Marquette Bureaucrats Conspire to Undermine Ben Shapiro Speech, Encourage Fraud

It just broke.

Of course campus leftists don’t like the fact that conservative Ben Shapiro is speaking on campus. But how far are they willing to go to undermine him?

And are Marquette officials willing to conspire to encourage fraudulent activity to undermine him? The answer is “yes.”

A leftist staffer from Marquette’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies found out about Shapiro’s talk, and phoned “one of the directors of diversity on campus.” She was told to reserve a seat online, and then not go to the talk, in order to “take a seat away from someone who actually would go.”

The same staffer responded to a comment by Susannah Bartlow (who was fired in 2015 from her Marquette job for approving a mural honoring a black militant cop killer in a Marquette office), noting that someone who is not a student could register as a student and take a seat from somebody who might want to come since “they can’t tell, quite honestly.”

Marquette’s Motivation

One might at least credit Marquette for allowing Shapiro to speak (but how much “credit” should a university get for allowing free speech on campus?), but in fact the Facebook post asserts that Marquette let him speak “because of the backlash DePaul University had with not allowing it.”

In other words, Marquette bureaucrats, in their hearts of hearts, would have liked to forbid Shapiro speaking, but were worried about the “backlash.” Simply wanting diverse opinions to be heard was not something they much cared about.

Young Americans for Freedom

Young Americans for Freedom, the student group sponsoring the event, knew about this last Thursday, but held off publicizing it, instead taking it to Corey Lansing of the Office of Student Development. That office has not responded.

Lansing did not respond to an e-mail from us asking what the status of the case is.

Marquette employees (the staffer from Marquette’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies and “one of the directors of diversity on campus”) should be fired for encouraging fraudulent behavior in order to sabotage a campus speaker.

But given Marquette’s tolerance of assaults on free speech from the left, we don’t expect that to happen.