Conservative Student Leaflets Class of Leftist Theology Instructor

From GOP3.COM, a post by Brian Collar:

To the students of Theo 001, Section 1021 (along with our regular readers):

Thanks for visiting GOP3.com based on the information sheet given to you this morning before you entered your classroom.

If you would like another copy of the “Best of” list of Simon Harak’s zany quotes, compiled by myself and co-blogger Daniel Suhr, download this PDF document and print it out. Also, we encourage all of our regular readers to review some of Harak’s outrageous remarks.

Read the rest for more details of Harak’s extreme leftist views.

We asked Collar about the reaction to his leafleting. He responded:

Students were pretty miffed, as I knew they would be. One liberal kid got all huffy about the fact that I was handing them out (“How would you know this stuff if you haven’t had his class” etc). I then said that I was warning the class before they had to hear misrepresentations of the Catholic faith and accusations that American forces in Iraq had indiscriminately killed millions.

Then the kid retorted that we had caused any number of atrocities in Iraq. To which, beautifully, this other freshman, who I assume is here on the GI Bill, became angry and said, “I’ve been to Iraq, that’s not true. I’ve been in the military for six years.” The girl couldn’t have been more than 5’1”, it was awesome! She went on for a couple more seconds.

Harak didn’t show up until a few minutes before his class. I went up to him and gave it to him. “A little bit of activism,” I managed to get out. He looked at me, looked at the document, and said “Well isn’t this interesting” and then walked into the classroom. I stayed around for maybe 2-3 more minutes handing them out to students as they entered the hallway to go to his class.

I ended up handing out about 30, and there were 38 students in the class according to Checkmarq.

Remarkably, even though it was nearly 3 hours ago, I haven’t had a single email response on the blog or in my personal email, and no one has called me.

We’ve never heard of this happening before at Marquette.

It has to be pointed out, however, that leftist campus activists on many campuses in the 60s not only did things like this, they actually disrupted the classes of professors whose views they disagreed with.

So we’ll see how people at Marquette react to this.

Collar ends his post with an appeal to Marquette students to drop Harak’s class.

But fortunately, you at least do not need to subsidize Harak with your own time. You still have the opportunity to switch out of Harak’s Theo 001 course and into another course. Call up the College of Arts and Sciences at 288-7059 and ask to get into another Theo 001 class — they can get you in, even if another class is full. Or change to another class required by the Core Curriculum.

Is this appeal going to work? Almost certainly not. Marquette students don’t particularly mind controversial professors. Conservative students, who might be inclined to drop Harak, are probably even more tolerant than liberal students in this regard.

In fact, the publicity is likely to increase Harak’s enrollment, if it has any effect at all.

Is this a violation of Harak’s “academic freedom?”

When Students for Academic Freedom tried to organize on the Marquette campus last year, the Administration shut them down on the grounds that they might criticize the liberal and leftist bias of professors and programs. So Marquette’s position was that “academic freedom” does not include the right of students to criticize professors for bias.

But of course, students are perfectly free to criticize professors for bias at places like RateMyProfessors.com and the now defunct DogEars.

Campus leftists, for their part, were quite happy to picket and leaflet when the Law School brought Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to Marquette to speak.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the campus left claimed that “academic freedom” applies to professors, but not to students and not to outside speakers. In other words, it only applies to the most liberal and leftist group that might want to express themselves on a college campus.

[Update:]

Harak declined to respond to our request for an “on the record” comment about this issue.