We only hurt them further when we choose to pretend that these walking wounded are OK the way they are, that their present injuries are the best they can hope for in life.”
Hilton also asked Kazik and an administrative assistant for the women’s studies department to reconsider holding the event.
The e-mail set off a furor throughout the UW system. “Such an e-mail can neither educate nor contribute to dialogue or understanding, UW-Eau Claire Chancellor Brian Levin-Stankevich said in a written statement. “This will be addressed administratively.”
The chancellor said he has worked to improve the environment for gay and lesbian students at UW-Eau Claire, pointing to the Chancellor’s Diversity Advisory Commission, the LGBT Advisory Board and the Hate and Bias Incident Response Team.
Levin-Stankevich said any action taken against Hilton would not be made public. The university does not want to censor the expression of ideas, but the administration needs to address the appropriateness of the time and place of expression in this case, he said.
Under fire for his remarks, Hilton told the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram that he felt “really badly about what I said.” He told the paper that he would cooperate with the university’s response to the incident.
Kazik reportedly was among a handful of UW-Eau Claire students and faculty who traveled to San Francisco in June as part of a women’s studies class that included visits to an LGBTQA parade and film festival. That trip inspired the creation of the Eau Queer Festival, which included student-made documentaries.
Despite the controversy, more than 600 people attended the four-day festival, held Oct. 7 to 10, according to Pam Forman, a UW-Eau Claire professor of women’s studies and sociology. The event was timed to lead up to National Coming Out Day on Oct. 11.
“The purpose of the film festival was to show alternative views of sexualities and ways of living your life,” Forman told The Badger Herald, UWM’s independent student newspaper. “We achieved this by showing an array of international films, presenting different cultures and how they deal with homosexuality.”
But Forman said the e-mail incident took away attention that should have gone to the importance of the event.
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