If you’re my friend on Facebook then you’ve been inundated with statuses about the new LVC women’s center and its impending opening ceremony on Thursday. I still can’t get over it. 6 years of work, 6 years of fizzled enthusiasm, giving up, being distracted, shifting priorities, turned heads. 6 months of determination, petitioning, shaming, organization, emotional pleas, on and off support, and now, 2 days until the opening of a much needed resource for girls on LVC’s campus. 

A girl was recently raped on campus. Her friends called the police. The administration chastised her for calling the police before talking to them and suggested that it was perhaps in her best interest not to press charges. Now she leaves her dorm room and can look down the hallway to the door of her accused rapist. A student gets immediately ejected from campus for suspicion of possessing marijuana, but rape is apparently no big deal. 

Tons of women on campus are screened each semester for STIs and tons of them get positive results for easily preventable diseases because they are too shy to ask the 60 year-old nurse for the free condoms in the health center. 

Women are harassed in the dorms but don’t report it to the Bias Response Team because they think it’s no big deal- it’s what happens to college girls, right?

This center is so needed, so important, even if it never opened its door. Just the show of support for women (60% of the campus population) by the administration is a huge step forward. 

We assume that because it’s the twenty-first century that no one is marginalized, least of all women. But it’s just not true. 

Andy Warhol said, “They say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” The times have changed, but we have to change the atmosphere.