New Marquette Faculty Blog

Associate Professor of Theology Mark Johnson has blogged for a while, but he’s recently picked up the pace and turned to political subjects.

Check out, for example, his recent posts “What should Obama do? What does Hillary want?” and “The historical importance of Obama’s nomination.”

Will he turn his attention to campus issues? That would be dandy, although we have no idea whether he is so inclined.

Faculty bloggers at Marquette are terribly sparse. Some might say that that’s because most faculty have better things to do, but we think it’s because faculty are excessively reticent about engaging in public debate -- which can be rather rough and tumble.

Blogs are part of the common culture at Marquette, but not nearly so big a part, nor nearly so involved with the faculty, as they should be.

We look forward to reading his blog, and perhaps taking issue with him if we think he’s off-the-mark.

New Blogs from Marquette Law School Students

We always welcome new blogs on campus.

So we note there are two new blogs from Marquette Law School students.

It might make sense that law students are especially likely to blog, since blogging has taken much deeper root among law school faculty than among faculty elsewhere in the modern university.

If we had to speculate, we might guess that lawyers, unlike people in other professions, have to be good at sitting down and knocking out, in a rather limited time, a pretty decent piece of writing. This would make them the perfect people to blog.

At any rate, we have Brazen Maverick, from a first-year liberal student, and Roaches and Twinkies from one of his first-year conservative cohorts.

Both bloggers are currently pretty active.

We wish them the best, hope they enjoy the blogging and hope that they keep it up during the rest of their Marquette careers.

We especially encourage them to blog on campus events and issues, following in the footsteps of the now defunct Campus Tavern, and the still very active GOP3.COM.

Report, comment, air dirty laundry. It’s fun, and it makes Marquette a better university.

Blogs Come and Go

I just finished working on my blogroll, and sadly have deleted some quite inactive entries.

These include (on the right) Marquette Law School Federalist Society and Joseph Kastner’s Office of Homeland Security and leaning left (perhaps moderate left) We Live Our Lives Among Giants and Fourth Blog Politics.

Nothing personal. Students get burned out on blogging. Other people do too.

Happily, we have a new entry, Blogging in the Word from Political Science graduate student Jason Ardanowski.

This still leaves the Marquette campus with too few blogs. Particularly needed are undergraduate blogs that cover campus politics and expose the failures of the Administration.

GOP3.COM continues to do a dandy job, but there is no corresponding liberal blog, and the original three bloggers are getting older and a bit further from undergraduate life -- although Brian Collar is still an undergraduate and the other bloggers sometimes post great stuff.

Any undergraduate who wants to write and comment about campus politics (and broader politics) needs to know how much sheer fun blogging can be.

[Correction]

Brian Collar reminds me, in a comment, that he’s a graduate student now.

I knew that.

Really “Coexist?”

Boots & Kittens is a parody of Owen Robinson’s blog Boots & Sabers by a lefty.

Technically, it’s a copyright violation, since so much of Owen’s code was copied.

But in reality Robinson should be flattered that he’s important enough to parody.

Of course it’s unfair and shows a leftist bias. That’s the point.

But it does have one good image: a parody of the parody of the “Coexist” image that has been so controversial in recent days.



That’s probably a tougher form of coexistence than Christians getting along with Jews getting along with Muslims getting along with atheists.

The Death of Blogs?

From Ted Olsen at Christianity Today, a quote we could not resist:

As weblogs proliferated earlier this decade, Andy Warhol’s famous aphorism was modified to read, “In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.” Now it looks like Warhol was right after all: Thanks to widespread blog burnout, everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes.

Read the whole article, with its interesting observations.

It’s clear that blogging is not as trendy now as it was in the Spring of 2005 when we started the Marquette Warrior.

But there continue to be people with something to say, and people good at culling information from non-mainstream sources, and people not part of the mainstream media who can do good reporting. So if blogging isn’t trendy anymore, it’s not going to go away either.

New Blog on Marquette Student Government

This one is from Joseph Schuster, who is a conservative/libertarian, and had a radio show on Marquette radio last year.

It’s called “The MUSG Disconnect,” and as the name implies, it’s likely to be critical of student government.

Indeed, Schuster has the following statement on the masthead of his blog.

The Marquette University Student Government, affectionately known as MUSG is useless, it’s no secret, it’s just something that we at Marquette do not like to talk about. The purpose of this blog is to relate to the students of Marquette what MUSG does, or perhaps more accurately, does not do. Comments, and suggestions for postings are always welcome, contact me at joseph.schuster@marquette.edu.

It remains to be seen whether the blog will follow in the distinguished footsteps of the now defunct 1832/Campus Tavern, or equal the extraordinary record of GOP3.COM.

But we wish Schuster luck.

New Blog Roll Entry: Taking a Sharp Right

From UWM student and frequent writer for Frontpage Milwaukee Rebecca Kontowicz, a blog called Taking a Sharp Right.

Two recent posts of great interest:

• An account of how homosexual city workers in Oakland, California, got official city recognition and used the city e-mail system to promote “National Coming Out Day,” among other things. When a Christian group of city employees put up fliers opposing “all views which seek to redefine the natural family and marriage” a lesbian worker claimed this was discriminatory, and that she felt “excluded” and “targeted.” A court sided with the lesbian, although the Supreme Court may take this up, and hopefully overturn the decision. It is apparently alright to target and exclude Christians, but don’t you dare say anything that homosexuals object to!
  
  What we have here, quite simply, is an attempt by liberals to define as “discriminatory” the expression of any political opinion of which they disapprove.
  
  
• A new Federal policy calls for the removal of religious books from Federal prisons. Not all books, but the number available is now strictly limited. The policy is apparently aimed at radical Islamic texts that might incite violence on the part of inmates. Kontowicz approves of the policy, which we think is very shortsighted.

This is clearly a blog to watch.

Marquette Warrior Banned in China

With a hat tip to Jim Pawlak of Crusader Knight, here is a web site that will test in real time whether a given web site is banned in China.

It’s not perfect, since it apparently can’t distinguish between sites that are actually blocked by the Chinese government, and sites that can’t be gotten because of network problems or an overloaded server.

Still, we are quite happy to find ourselves to be (apparently) blocked.

We doubt they have heard of our little blog, and suspect they have blocked all Blogspot blogs.

(See below, and click on the image for a larger view.)

Some testing shows the Washington Post and Fox News to be available most of the time, which suggests either time-selective blocking (sometimes there is negative news the government wants to suppress) or that the web page is a bit unreliable, giving a fair number of false positives when testing for blocking.

The picture is rather different for the Wikipedia article on the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. It is blocked solidly and consistently.

Front Page Milwaukee Scoops Journal-Sentinel on Recruitment Center Investigation

When anti-war activists demonstrated in Milwaukee, some of them vandalized the Army Recruitment Center on Oakland Avenue near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Federal authorities are now investigating the incident, which might involve a violation of Federal law.

Just yesterday, Front Page Milwaukee, the web-only newspaper published in the Journalism Department at UWM, broke the story. Their article went online at 3:00 p.m.

The Journal-Sentinel finally got a Regional News Brief on the issue posted at about 9:00 p.m.

It seems the student journalists at UWM are ahead of the monopoly dead tree outlet yet again, just as the blogosphere was ahead of the paper in reporting the offensive comments of Michael McGee, Sr.

WNOV: McGee Suspended Indefinitely, Son to Take Over Show

It has been a local issue that went national: radio talker Michael McGee, Sr. welcoming the death of talk show host Charlie Sykes’ mother, and suggesting that Sykes himself killed her to inherit her money.

McGee’s station, WNOV, condemned the comments, and then (oddly) seemed to make excuses, saying that Sykes attacked McGee’s son, Michael McGee, Jr. Sykes did indeed attack the younger McGee, a Milwaukee Alderman, for very public and highly publicized misconduct.

For about two days, we have been wondering what the WNOV management would do. Now we know.

Just in from WNOV:

May 5, 2007

PRESS RELEASE

STATION OWNER SUSPENDS McGee SR.

Pursuant to a meeting with former Alderman Michael McGee Sr. and representatives from his production company, 860 WNOV owner Mr. Jerrel Jones is suspending McGee Sr. indefinitely. McGee’s son Alderman Michael McGee Jr. will be the host of the Word Warriors program.

“It is imperative that the community’s concerns are responded to immediately”, Jones said.

“Word Warriors program is an integral ingredient to the community’s cry for information and access. McGee Sr. will be suspended, but the programming will continue,” Jones said.

McGee, Jr., of course, is a chip off the old block. What Jones appears to have done is to try to appease both McGee critics and supporters in “the community.” Given the track record of the younger McGee, he can expect to have another embarrassing situation on his hands sometime soon.

Journal-Sentinel Editorial on Michael McGee Affair

The Journal-Sentinel, the lumbering local monopoly newspaper, has finally started to pay attention to the Michael McGee affair.

They posted an editorial condemning McGee, and commended the owner of WNOV for taking him off the air.

It will be determined tomorrow (Saturday) whether McGee will merely face a suspension, or will be banned from the station.

After posting a brief “Day Watch” entry yesterday (Friday) the Saturday edition of the paper has a full-fledged article written by Tom Held.

It seems the Mainstream Media is finally catching up to the blogosphere.

New Blog Roll Entry: The National Conversation

Just added to our blog roll, The National Conversation, by blogger James Harris.

Readers who listen to Charlie Sykes will know about “James from Sherman Park.” Yep. This is indeed James from Sherman Park.

Since Harris is black and conservative, a certain number of politically correct whites and race baiting blacks are going to consider him a traitor to his race.

We, however, think that it’s inherently demeaning to think that black people aren’t allowed to have different political opinions.

After all, we expect whites to disagree among themselves.

Of course, if varies by issue. It will be a cold day in hell when any significant number of black people decide that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a bad idea.

And blacks clearly lean in a liberal direction on economic regulation and social welfare spending. Here, however, there are a fair number of blacks who own businesses, or work for corporations that are the targets of liberal politicians (energy, pharmaceuticals, health care).

But on a variety of social issues rank and file black folks are not particularly liberal at all. Blacks are split down the middle on the death penalty. And there is an often hidden but intense condemnation in the black community of behaviors that make upward mobility for youth impossible: drug use, promiscuous sex, contempt for academic achievement and hostility toward authority.

Just listen to Bill Cosby give his talk in front of a black audience.

So blacks who are in the business of telling white liberals and leftists what they want to hear aren’t the only “authentic” voices of the community.

Marquette Rejects Students For Academic Freedom: More Coverage

Marquette’s refusal to recognize the campus Students for Academic Freedom has been covered by both student newspapers, and the campus blogs.

In The Warrior, an article by Mary Ellen Burke is titled “SAF denial dampers hopes for Student Bill of Rights.” It offers a very detailed and balanced account, with the history of student government actions seeking to protect academic freedom for students, and extensive quotes from SAF president Charles Rickert, Mark McCarthy, Dean of Student Development and Vice Provost Margaret Bloom.

“You have the right to remain silent — especially if you’re a student,” Burke observes.

The Tribune has a somewhat shorter article by Lindsay Fiori titled “OSD denies Students for Academic Freedom recognition.” Given the Tribune’s editorial position opposing SAF, the Fiori article is ironically a bit more favorable toward the organization than the Burke article in The Warrior. Fiori of course quotes the usual University spokespeople, but also quotes us, and includes extensive quotes from Rickert, including some real zingers. For example:

“Today was a defeat for the free marketplace of ideas at Marquette,” Rickert said. “It’s sad universities today are no longer places of civil and reasoned debate among different viewpoints.”

And further:

“This response means that throughout the course of 18 weeks OSD clearly did not hear what I was saying because they were either not listening or were trying to frame debates in ways SAF never meant,” Rickert said. “From the moment SAF applied, OSD was only looking for reasons to deny it. They were not helpful or specific on what to modify in our constitution and took two months to even give an initial opinion.”

The blogosphere chimed in as Daniel Suhr of GOP3.COM dissected Marquette’s decision. Suhr notes that the Office of Student Development disagrees with some of the stances of the SAF national organization, and then argues:

I entirely agree that MU should evaluate the national affiliate. However, in cases when a parent organization’s agenda conflicts with Marquette’s mission, the past practice has been to simply say that Marquette’s mission takes precendence in the specific areas of disagreement, not to deny the group outright. Thus, even though both the national Democratic Party and Amnesty International support abortion and gay marriage, we have College Democrats and AI on campus. If Marquette objected to certain parts of the nationwide SAF Information Center, common practice would have been to specify that the Marquette chapter could not advocate those objectionable parts of the national group’s agenda.

But of course, “common practice” can be ignored when the real intention is to stifle the group.

Suhr goes on to take issue with a reported comment of Mark McCarthy that “The main focus of such an organization is on academic freedom, which is really under purview of faculty.” Suhr responds:

This is typical of the administrators’ mindset - students are to be babied. They bring nothing valuable to campus but their tuition dollars and butts in the lecture hall chairs. Academic freedom is of interest to everybody! SAF argues that students need the freedom to express themselves in the classroom or in assignments without fear of ideological punishment. I suppose it should not be surprising that the administration that does not see a need for a student voice on governance issues does not believe students have academic freedom.

Also on GOP3, Brandon Henak urges readers to take action to support SAF by writing Marquette administrators.

Finally, talk show host Charlie Sykes links to one of our posts on the issue, and notes the irony of the situation:

Now, this is odd.

John McAdams has the story, including the newspeak explanation by MU bureaucrats that Students for Academic Freedom is inimical to. . . . academic freedom.

A fascinating glimpse of the academic mindset.

Fascinating, but all too typical, we are afraid.