Marquette: How Do We Deal With Students Who Don’t Accept “Social Justice” Indoctrination?

And e-mail today, sent to all faculty (emphasis added):

One aspect of Marquette’s mission is to form “leaders concerned for society and the world and desirous of putting an end to hunger and conflict” (Kolvenbach, 1989b, 59). The skills and awareness students need are inexhaustible. Whether in STEM, health care, law, communication, the humanities (philosophy, history, English, theology, social and cultural sciences, languages), or business, MU courses should prepare our students to be leaders who will address “the gritty realities of our world.” Many faculty have taken on this challenge with assignments, readings, problems, experiments, service learning, international study, observations, clinics, and social innovation projects. Some teachers experience resistance when they address issues of social justice.

Faculty are invited to prepare proposals for mini-workshops for this interdisciplinary faculty day that will showcase their ideas, resources, assignments, and successes, but also any pushback they experience in the classroom when they treat social justice topics and concerns. These will provide the grist for interdisciplinary conversations that will spark new ideas and ways to proceed.

The University Working for Justice

Wednesday, January 7, 2015—Faculty Conversations on Learning

AMU 157 and AMU 163 from 8:45 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Lunch included. Co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and Manresa for Faculty in the Center for Teaching and Learning

The goals of this day are to:

• Provide a framework for justice education in the Jesuit tradition
• Build faculty capacity to respond across the disciplines with learning experiences in the classroom
• Explore strategies for confronting roadblocks and pushback
• Engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and conversation about Marquette/Jesuit education goals

What are some of the examples of “pushback” that instructors might face?

We blogged about one just yesterday: a student who wanted to discuss gay marriage in class, and what told that any such discussion would “offend” any gay students and would be “homophobic.”

So this looks for all the world to be a workshop in “how do we deal with students who resist indoctrination.”

At places like Marquette,  “social justice” is merely code for a liberal or left political agenda.  It’s not just “we should care for the poor,” it’s “we should support every standard liberal and leftist idea about how to help the poor.” It’s not just “we should oppose racism,” it’s “all whites should feel guilty about their white privilege.”

And indeed, it’s about opposing some things (like genetic engineering of crops or globalization of markets) that promise to lift millions of the world’s poor out of destitution, since they are seen as benefiting capitalist corporations.

Among these folks, opposition to abortion is not  a part of social judtice.  Neither is opposition to gay marriage.  On the contrary, any opposition to gay marriage is called “homophobia.”

In short, these folks think that by invoking “social justice” they can pretend to be supporting the supposed Catholic mission of the university.  But in reality their agenda is identical to secular liberal and leftist elites.

If Marquette actually cared about “leaders concerned for society and the world” the university would welcome “pushback” from students directed toward their professors.  That would indicate students are thinking and critically analyzing.  It would indicate they are intellectually engaged.

It would indicate the nature of “social justice” is an open question, and people may have different ideas about it.

But that would be highly inconvenient for professors who want to indoctrinate.