Marquette’s Race and Ethnic Studies Program: Stacking the Faculty with Leftists, Diverting Students into Victim Studies

Yet another of the many “initiatives” at Marquette, and like most of them it promotes political correctness in a way that degrades the fundamental quality of a Marquette education: the Race and Ethnic Studies Program.

The university website explains:

Marquette University seeks to diversify its faculty and student body. In support of these goals, Marquette is planning a new Race and Ethnic Studies interdisciplinary program, and a hiring initiative to support the program is underway.

Translation: we want to hire a lot of new minorities as professors, and we might have trouble if we simply allowed more hires in traditional disciplines, driven by the need offer a balanced curriculum or allow reasonably sized classes. So we will define positions in a way such that minorities will be most of the applicants.

Here is the list of new positions:

Marquette University seeks six tenure-track faculty members in these areas:
Assistant Professor of Marketing (tenure track)
Assistant Professor of Multicultural Branding
Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Sciences – Sociology (tenure track)
Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies
Assistant Professor of Philosophy – Africana Philosophy (tenure track)
Assistant Professor of Philosophy – Non-Western Philosophy (tenure track)

As a Catholic, Jesuit university, our history and mission call us to provide higher education to first-generation college students. New programming and hiring, and plans to become a Hispanic-serving institution are only part of Marquette’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Needless to say, first-generation students who happen to be white will get short shrift.

The links to the job listings don’t work now, but we are including them in case they work in the near future.

Whose Interests Does This Serve?

The notion that you serve the interests of black and Latino (not “Latinx,” a barbaric politically correct term) students by having them study “Race and Ethnic Studies” is not merely risible, it’s absurd.

It achieves neither the traditional goal of a liberal arts education — “the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination, for the person’s own sake” — nor does it provide what parents often obsess about: preparing the student for a good job.

So why would minority students enroll in such a major? In fact, a lot will be sensible and major in something else.

But affirmative action, perversely, creates a market of this sort of major. Minority students, admitted under affirmative action, find themselves “over their heads,” especially in STEM fields, but often even in mainstream academic fields (political science, history). Thus they tend to gravitate to softer fields, such as education, communications or even the archetypal soft majors in victim studies.

There, sympathetic instructors hand out good grades, and the students marinade in a sense of victim-hood that allows them to rationalize their precarious situation, and avoid asking hard questions about public policy issues.

All this is in place of studying Plato, or Physics, or maybe accounting. These students are victims, alright. But they are victims of the politically correct campus bureaucrats who claim to be their allies.