Earlier this spring semester, Navya Gupta took a trip to Haverford College’s Lutnick Library as part of their first-year writing seminar titled “Through the Looking Glass: Ancient Sexuality and Modern Queer Politics,” taught by Professor Ryan Warwick. There, they found a collection of surveys and archival data conducted by Brian Jackson and Anduin Touw in 1993. The surveys were largely conducted by the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance (BGALA) in 1993.
As part of Gupta’s project for the course, they decided to filter out the six surveys done by BGALA and recreate them; Gupta sent out two Google forms to the Haverford student body titled “Issues of Sexuality and Sexual Orientation” and “Issues of Gender Relations on Campus.” In the Google form, Gupta writes that “the goal of this survey is to compare the opinions of the Haverford student body and those from thirty-two years ago.” I sat down with Gupta to discuss their work with their class and the survey.
BGALA surveyed the Haverford College student body about topics ranging from feminism, sexism, sexuality, sexual violence, and gender. The association, however, stopped running in 2006. Gupta told the Bi-Co News that BGALA has archival items in special collections, specifically a notebook that kept track of the group’s meetings. Gupta said, “They had a notebook, and eventually, only one person was writing in the notebook. There was way less participation, and that’s something we talk a lot about in class, and something that came up in my survey, with people being like, ‘I don’t feel the need to have a club for queer people, because I have a community—there’s so many queer people here, I can create that community anywhere on Haverford campus.”
Gupta sent out the surveys through The Weekly Consensus, a list serve sent out to Haverford College community members. They note that “it’s been a struggle getting publicity. I talked about it at the plenary and tabled it at the plenary. I’m doing things to put it out there and trying to have the whole student body have access. I printed out three thousand pieces of paper and put them on desks everywhere. It’s not as many responses as I hope.” Even though Gupta turned in their data of the survey for the class, they found that students are still filling in the survey, and they’re determined to find more. “The 1993 survey had 12% of the student body, while mine was 4.1%…I’m gonna keep the survey going because all of the responses are so interesting,” they say.
In 1993, there were five surveys circulated to the student body and one given to faculty. Gupta decided to limit it to two surveys for the student body, and aims to re-create the faculty one next year. “I don’t want to try and get the student body to do three more surveys—that’s a lot. But I want to do one for faculty and staff,” Gupta said. While also looking through this archival data, they found that the main goal for the 1993 survey was to “gauge how closely the student body followed the Honor Code. The writers felt like that wasn’t represented enough. The faculty and staff also described themselves as ‘disillusioned’ with the honor code—that was the main point of the survey. That’s why I think it’ll be interesting to put up the faculty one.”
The main similarities and differences between the 1993 survey and 2025 survey, Gupta tells me, are that the responses are “way more similar than I thought they would be. Opinion has not shifted much on a lot of these topics. I was kinda shocked. In the 1993 survey, overall, there were more people who were less progressive, more openly, like people were saying really homophobic and misogynistic things in the survey, but it was only like four people. The vast majority were feminist and very accepting allies.” In contrast, Gupta’s re-creation of the survey had little to no responses that have homophobic or misogyny rhetoric, marking the shift in progressive views in the student body. However, they noted, “if there were homophobia or misogyny, it was couched in layers of like—‘this is why I feel this way specifically’, and ‘intellectual’ reasons for it, with varying degrees of validity, but there wasn’t any [homophobia, misogyny, etc.] overall.”
According to statistical data, there were still close similarities between the 1993 responses and the 2025 responses. “Percentage-wise, they lined up pretty well…I was expecting more change.” Gupta referred back to the “Issues of Sexuality and Sexual Orientation” in our interview, mentioning the questions of “Can a man be raped” and “Can a woman commit rape.” They say that in their survey, “everyone responded that a man could be raped and a woman could be a rapist. “In the 1993 survey, there were a few people who didn’t say those things. In my survey, 100% of people said those things were true. In 1993, people mostly said no, and that was surprising.”
The actual process of conducting the two surveys varied between 1993 and Gupta’s recreation. The 1993 survey had support from more of the student body and BGALA, and their answers were synthesized into a short summary. “It’s kinda hard to compare all of these things because I got long answer responses, but the [1993 survey] only summarized the answers they received. There, I’m comparing my answers to the summaries they received. There was no like, ‘this is all of our data’, or anything like that. I wish there were more comprehensive data to compare,” Gupta says.
Even though the project was a positive experience, Gupta still faced a lot of challenges and roadblocks in their surveys. “A lot of these questions have a lot of nuance to them. Very few of them don’t leave room for interpretation—a lot of these questions are really problematic because they leave so much space for misinterpretation. I copied the questions directly from the old survey, and I really wish I had rewritten them, even though that might’ve introduced a lot of interesting things. A lot of these questions could indicate that they [1993 survey] are talking about trans people on campus, but it’s never explicitly stated. And even when questions are asking about queer people on campus, they’re only asking about Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian students since it was created by BGALA. That created an interesting place where, [in Gupta’s 2025 survey] people talked a lot about transness and trans identities on campus that I wasn’t able to compare with in old data,” says Gupta. They are unsure if the group purposefully excluded transness or if it was outside of the scope of their research.
Gupta encourages all Haverford students to take the two sexuality and gender surveys. If students are interested in Gupta’s data analysis, Excel spreadsheets, data charts, and more details on statistics, their results are posted on their WordPress. The site is available to all of the students in the tri-co. For more on the surveys, students can reach out to Navya Gupta by emailing them at nngupta@haverford.edu.
