Two people have accused a tenured
professor of bullying gay students.
Christina Santiago, a graduate student
at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) located in Indiana,
Pennsylvania, told CBS affiliate KDKA that the professor told
students that being gay is “disgusting, unnatural and abnormal.”
“I raised my hand and I asked the
professor, 'So, are you saying that students like myself who identify
as homosexual are disgusting, unnatural and abnormal?' And the
professor replied, 'Yes,'” Santiago told a reporter.
Michael Heller, an IUP graduate,
recalled anti-gay taunts from the same professor five years ago: “God
created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, and that being gay was an
abomination, and that anybody who was gay was going to burn in hell,
and that's what they deserved.”
Santiago, who is no longer enrolled in
the professor's classroom, filed a complaint with the school. Last
week, students held a demonstration to protest the professor's
anti-gay comments. The school says it is investigating. (The video
is embedded in the right panel of this page.)
The events come just months after the
school's ex-president, Lawrence J. Pettit, suggested in his memoir If
You Live by the Sword: Politics in the Making and Unmaking of a
University President that gay baiting played a role in his 2001
firing. He's
since denied he's gay.