Openly gay and lesbian professors are still a rare commodity on most college campuses; there are good reasons.

First, neither federal law nor most state anti-bias laws include job protection for bias based upon sexual orientation. While many postsecondary campuses do protect against anti-gay bias, not all schools do. And private colleges, especially religious-based schools, do not offer any security.

There have been a number of cases that involve the firings of gay professors for having sexual relations with male students, while their straight male peers who did the same with female students received little disciplinary action. The courts upheld the unequal treatment because — at least when the courts heard these cases — schools could treat heterosexual professors preferentially.

Typical of the cases is Corstvet v. Boger, where Oklahoma State University fired a bisexual professor in 1985 for admitting to being bisexual. The court upheld his firing for engaging in acts of moral turpitude because, “the detestable and abominable crime against nature, committed with mankind or with a beast, includes sodomy as well as other unnatural acts.”

Today, with most public colleges providing job bias security, there are still other more subtle obstacles facing openly GLBT faculty. These involve faculty bias against GLBT scholarship, and also student bias against GLBT professors. Student evaluations of GLBT faculty may reflect the bias.

In order to achieve tenure, professors must be outstanding in their fields of academic scholarship, and they must also have strong student evaluations. For GLBT professors who publish in the area of GLBT studies, they suffer a similar fate academics bestowed upon early scholars in the areas of women’s studies and ethnic studies.

The GLBT scholarship issue is, of course, not much of an issue for those openly GLBT professors who teach subjects outside of GLBT studies. But these professors, as well as the GLBT studies professors, suffer from another bias. It’s bias from students.

The primary gauge of teaching is the student evaluation. Most colleges request students to rate teaching skills, and sometimes they request written comments. While most students think schools ignore evaluations, the reality is that student evaluations are critical in faculty promotions.

A 2002 study focused on how students rate professors based upon the sexual orientation of the professor. Coming out in the Classroom: An Occupational Hazard? The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Teacher Credibility and Perceived Student Learning involved a research study where a male professor taught the very same lecture to two different groups of students.

In one class he told the class a story about his wife. In his evaluations for the lecture, his ratings were excellent. The students liked the story. To the next class, he gave the same lecture and told the same story. This time, however, he didn’t refer to wife, instead referring to his lover, Mark. His ratings for this class were considerably lower.

The study investigators met with students in subsequent interviews to see if they could account for the differences in ratings from one class to the next. Students in the second class indicated that the professor surprised them when he revealed he was gay and that he mentioned his sexual orientation in the class. They also indicated that they had grown up with primarily negative images of gay men. They discounted the credibility of the instructor for that reason.

Students in the first class didn’t think anything of the fact that the professor was married or that he mentioned his sexual orientation to the class. They liked the fact that their instructor had a wife, and because he lived their lifestyle he was more credible. He conformed to their view of their world.

The findings of the study should not be so shocking. When African-American teachers taught classes of all-white students, they suffered from bias. The same occurred when female professors taught classes consisting of male students (and even female students). The perception was that a white male professor was the best.

None of this means, of course, that colleges should hold openly GLBT professors to a lower standard. A rotten teacher is a rotten teacher. But faculty review committees, when examining student evaluations of GLBT faculty, should take into account the negative perceptions students may harbor against openly GLBT faculty. To the extent that these negatives could affect an overall student evaluation, such negative ratings should be closely examined for traces of bias.