The University of Idaho administration is working to be more inclusive of all students by looking for ways to allow the use of preferred names in Blackboard Learn (BbLearn). This project, however, is not new.
Last October, when the Vandal Card office began printing students’ preferred names instead of their legal names, discussions were also underway to allow students to use preferred names on BbLearn and VandalWeb. As it stands now, all students must use their legal names on BbLearn.
This project will aid transgender and nonbinary students along with students who have trauma associated with their legal names, Julia Keleher, director of the LGBTQA Office at UI, said. For students who use a preferred name, deadnaming can misrepresent their identity and possibly cause additional trauma.
“It’s like going into somewhere and someone constantly calling you the wrong name,” Keleher said.
Kristin Haltinner is part of the UBUNTU committee, which has been a proponent for preferred name implementation. UBUNTU called this project the “Seven-Year Challenge” and said BbLearn especially needs to be changed, citing a student named Samantha as a reason for this change.
Haltinner said every semester, Samantha emailed all her professors to tell them her preferred name. On one occasion, Samantha’s professor complied with using her name, but when she needed to do an activity in BbLearn’s discussion boards, she was outed to her class, bullied and threatened as a result.
People can use their preferred name in Zoom calls, but when they talk in BbLearn discussion boards, forced to use their legal name, it can confuse their classmates, Keleher said. In addition to this, if the person’s peers didn’t know their gender identity, participating in these boards can out them as transgender or nonbinary, creating “undue psychological stress,” Keleher said.
The stress can make students feel unsupported or not welcome in the classroom, Keleher said, so they may not want to go to class or log on to BbLearn at all.
Other universities have already implemented preferred names into information systems. Washington State University allows students to use preferred names on “nearly everything,” Mathew Jeffries, the director of the Gender Identity/Expression and Sexual Orientation Resource Center at WSU, said. The exceptions include W2 forms, payroll, transcripts, insurance, medical information and FAFSA information, Jeffries said.
WSU added a new field in the “myWSU” portal, the program or “banner” where all student information is pulled from, called “nickname,” which serves as a preferred name field, Jeffries said. When other platforms pull information from myWSU, the preferred name is given priority everywhere except when legal names are required, Jeffries said.
Dan Ewart, the vice president of Information Technology at UI, said the current version of VandalWeb, UI’s student information banner, has the space to store preferred name information but does not have a field for it to be entered.
“We’re in the process right now of upgrading banner and VandalWeb to a version that will allow that to happen,” Ewart said.
Once VandalWeb has been updated, the process of feeding preferred name information to other systems, like BbLearn, can take place, Ewart said.
However, UI Registrar Lindsey Brown, along with Ewart, said implementing preferred names in all the other systems will be a lengthy process, altering how information is fed to 100 different systems and thousands of reports. Ewart estimated proper implementation would take 1,740 hours. It will take so long because “we really need to evaluate each (system) to make sure the information is feeding correctly,” Brown said.
“We have a plan,” Ewart said. “We have the estimates, and because it’s a significant amount of effort, we’re asking for assistance from university leadership in prioritizing that.”
The president’s cabinet meeting on Oct. 29 will discuss preferred name implementation and decide whether it will be prioritized, and whether additional assistance will be given, according to Ewart.
Cody Roberts can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @CodyRobReports.