TL;DR - Greg Gianforte has doubled down on his hateful and discriminatory actions against LGBTQ people. It's high time we completely remove his name from any Stevens building. Please sign this new petition.
See here for a full timeline of events starting all the way in back in 2017.
Hello all,
It's been 4 years since Stevens decided to name a building after Greg Gianforte, and many things have changed between now and then which have brought the naming of the building back to the forefront as an important issue for the Stevens community.
In May 2019, Stevens quietly announced Greg Gianforte rescinded $10 million of his $20 million gift to the school. As a result, the new building (originally to be named the Gianforte Family Academic Center) was renamed to the Gateway Academic Complex with one half of the building being dubbed the "Gianforte Family Hall".
That following winter on December 10th, 2019 three Stevens students Eli Trakhtenberg, Nasir Montalvo, and Adrian Castellanos (Torch VP, Diversity and Inclusivity Committee Chair, and SGA VP, respectively) organized a student protest during the ribbon cutting ceremony. The protest was organized not only out of frustration with Stevens for not renaming building though. As outlined in their proposal document, the students were upset with the administration's failures over the past several years in making the campus a more diverse, inclusive, and safe space for all.
Ultimately the university didn't acknowledge the protest, and the university's response was lackluster.
On January 2021, Greg Gianforte was elected governor of Montana. As governor, he's passed the following legislation:
* The Religious Freedom Restoraction Act, potentially allowing for discrimination against LGBTQ people in court.
* 3 anti-abortion laws
* House Bill 112, an anti-transgender bill that bans transgender girls and women from participating in sports at the elementary, secondary, or post-secondary level consistent with their gender identity.
In words more eloquent than we could muster, Nasir Montalvo, one of the organizers of the student protest in 2019, penned the following article which outlines why the university must (yet again) make the right choice to protect its LGBTQ students and commit itself to doing more to making the university a safe space for them. One step the university must take to fulfilling that promise would be to commit itself to removing any mention of the Gianforte family from its buildings.
As much as things change, they remain the same. The university refuses to engage with the fact its honoring Greg Gianforte who is a public figure using his power to spread hate and harm LGBTQ people. The university is complicit in Gianforte's actions by continuing to honor him.
We mentioned at the beginning of this update, but we will mention it again here, Nasir Montalvo created a new petition demanding the university change the name of the building. We're asking you to sign and share it not just because it explicitly calls on taking Gianforte's name off the building -- something that many of you supported but was not part of our original scope, nor was it something we could've imagined happening four years ago! We believe that taking this next step, along with talking with our fellow Stevens community members and reaching out to the administration and ask to know why they continue to be complicit, allows us to meet Gianforte's rhetoric-turned-law with a small, yet tangible action of our own -- to firmly reject what Nasir calls a "value of brick and mortar more than the queer experience," and to do something that's difficult in social action: to sustain our cause from moment to movement, having successfully passed from the individuals writing this to current students, alumni, faculty, Stevens staff, and Hoboken residents and allies all looking to make a collective, permanent impact.
For the curious, here is a comprehensive overview of the full timeline of events concerning the Gianforte-Stevens saga.
We hope you all are as well as can be given the difficulties the past few years have presented to us all.
Andy Waldron, Kyle Gonzalez, and Joe Risi