Marquette Honors Program Will Not Sponsor FemSex

We have it from Andy Brodzeller, of the Office of Marketing and Communication: the Honors Program will not be sponsoring the FemSex Program this semester. This reverses an earlier decision of Honors to do exactly that.

Brodzeller explained that “the context from last semester” was “shared with the Honors Program,” by the Office of the Provost, and the Honors Program “decided” not to sponsor FemSex.

Was the “Honors Program” — meaning Director Amelia Zurcher — hiding in a cave last semester, such that the program didn’t know the context?

Or were they flatly ordered by the new Acting Provost, Margaret Faut Callahan, not to sponsor the program.

Last semester, the program was to be sponsored by the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. After an uproar in the local media, and numerous complaints, the Administration canceled the sponsorship by that Center.

Brodzeller said that the women who wanted to mount the program had been in discussions about other ways of getting it on campus, for example, via Student Affairs. Presumably this would mean that a recognized student organization might sponsor it.

[Update]

Andy Brodzeller sends the following response to this post:

I did notice you have a blog post up already, and want to clarify it was academic leadership in the college that met and shared the context from last spring with the Honors Program. – Andy

[Update]

Chris Miller, Vice President for Student Affairs says:

We have received no inquires with regard to this program.

This, of course, does not mean that it won’t happen.

[Update]

The University released the following statement about the decision:

As a Catholic, Jesuit university, Marquette supports the educational and intellectual exploration of issues regarding gender and sexuality. Early this week, a student-led Female Sexuality workshop was promoted on campus with sponsorship from an academic program. Following a discussion with the program about academic sponsorship, including the requirement of faculty presence, the program chose not to continue sponsoring the Female Sexuality workshop.

While it was evident that changes to the workshop outline were made since spring, additional changes were needed to align with Catholic teaching. We understand that our students engage in discussions on gender and sexuality, but when they happen as part of a university-sponsored event, we must address these topics in the context of our Catholic faith. We continue to be confident that we will find mutually respectful ways to engage in these important discussions in a way that is consistent with our mission and identity.

That is quite a good statement, so far as it goes.

The problem is that this program got as far as it did, first getting sponsorship from the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, and then (when that was pulled) from the Honors Program.

So when subject to extreme provocation, and when an attack on the Catholic nature of the University creates enough of an uproar, the Administration will come down on the side of Catholic teaching.

But it remains disturbing that several parts of the University (Honors and the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center are far from the only ones) are flatly opposed to Catholic teaching on sexuality, and will undermine that teaching when they can get away with it.

FemSex is Back at Marquette

[Updated on September 16 - see below]

But not with the approval of the Marquette Administration.

The bawdy, promisculty-encouraging “workshop” where all sorts of things sexual are concerned, and nobody is supposed to be “judgmental,” will be held on campus this fall.

The version back in the Spring semester was sponsored by the Marquette Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. It was cancelled when an uproar over the program caused the Marquette administration to cancel it.

The program featured activities such as having the participants create a piece of “erotica,” and coloring in the “cunt coloring book.” We discussed the program in detail last spring. According to the course syllabus:

Themes include pleasure, health, gender, consent, boundaries, privilege, power, body image, communication, race, class, orgasms, masturbation, sex, kink, and sexual identities.

The version this fall will be sponsored by the Honors Program (although Honors provides no funding). This supposedly does not represent a reversal of policy by the University. Rather, academic departments are allowed to decide on their own programs (a matter of academic freedom), and sponsorship by a department does not constitute university endorsement.

The Honors Program is controlled by the English and Philosophy departments, two of the most politically correct departments on campus.

[Update]

Brian Farley has challenged one part of the above post, asking:

The Honors Program? Really?

So academic freedom allows departments to do whatever they want, no matter how academically dubious, anti-Catholic, etc.?

Brian has a point here.

None of the traditional norms about academic freedom say that anybody on a university campus has the right to say anything any time they want. And none of them say that a university (or any division thereof, such as the Honors Program) has to sponsor any particular speaker, workshop, or discussion group.

The traditional norms of academic freedom apply to faculty. And they protect faculty only when speaking in their area of professional expertise. Those norms would not protect a math professor who wanted to pop off about how evil the Tea Party movement is. They would mean, for example, that a professor, teaching a course on the Ethics of Sex would have a right to say that homosexual acts are perfectly moral and licit (contradicting Catholic teaching).    They would not require any department, program or division of any university to sponsor a program pushing that point of view.

Those norms do not apply to persons with no appropriate academic credentials giving a course that is not part of the curriculum, gives no academic credit, and doesn’t have any particular academic legitimacy.

In short, the Honors Program sponsored this program because they wanted to. And the University allowed it because they chose to, not because they had to. The Honors Program is run by Amelia Zurcher, a faculty member in English and one of the people who signed a statement supporting the hiring of the aggressively lesbian Dean candidate, Jodi O’Brien.

Marquette has allowed departments to sponsor “The Vagina Monologues,” which it has not allowed recognized student groups to perform with official recognition. That raunchy play has been sponsored by the Honors Program, and Social and Cultural Sciences (Sociology).

One could view Marquette’s acceptance as a principled respect for the autonomy of departments. Saying “the autonomy of departments” is a more precise formulation than “academic freedom.”

But then, one could view this as a cynical policy to distance the Administration from distasteful stuff, while not getting the politically correct crowd on campus too mad. But if this were truly a Catholic university, the Administration would be willing to make the politically correct crowd mad.

And it would not give control of the Honors Program to those folks.