As one of the nation’s best-known schools shutters its LGBT office, progressive students are taking the drama queen route in response. According to Harvard University’s student newspaper, two LGBT student groups and a cadre of lecturers and administrators staged a mock funeral on Friday to mark the closure of the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, nicknamed the “QuOffice.” Amber M. Simons, a student and the co-director of the Harvard Undergraduate Queer Advocates, said in a speech at the event, “The death of the QuOffice is so much more than the loss of a physical space to be in community together. … It represents the silencing and erasure of queer voices.”

Students flew a rainbow Pride flag, which was lowered to half-mast, and wrote notes to deposit into a fake coffin. In a “eulogy” commemorating the closed office, Undergraduate Studies in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Director Caroline Light said that the shuttered LGBT office “stood for something powerful: the radical idea that LGBTQ+ students deserve not just to survive at Harvard, but to find community — to find care and joy.” She continued, “While the QuOffice may be gone, queer students remain as loud, fabulous, and stubbornly visible as ever. May the memory of the QuOffice be a blessing and an inspiration to us, and may its ghost continue to haunt those who would mistake cowardice for neutrality.”

Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation and acting director of Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, told The Washington Stand, “These offices are ideological strategies, not academic efforts. And to the degree these offices push ‘gender’ ideology, these offices and departments are divorced from biology — and otherwise do not prepare students to be better doctors, teachers, engineers.” He continued, “If students are disappointed when administrators close such offices, the students will have to choose to go somewhere else. It is well within officials’ responsibilities to only invest in the programs and instruction and cultural activities that they think will benefit students and prepare them for the future.”

The closure of Harvard’s LGBT office comes amidst a push from President Donald Trump and his administration to remove LGBT and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) influences from higher education. In an executive order issued in January, the day after returning to the White House, the president ordered the termination of all federal contracts and grants funding organizations or institutions that allow, encourage, or promote DEI and related initiatives. The president declared that DEI and LGBT initiatives on university and college campuses “undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system,” in addition to violating federal civil rights laws.

However, not all colleges and universities are complying with the president’s order. According to a report earlier this year, hundreds of colleges and universities are not dismantling their DEI and LGBT offices, and some are simply rebranding them, allowing them to carry out the same DEI and LGBT programs as before but under a different name. It would seem that Harvard is doing the same.

According to the Harvard Crimson, the university’s LGBT office staff, alongside staff from the defunct Women’s Center and the Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, have simply been relocated to the Office of Culture and Community (OCC). Quincy House resident tutor Katie B. Kohn pledged, during the “funeral” for the LGBT office, to use OCC funds and resources to continue the mission of the shuttered Office of BGLTQ Student Life. “Under the umbrella of Culture and Community, we are going to keep creating spaces for queer joy, for folks to be together, and we’re going to keep spending Culture and Community money on gay s***,” she said, objecting to the Harvard Crimson’s inclusion of her public remarks after the article’s publication.