Debbie Bazarsky, inaugural director of BU’s new LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty & Staff, founded two nationally recognized LGBTQIA+ centers, at Princeton and the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was most recently Pennsylvania College of Art & Design’s dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion and of enrollment, engagement, and diversity. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

New Appointments

Meet Debbie Bazarsky, Inaugural Director of BU’s New LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty & Staff

Center’s programming, services, and events will bring together LGBTQIA+ colleagues from across the University

Debbie Bazarsky would prefer that this story wasn’t about her.

Rather, the brand-new director of the equally brand-new LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty & Staff at Boston University would prefer that it focus on the hard work of her colleagues, the members of the University’s Task Force on LGBTQIA+ Faculty and Staff, who recommended creating a professionally staffed center back in 2019. Or she’d like it to be about the trailblazers who’ve come before her and experienced the discrimination the center hopes to eradicate. 

“I don’t want to overshadow the amazing work of faculty and staff for decades or the work of the task force over the last several years—or the support and advocacy of senior administration here at BU,” Bazarsky says.

But her arrival is a big deal. Bazarsky holds a PhD in human sexuality from Widener University and is a nationally respected leader and lecturer on LGBTQIA+ topics in higher education. She’s also the founding director of not one, but two universities’ LGTBQIA+ centers—the first at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1990s and then at Princeton in the early 2000s. 

In a memo sent to BU faculty and staff in July, Jean Morrison, provost and chief academic officer, and Crystal Williams, vice president and associate provost for community and inclusion, wrote that the center, which opened September 2 on the second floor of 808 Commonwealth Avenue, will “serve as a hubway for our workplace community, bringing together LGBTQIA+ colleagues from our Charles River, Medical, and Fenway campuses through programming, events, and shared gathering space.” 

The center is one of the latest components of the University’s 2030 Strategic Plan, a set of five priorities meant to guide the school through the rest of the decade. One such priority? Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which empowered the LGBTQIA+ task force to make recommendations for improving the LGBTQIA+ experience. Among other recommendations were creating a centralized website for the BU LGBTQIA+ community,  increasing the visibility of gender and sexual minorities in University media, and investing in and promoting the scholarship of LGBTQIA+ faculty. 

For now, Bazarsky’s task is to get the center up and running—and build out its agenda. “I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Bazarsky to our campus,” Williams says. “Already, she has—in an amazingly short period of time—begun to develop an ambitious framework for what the center will be at BU and how it will serve our LGBTQIA+ staff and faculty. 

“She brings an enormous amount of expertise, vision, and compassion to Boston University. That combination is exciting, and I know, means that the center will be a dynamic catalyst for the kinds of essential connections, communities, experiences, and outcomes to which we all aspire.” 

A Texas native and a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, Bazarsky has spent two decades in the diversity and inclusion field, with a focus on LGBTQIA+ inclusion. In addition to being the founding director of two nationally recognized LGBTQIA centers, she was most recently dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion and of engagement and enrollment at the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. She also spent more than a decade at Princeton, where she held a variety of roles that included lecturing in the  Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. When she first entered the field, Bazarksy notes, there were fewer than 40 people in the country doing LGBTQIA+ work in higher education. In fact, the Ohio State University office where she worked during graduate school was simply the GLB Student Services Office—the “T” hadn’t yet been added to the acronym, much less anything else. 

By serving as the inaugural director at BU’s LGBTQIA+ center, she says, she’s getting back to her roots.

“I became involved with diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and training at the age of 14,” she says. “Since then, I’ve been on a bit of a journey doing broad-based DEI work, but what really makes my soul sing is LGBTQIA+ center work. I keep returning to these roles because it’s meaningful, transformative community work.”

So what will that look like at BU?

Bazarsky has a few ideas. First things first: she’s working through the LGBTQIA+ Task Force recommendations. Her goals include improving the recruitment and retention of LGBTQIA+ faculty and staff, as well as turning the center into a go-to space for networking, events, and community-building. She also hopes to establish a robust training arm at the center, whether for ally training, department-specific training, professional development, or anything in between. 

Until then, she’s working on implementing programming for this year—which will include recognizing International Pronoun Day on October 20 and hopefully, launching an ongoing speaker series—and setting up focus groups to root out the needs of LGBTQIA+ staffers.

“My goal for the year is really about listening,” she says. “It’s a new day at BU. There are faculty and staff who’ve been here for many years and have experienced homophobia or transphobia. My hope for the center is that it will be a place that uplifts and celebrates the community, as well as a place where people can find support.”

To find out more about  the LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty and Staff, email LGBTQIA@bu.edu or call 617-353-3990.