Marquette on Drudge — Again
If you are going to get bad publicity, the last place you want to see it linked is on the Drudge Report, a hugely popular news aggregator. We’ve seen reports of daily newspapers in mid-size cities having their servers melt down because of the traffic that a link on Drudge creates. (Not literally melt, you understand.)
So it can’t have pleased Marquette officials when a link to the Breitbart story on their attempt to fire us appeared on Drudge.
As has been typical in the media, the headline gets the story wrong. We didn’t “defend man-woman marriage,” merely the right of a student to express opinions on the subject without being demeaned and bullied.
The Drudge link is the second one in less than a year. The last time was when the story broke that Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center had, painted on its wall, a mural glorifying cop killer and terrorist Assata Shakur.
Thus, the narrative of Marquette being a place dominated by intolerant political correctness is gaining steam. Will this hurt Marquette?
Many kinds of institutions can be as politically correct as they want with impunity. Ivy League universities, for example, are so prestigious that they can do almost anything and still attract a massive number of applicants. If you can get yourself admitted to Yale, you want to go to Yale, and will tolerate the political correctness.
Public universities, likewise, have a captive clientèle consisting of families that can’t (or don’t want to) pay the high tuition of a private university. Especially if they doubt that the private university provides a better education.
But Marquette, as a mid-level institution (ranked in the top 100 nationally, but not in the top 50) which markets itself as a “Catholic university” and has high tuition, may be especially vulnerable when the notion that it’s actually Catholic becomes more and more transparently untrue.
So it can’t have pleased Marquette officials when a link to the Breitbart story on their attempt to fire us appeared on Drudge.
As has been typical in the media, the headline gets the story wrong. We didn’t “defend man-woman marriage,” merely the right of a student to express opinions on the subject without being demeaned and bullied.
The Drudge link is the second one in less than a year. The last time was when the story broke that Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center had, painted on its wall, a mural glorifying cop killer and terrorist Assata Shakur.
Thus, the narrative of Marquette being a place dominated by intolerant political correctness is gaining steam. Will this hurt Marquette?
Many kinds of institutions can be as politically correct as they want with impunity. Ivy League universities, for example, are so prestigious that they can do almost anything and still attract a massive number of applicants. If you can get yourself admitted to Yale, you want to go to Yale, and will tolerate the political correctness.
Public universities, likewise, have a captive clientèle consisting of families that can’t (or don’t want to) pay the high tuition of a private university. Especially if they doubt that the private university provides a better education.
But Marquette, as a mid-level institution (ranked in the top 100 nationally, but not in the top 50) which markets itself as a “Catholic university” and has high tuition, may be especially vulnerable when the notion that it’s actually Catholic becomes more and more transparently untrue.
Labels: Academic Freedom, Assata Shakur, Breitbart, Drudge Report, Intolerance, Marquette University, Marquette Warrior, Political Correctness
posted by John McAdams at 6:25 AM
4 Comments:
I guess that "tenure" now means that you have the right to parrot the ruling class and nothing more.
Marquette is a pitiful excuse for a Catholic university, much less a university if a student is not allowed to use their Freedom of Speech. Professor McAdams should NOT apologize as he did nothing wrong. Dr Lovell and Cheryl Abbate should be the ones at charge here for her crime of censorship! Stand strong Professor! You have a lot of people baffled and disgusted over Dr Lovell and Cheryl Abbate's disdain for freedom of thought, and Biblical teachings.
FYI: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/an-open-letter-to-archbishop-jerome-listecki/
Professor: Since we are talking about a private catholic university, It's ok to sensor students or shall I say stop them in their tracks to correct their premises. They're clueless and will reach false conclusions until they have a strong foundation to formulate correct conclusions. Obviously no one sensored your assistant prof while she was going through school and was allowed to develop false conclusions on marriage. But I'm actually more curious how the sensoring was done by the assistant prof. All I envision is dr evil shushing his son from the movie Austin powers.
But the deeper problem here is that Catholic universities in the US have to decide if being Catholic and teaching the true core values of Catholic Church at a Catholic universitie is more important than abandoning their Catholic values so as to compete with the secular universities such as the Harvards, Browns, and Berkley's.
If the Catholic universities choose to abandon core Catholic values to compete with the secular world then maybe it's time my holy Catholic church begins sensoring the presidents and faculty of these universities.
DC. - warrior grad '86
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