Liberal Hired for Top Marquette Administrative Position

From GOP3.COM, Daniel Suhr on a new administrator hired to work in Marquette President Robert Wild’s office.

The fellow is named Jeff Snell and his job will be “to define long-term strategic priorities of the university.” Yes, that’s vague as hell. But he’ll be another of the O’Hara Hall crowd.

Snell was chief operating officer of the Argosy Foundation. What is significant about this? Suhr explains:

Dollars to Marquette from Argosy (from 2002-2005, and later from news reports): $0.

They give lots to Stanford, Duke, Yale, Vermont, Wyoming, Amherst, and the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, but $0 to MU.

Second, we have the liberal political agenda of Argosy.

The Argosy Foundation, where Snell is COO, is for Milwaukee liberals what the Bradley Foundation is for Milwaukee conservatives. And it does lots of good work, don’t get me wrong, for instance supporting WisconsinEye and the Symphony. But it is an unabashedly liberal organization: “creating a force from the liberal side of the spectrum of even more significance than the Bradley Foundation has been on the conservative side.” The Business Journal described Argosy as a “supporter of liberal social and environmental causes,” and it is well connected to Team Doyle. Recipients of Argosy largess include Planned Parenthood, the Milwaukee LGBT Center, the Women’s Medical Fund (it pays for poor women’s abortions), Wisconsin Citizen Action, WAVE (gun control), the Feminist Majority Foundation, and a variety of environmental groups.

So is there anything wrong with hiring a liberal bureaucrat at Marquette?

It depends on how many other liberals you have.

As the conflict over the “Marquette Warriors” nickname, and the frequent censorship of conservative speech on campus shows, liberal groupthink already dominates O’Hara Hall as well as Student Development, Manresa, the University Ministry and so on.

Conservative viewpoints simply aren’t being heard in the Marquette administration, and University decisions suffer for it.

[Update]

Daniel Suhr has amended his original post with new information. Although he did a standard search, and failed to turn up any Argosy donations to Marquette, in fact, some Argosy money has flowed to Marquette:

Turns out I was wrong. Comment-leaver Greg prompted me to search MarquetteTribune.org, and it turns out Argosy has given money to Marquette to support the Institute for Human Rights Leadership. An email from the Foundation puts the support at $168,329.30. The email also noted the possibility for future partnerships between Argosy and Marquette.

To the extent those future partnerships help develop Marquette’s theatre and fine arts programs, I am for it. If Argosy supports conferences or institutes on important questions of politics and public policy that feature both sides of the ideological debate, I am for it. If Argosy supports new buildings or scholarships or (probably) endowed professorships, I am for it. In fact I very much appreciate it.

I hope, however, that Argosy does not simply pour money into funding left-wing causes, centers, and professors on campus. We have enough of those already, thank you, and they don’t need special support from foundations, they have our tuition dollars.

Moreover, I do not think that $160,000, when compared to Bradley’s $13 million plus, changes my first point at all.