Heterosexist microaggressions, student academic experience and perception of campus climate: Findings from an Italian higher education context

intolerant to a specific group might interfere with students’ social integration within the cam- pus community, regardless of their directly connection to the LGBQ+ community. Another potential explanation for this phenomenon is that seeing peers, faculty, and the overall institu- tion staff not treat minority group individuals as valued members of the campus community may lead heterosexual students to believe that they in turn will be treated in the same way and will not receive support when needed [10]. A novel finding in our study is that heterosexist microaggressions within university environments were associated with specific dimensions of social integration. This factor reflected the quality of students’ interactions with peers and stu- dents’ perception that faculty are concerned about students’ development. There was no signif- icant association between environmental microaggressions and students’ daily interactions with faculty. These differential effects suggest that heterosexist microaggressions within uni- versity environments are interpreted by students as something that involves interpersonal rela- tionships, in terms of horizontal relationships with peers. The role of faculty would be crucial to the extent that, if microaggressions occur, they may be perceived by students as a conse- quence of a lack of faculty empathy and concern for students’ well-being and development— perhaps due to a passive response from faculty in addressing and facing the problem—that reflects the message that denigration is normal. This conjecture is in line with previous

research on homophobic bullying at school, which suggested that teachers play an important role in creating and maintaining a supportive and inclusive learning environment [41]. Kosciw and colleagues [24], for instance, showed that LGBT students experienced less harassment and assault and better educational outcomes when their teachers intervened in incidents of homo- phobic bullying. In our study, interactions with faculty were not impacted by environmental microaggressions, perhaps because students experience these faculty interactions as strictly related to addressing the educational mission of colleges and universities, namely teaching. This interpretation is somewhat consistent with Mathies and colleagues’ study [27], which reported that microaggressions like “That’s so gay” and “No homo” were associated with aca- demic stress but not with students’ satisfaction about their academic and intellectual experi- ence at campus. Partially consistent with our second hypothesis, we found that heterosexist microaggres- sions on campus indirectly contributed to a negative perception of campus climate through the negative effect they had on social integration in both heterosexual and non-heterosexual students. Specifically, episodes of heterosexist microaggressions on campus were associated with students’ reports of low quality peer-group interactions and low perception of faculty concern for student development that in turn contributed to negative overall perceptions of campus climate. This finding suggests that students’ perceptions of campus climate for diver-

sity are not tied as strongly to experiences related to classes and studying, but, instead, they seem to depend on the way students experience relationships on campus. This is consistent with the study by Tetreault and colleagues [7], who stressed the importance of factors related to students’ daily lives (e.g., how they are treated in class, the support they receive from their friends), above and beyond the institution’s demographic profile, in determining a more posi- tive perception of the environment. Contrary to our third hypothesis, we did not identify that non-heterosexual students showed worse consequences than heterosexuals. However, while non-minority students, that are not directly targeted with heterosexist microaggressions, displayed a hostile perception of campus climate depending on the impact that those subtle forms of discrimination had on the quality of their social integration on campus, microaggressions directly contributed to the non-heterosexual students’ negative perceptions of campus climate, without necessarily impacting their social integration on campus. One possible explanation for this could be related to the fact that heterosexist microaggressions directly target sexual minority students, PLOS ONE Heterosexist microaggressions and campus climate PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231580 April 16, 2020 12 / 16