Marquette Backs Away from Language About Student “Resistance” to Indoctrination

This started when a Marquette official sent out a notice about a campus speaker. The title of his speech was listed as “Freedom Dreams Now: Black Lives, Brown Lives, Native Lives: All Lives Matter!” Since “All Lives Matter” is politically incorrect, she quickly sent out, less than an hour later, a “correction” and “apology” that changed “All Lives Matter” to “Whose Lives Matter.” Here is the first e-mail, and here is the abject apology.

But there was something else in both versions of the e-mail that we found objectionable. Quoting the e-mail:

The goals of this interdisciplinary all-campus faculty day are to:

• Provide a framework to discuss the social movements around African American, Latinx, and Native American lives
• Explore strategies for responding to student resistance to learning about the protest strategies of these groups
• Engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and conversation with faculty and students about the impact of these movements at Marquette and the Milwaukee community

Keynote by Joseph Brown, S.J.,
Director of the Africana Studies Department,
Southern Illinois University.

We observed:

Particularly arrogant is the language about “strategies for responding to student resistance to learning about the protest strategies of these groups.” Translation: students might resist being indoctrinated with a Black Lives Matter agenda, and so such “resistance” must be overcome. For these folks, there is no legitimate disagreement with their agenda.

Today

Earlier today, we got another reminder of the event, and the list of “goals” was a bit different:

• Provide a framework to discuss the social movements around African American, Latinx, Native American, Muslim lives and others on the margins
• Explore strategies for responding to student responses to learning about the protest strategies of these groups [emphasis added]
• Engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and conversation with faculty and students about the impact of these movements at Marquette and the Milwaukee community

Marquette, it seems, does not want to admit that students might resist indoctrination. Or even that it is indoctrination.

Joseph Brown, S.J.

But indoctrination it certainly is. Brown, it seems, is an extreme leftist. An observer of a talk he gave at Boston College described his comments:

Fr. Brown, head of the Black American Studies Program at Southern Illinois University, urged fellow Catholics and educators to remember King’s legacy by meeting their obligation to love the less fortunate. He also challenged Boston College to institute a “humanities core for the 21st century” that would require students to take two courses apiece in black studies, women’s studies and Hispanic studies, as well as courses in Native American, Asian and other multicultural topics.

Right. Who needs courses in math, science, philosophy or anything else when you can get 30 semester hours or so learning how straight, white, cisgender males have always oppressed everybody else.

He goes on:

In the course of his remarks, Fr. Brown sharply criticized what he described as the injustice inherent in the American capitalist system, and compared the current political era with the 1890s, when post-Civil War civil rights laws were rolled back and Jim Crow became entrenched.

“There is a profit to be made from inequality. That’s the American way of life,” said Fr. Brown. He maintained that those on welfare are not there as a result of “moral failure,” but are kept there by the forces of capital as a labor reserve to keep the employed in check. “You’ve got to keep the mob as a threat to control those who work for you,” he said.

He also cited several large American corporations that he claimed profit by keeping young black men in jail, and suggested that college graduates who go to work for such corporations are complicit in an economic system that is the modern-day moral equivalent of slavery.

Fr. Brown added that King’s most oft-quoted phrase has been reduced to meaninglessness.

. . .

“He didn’t get killed because he said, ‘I have a dream,’” Fr. Brown said of King. “He got killed because he said we have to restructure the economy of America.”

The writer goes on to say that Brown’s “strident and sometimes tongue-in-cheek delivery drew an enthusiastic response from the audience.”

It would get an enthusiastic response at Marquette too, but only because leftist students will be the vast majority of those who attend. So instead of staging a program that might present alternative views, and engage the interest of a broad range of students, Marquette has opted for extreme leftists such as Brown, Angela Davis, documentaries about how it is evil to lock up black criminals, and a “Mission Week” that is equally propagandistic.

Brown, by the way, is a supporter of the gay agenda within the Catholic Church. More his his thoughts (unfortunately in verbose and pretentious prose) can be found on his blog.

Conclusion

The use of the word “resistance” was a Freudian slip by Marquette bureaucrats. They know that many students (if they are unfortunate enough to even be exposed to these speakers) will resent the extreme leftist indoctrination. And a vigorous airing of alternative viewpoints would undermine the entire project. So the students must be made to conform. If they resist one-sided persuasion, the guilting and bullying will begin. Resistance to “social justice” must be expunged.