Staff Q&A with Robert Schoenberg

In the early 1980s, the University began a search for a staffer to support the lesbian and gay student community at Penn (bisexual and transgender students were not yet part of the conversation). In 1982, Robert Schoenberg was working on his dissertation at Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice—then called the School of Social Work—when he applied for the role. He was subsequently hired on a part-time basis, and by the time he finished his dissertation in 1989, was working full-time in that capacity.

In his role, Schoenberg listened to and worked with students, doing outreach, education, and advocacy. He simultaneously worked as a therapist to self-identified gay students at the University Counseling Service, but says his role in the nascent days of the LGBT Center was not one of counselor.

Over the years, the Center grew—as did the staff—and moved to its dedicated home in the Carriage House in the summer of 2002. Today, the Center works to support the University’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, staff, alumni, and faculty, as well as increase the understanding and acceptance of sexual and gender minority members. One of the oldest LGBT centers in the country, Penn’s center offers a place for students to gather and study, while serving as a hub for the queer community on campus.

Schoenberg has helmed the Center from its beginning, and this fall, after 35 years, will retire. He will be honored at the Center’s 35th anniversary celebration on Saturday, Oct. 14.

The timing feels right to retire now, Schoenberg says. Plus, he hopes to spend more time at his home in the Poconos.

“It’s not as if I have any specific planned set of activities,” he says. “I used to be someone who didn’t like to have a lot of downtime. Now I’ve come to value my downtime. I know there will always be things to do. For one, I’m very involved in a lot of community activities—I have been all along and those will mostly continue.”

The Current sat down with Schoenberg in his Carriage House office to talk about the Center’s founding, the important role students have played in the entire life of the Center, and some of the biggest changes he’s seen over the years.

Was there a specific event that led to the founding of the LGBT Center?

The reason that anyone was hired was because students advocated for the position as a result of many factors, but the most dramatic of which was that a student in Van Pelt College House was rather badly beaten up for no other reason, apparently, than that he conformed to stereotypes of what it was to be a gay man. He was flamboyant, he was outspoken, and he was walking down a hall and someone just sucker-punched him in the side of his head and he bled badly from his ear. For many students, that was kind of the last straw, that kind of overt hostility. So they had the ear of Sam Fager, who was then the director of student health, and of Janis Somerville, who was then the vice provost for University life.

What was your initial charge when you started?

My charge was to support the student community, and because so many of the students had been involved in lobbying for the position and all of them were still around, I had a built-in advisory group. And there were a million directions I could’ve gone.

I met with students, I used the students as my advisers as to what I should be spending my time on. I’ve gotten many questions over the years as to how I was able to persuade the administration to keep supporting me and to expand their support. It was never a battle. Many other institutions have had task forces that studied the issues on campus or had sit-ins or negotiations. And so, I started out, just me and one work-study student, Susan Miller [now an assistant professor at Rutgers-Camden], and it was a couple of years before I was given funds to hire a second person, part-time, and it just expanded from there in terms of hours and in terms of staff to the point that 19 years ago, Erin [Cross, senior associate director] started as the second full-time person and a few years after that, we were given a third full-time position.

So students were really instrumental in the beginning and it seems like they’re still integral to the day-to-day functions of the Center.

We couldn’t possibly do everything we do without our work-study students. We try to tell them that as often as possible. We don’t ask anybody their sexual orientation, but I know we have many work-study students who identify as heterosexual and sometimes, people wonder of them, ‘Why would you want to work at the LGBT Center if you’re not part of that community?’ and their response is usually one or both of two things. One, ‘I’m a supporter of the community and I believe in LGBT civil rights and this is a way to manifest that.’ Or, ‘It’s a great place to work. It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s not just sit at a desk and watch people walk by.’

So, was Penn out front early on the issue of LGBT civil rights?

It’s great and it’s a little bit worthy of thought. I’ve worked under four presidents—three full-time presidents and one interim president. They’ve all been very supportive. Penn is a complex institution. It’s ancient and it has a streak of conservatism, but also pockets of real progressive activity. It’s very unusual to find an institution like this [with] six distinct cultural centers [Greenfield Intercultural Center, La Casa Latina, Makuu, Pan-Asian American Community House, Penn Women’s Center].

It’s not like we work only with our siloed population; we all work with everyone. People don’t have only one identity. It’s a very outdated idea to think that you’re either white or you’re gay or you’re black or you’re lesbian. It’s multiple identities, and so we say that everybody is welcome at all of the centers.

Penn is more touted for what it does on the student services side than on the faculty side. This is something that’s very challenging right now. We wish that there were more out, known-to-be LGBT faculty than there are. There aren’t very many who are completely and totally out and speak on the record as being out. We’re working hard on that. It’s a little bit perplexing to know exactly why.

I’m not sure I know anyplace that does go much further. If you take a look at all campuses with professionally staffed LGBT centers, out of over 4,000 institutions of higher education, two-year and four-year, there are still only a few hundred.

Who uses the Center? Is it just students, or do faculty and staff also come here?

We are primarily focused on students, and by that I mean, undergrad, grad, and professional students. That is the mission of the division of which we’re part and it will always be the primary consumer group, but we are very open to staff and faculty and to alumni. We work closely with the LGBT alumni organization and we have, over the years, on and off, had staff and faculty groups.

What’s kept you in this position for so long?

Every day, it’s been exciting, it’s been fulfilling, it’s of course, sometimes been frustrating, but what work doesn’t have frustrations? It’s working with the students who are bright and motivated and always enjoyable to interact with and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, a lot of positive regard for what I’ve done. So much has changed. I mean, the LGBT community is in a different world than it was when I started.

I think of what happens on campus as being an interaction with what happens in the larger world, especially in the United States. Penn was way ahead of its time in having non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in its policies from 1979 and Larry Gross who was a professor here at the Annenberg School at the time and is now at USC—he was pretty responsible for the 1979 policy. But it was in 2003 when Penn added gender identity to its non-discrimination policy and that was an interesting consequence to the fact that the city of Philadelphia did it. [Former Penn President] Dr. Rodin said, ‘If Philadelphia is doing it, we have to do it, we don’t really have a choice.’ Still, to have a non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity policy in 2003 or 2004 was pretty ahead of its time. But it’s a demonstration of the interaction between what’s going on out there and what’s going on on campus.

You mentioned changes. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen over the years?

It would have been unimaginable in the early 1980s to think about recruiters from major employers not only accepting LGBT applicants, but seeking them out, wanting to have events for the LGBT community, because they want these folks to come to their sites to contribute to the diversity of their employees.

I guess another way in which that’s manifested is that students used to come and then struggle to find their way out of the closet, and I still talk to a lot of alumni who say, ‘If only when I was 18 to 22, I’d been out.’ Now, they arrive out. The undergraduate application has a place where you can voluntarily state your sexual orientation. There are literally hundreds of students who apply as out LGBT people. It would’ve been unthinkable in 1982 to have a set of parents walk in with their daughter and say, ‘Will you be able to take good care of her while she’s here as an out lesbian?’ Now, we get parents coming all the time with their high school gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans kids who are thinking of coming to Penn and want to know if it’s going to be a safe place. We’ve been consistently ranked over the years as one of the top LGBT-friendly institutions of higher education, so I think the reputation is merited and people know that. It’s an important recruiting factor.