Students in the University of Rhode Island's GLBT community are fed up with what they describe as their marginalization. They are seeking, among other resources, respectable headquarters, where they can invite professors, hold events, and develop a sense of belonging on the campus. Since a week-long protest this past fall, they are gaining ground. The needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students, already well-served at some colleges, are attracting attention on campuses around the country. Several gay teenagers' suicides in the fall, including that of a student at Rutgers University, raised awareness of bullying, as have other incidents of bias: a gay-pride flag shredded last year at Elmhurst College, in Illinois, and one burned at Albion College, in Michigan. Concerns about safety and comfort, recently reflected in the first national survey of the GLBT campus population, are leading more administrators to consider how their students feel and what kinds of programs and services may help. Last year the University of Cincinnati and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington hired advisers and opened centers to serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. Membership in the national Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals included 75 colleges in 2000; it represents 175 today. But a center is just one item on the LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index--"a national standard of LGBT- and ally-inclusive policies, programs, and practices"--maintained by the Campus Pride advocacy group. Among 54 questions used to generate a 0-to-5-star score, the tool asks: Does your college offer to match students with LGBT-friendly roommates? Does it have an LGBT alumni group? Campus Pride introduced the index in 2007, with 30 public ratings; since then, 260 colleges have released their scores, and 100 more have requested the free evaluation. Some administrators use the index as a checklist, as others do with guidelines for LGBT programs and services published in 2003 and updated last year by the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education. The first national report by the Q Research Institute for Higher Education, released in September, found that nearly a quarter of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer students and employees had experienced harassment at their colleges, and more than half had observed or perceived it. But that report did not drill down to the campus level. And the increasingly popular Campus Climate Index, with its five-star scale, measures services, not sensitivities. LGBT-climate research tends to rely on snowball sampling, in which subjects recruit their friends. That technique, especially as it favors people who are out of the closet, can generate a skewed sample. A new national survey this spring will try to set standards for comparison. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program, which administers the Freshman Survey, is beginning a Diverse Learning Environments Survey, based on 90 institutional-diversity-and-climate instruments. It will poll all students, asking, for example, how often they have interacted with somebody of a different sexual orientation, whether their classmates seem to appreciate differences, and how satisfied they are with the atmosphere. But so far only 18 colleges have opted to participate. Recognizing historic homophobia in the black community, top administrators have committed to complete the Campus Pride Index and form working groups to discuss related issues. At a summit in April, they will share their progress, and professors will present research on LGBTQ issues at historically black colleges and in the black church. In another effort, the UNCF (formerly the United Negro College Fund) is collaborating with the national Human Rights Campaign to expand awareness of gay issues on historically black college campuses.