Bekah Hawley has taken her place in the UNH community seriously, participating in a number of organizations.
If you’re involved on campus, you’ve probably met Bekah Hawley. She’s an activist of all trades, dabbling in more activities and clubs than even she could fit into one sentence. She’s warm, enthusiastic and actively looking for more ways to understand and question the world around her. And she wants to inspire her peers to question society, too.
“My absolute passion is trying to get people to think of things in a new way,” Hawley said. “My passion is trying to get people to question their boundaries and see things from a different perspective, because, especially in this day and age, it’s easy to put blinders on.”
Hawley was born in New Jersey, but moved to Derry, N.H., at age nine with her mother, Diane, her father, Curt, and her younger sister, Rachel. With New York City less than an hour away from New Jersey, Hawley said she remembers growing up in a diverse, suburban area, where her neighbors strongly identified with their unique cultural heritage.
But Derry was where Hawley cites first recognizing what she refers to as “homogenized whiteness.” No longer did her neighbors identify strongly with religion, culture or ethnicity, something that a nine-year-old Hawley missed.
“When I was younger I didn’t have words for it, obviously,” Hawley said. “But as I grew older I sort of came to realize that the New England area is very deep in the idea of homogenized whiteness, that white people don’t have an ethnicity and different cultural experiences, which is very sad because it allows for more of a group thinking mentality and it doesn’t allow people to celebrate their own specific heritage.”
Also at age nine, Hawley first started questioning her sexuality. Hawley was sitting up late one night after her parents and sibling went to bed. While watching TV, she saw a lesbian couple and thought about how nice it would be to be in that kind of relationship. This single thought, according to Hawley, would dramatically affect her mood and state of mind for the upcoming years until she finally came out to a friend her freshman year in high school.
“When I was in middle school I didn’t really deal with it,” Hawley said. “I was depressed a lot, and I had a close group of friends but I didn’t really talk to them much either. I was just very alone.”
Hawley first came out as questioning, though this would later switch to bisexual, then lesbian, then queer, a process that Hawley stresses is a natural and normal part of celebrating and embracing one’s identity.
“Coming out is a continuous process. It’s not something you do once. I’m coming out to you right now or I did the other day,” Hawley said.
During the summer between her freshman and sophomore year, Hawley realized she wanted to start exploring her identity more in-depth. As a result, upon returning to class at Pinkerton Academy her sophomore year, she joined her school’s Gay, Straight Support Club (GSSC), her first taste of activism.
During Hawley’s sophomore year, she experienced some flak for coming out, including two unidentified people on two different days, trying to run Hawley and her partner off the road they were walking while yelling a derogatory word at them. These incidents, as well as most of the criticism Hawley received, pushed Hawley even more into activism.
“It mostly made me really scared,” Hawley said. “I feel constantly reminded that hate crimes do happen in New Hampshire, like people get murdered for not fitting within a gender binary.”
By the time her junior year rolled around, Hawley was running her high school’s GSSC.
“I joined my sophomore year and met some LGBTQ folks and I started getting more involved in activism,” Hawley said. I got really involved in that.”
During Hawley’s senior year in high school, she began a relationship with a woman, who would later transition to the opposite gender. Hawley made the decision to stay with this person, despite her leadership position in the GSSC and her identity as a lesbian, both of which were contradicted by being in a relationship with a male. Hawley and her partner received a lot of criticism for their decision, which only pushed Hawley more into activism.
When Hawley began applying to college, her first choice was Simmons College in Boston. Hawley settled upon UNH because of their sustainability program, which she described as having “a rich history in activism.” She also realized that UNH would be a more financially savvy college choice.
Hawley, now a sophomore, is a member of two sub-commissions of the president’s commission on the status of people of color- “What White Folks Can Do About Racism” and “The Status of Women.” She is also the business manager for the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), the keeper of peace of the Peace and Justice League, a Safe Zones facilitator and a volunteer for the Committee on Rights and Justice (CORAJ), which happens to be her internship this semester.
Hawley is also a triple major in psychology, women’s studies and queer studies, which she said applies almost directly to her involvement on campus.
Though Hawley’s life is pretty hectic, she finds time to sit and read, hang out with friends around campus and lend an ear to anyone and everyone who needs it.
Sarah McGraw, the executive director of SEAC and Hawley’s best friend, describes Hawley as warm and outgoing. She said Hawley is someone who immediately became one of her close friends when they met during the Power Vote campaign last year.
“One night I was really stressed out in the [SEAC] office,” McGraw described. “And I felt really overwhelmed with everything. Bekah really worked hard to cheer me up and make me laugh and feel like I wasn’t the only person who was freaking out and overwhelmed.”
Through academics, extracurricular clubs, volunteering and being a good friend, Hawley still describes herself as a bookworm who enjoys being alone at times and reading.
“I’m really flattered by the attention I get, but – and no one believes me when I say this but – I really do like to just sit in my room, by myself and read a book. I’m a very independent person,” Hawley said.
If you read on their facebook page for the stolen sign they accuse them of taking it. I just think that the blame game has gone too far on this campus and people see fraternities as a good scape goat. Yes some do some shady stuff, but at the same time one cannot instantly blame them. "They think it was maybe a fraternity stunt or scavenger hunt of some kind." - taken directly from their facebook page. I do hope that your sign does get returned because I understand how iconic it is for the university and the MUB.
It is time the faculity sucked it up like the rest of us on campus. This year staff over $40,000 received no raise, faculity received 5.5%. Take the 1.5% and be happy. Do You remember why you became a professor? I hope, to pass your knowledge on to the next generation. Some of you look like greedy individuals who can only think of the God almighty dollar and not the students you teach and mentor. If we keep increasing out tuition to pay for salaries students will look at other schools and then where will you be, on the street.
I don't think it's fair to compare UNH to UMass (Amherst, I assume) and UConn. Both those schools are considerably larger than UNH — 26,000 and 20,000 undergrads, respectively — while the other schools mentioned are closer to UNH's size, give or take 3,000 students. Massachusetts and Connecticut are also feeling the effects of the recession slightly more than NH is. I realize that UNH commonly uses those schools as comparators, but those two are just on a different level than our school.There are two other things I'm going to look up before I decide how I feel about this. First, how does the average UNH professor's salary compare to to other universities? It's probably in line with other schools, but if it's significantly lower, shouldn't UNH profs get that too? As some have said, if the pay is lower here, professors can quit and go to other schools — if they can find an open position somewhere else. But, if a professor leaves, the school will be left in the position of trying to attract a new teacher with lower-than-average salaries. Enact the raises and UNH remains competitive in keeping and hiring the best professors.Second, what percentage of UNH's budget goes toward paying the professors? Again, this could be that the professors are asking the university to dedicate an equal amount to paying educators at UNH as they are paid at other schools. If UNH only dedicates 15% of the budget to prof pay and the other schools all dedicate 20%, why shouldn't that be changed? Not to sound Beck-ian, but I don't know and that's something that should be looked at.Neither of those questions deal with the larger problem of education funding from the state, which I think was something like 2 percent (and that's for all schools, not just colleges). California students staged huge protests yesterday because fee hikes raised they amount they pay per year for school to around $11,000. Meanwhile, that's close to what UNH students have been paying for tuition alone for years, and it continues to rise. If Governor Lynch and our state reps don't start working to increase education funding in the state, all the groups involved, students, professors and administration, need to start showing the kind of outrage that California showed yesterday.
The whiny, lazy, faculty all need to get fired. I haven't seen a more wanna-be-entitled bunch anywhere I have worked. They don't deserve any raises, but instead a pay cut. The rest of the staff had a mandatory salary freeze that will last probably 2 years at least. Faculty also get the bonus of cheaper benefits than the rest of the staff. To top it off they are whiners and complainers about anything not in their contract or if they feel the least bit slighted by the administration. They got out of taking mandatory sexual-harrassment training that everyone else on staff had to take, since somehow their union filed a grievance with the administration that it wasn't required in their contract. The entire training was online and took less than an hour but that's too much for those slackers. Tenure indeed is the only thing that keeps many of them employed, and it's a concept that needs to get thrown out. Many of them are dead wood, not bringing new ideas to the table and too 'busy' to try anything new, despite having many grad assistants and others to do all their real work, and the most over the top support structure of any organization I have seen. Yet their greed continues unchecked! Ugh! Good riddance!
How quickly things change. Just last week, when editorializing about a group of campus perverts, the attitude of the editors was: "we also don’t think it’s any of our business to judge an organization just because their activities are a shock to our system." Seven days ago we were advised to "shackle our judgment" and told that the campus S&M crowd "deserves respect." Now, a mere week later, when the same editorial board concludes that the UNH faculty union's collective bargaining position is "shocking," what do the editors do? Take their own advice and "shackle their judgment?" Offer respect to the faculty? Conclude that the negotiations are none of their business? No, none of these. Instead, the hypocritical editors tell "whining" and "greedy" faculty they are lucky to have a job, and should be satisfied with whatever the administration considers to be a fair offer -- because, presumably, the administration ALWAYS tells the truth about university finances, and ALWAYS treats the employees of the university fairly.Why not spend some effort actually learning the facts regarding the financial situation of the university -- revenues from the state, tuition increases, higher enrollments, grant money? Why not report on the value of the faculty and the university as an economic engine for the state? Why not investigate both the enormous increase in administrative salaries and the bloated growth in new administrative positions over the last two decades? Why not write about the relative compensation of your faculty compared to those with similar education, training, and experience in other fields? I guess these tasks were too challenging. It's just easier to call faculty names. Everybody loves free-market capitalism as long as the managers and administrators get to call the shots and the workers remain docile and content with whatever the bosses decide they deserve. But, when workers assert their rights and engage in labor negotiations as equals -- well, that is just unacceptable to our enlightened editorial masters. You're all doing a great job of learning how to be corporate lap dog journalists. Oh, and you spelled "principal" incorrectly.
 "Photo: Amanda Beland")
 "Photo: Amanda Beland")
and 
