Marquette’s Sex Obsessed Climate Survey

Everybody at Marquette is encouraged to complete a “climate survey.”  At the beginning of the survey is a list of definitions of terms used in the survey.

Most of the definitions are sensible enough.   For example: “Disability: A physical or mental impairment that limits one or more major life activities.”

But where sex is concerned, the list goes wild and defines all of the following:

• Asexual: A person who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of an individual.
• Assigned Birth Sex: Refers to the assigning (naming) of the biological sex of a baby at birth.
• Gender Identity: A person’s inner sense of being man, woman, both or neither. The internal identity may or may not be expressed outwardly and may or may not correspond to one’s physical characteristics.
• Gender Expression: The manner in which a person outwardly represents gender, regardless of the physical characteristics that might typically define the individual as male or female.
• Intersex: A general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.
• Pansexual: A person who is fluid in sexual orientation and/or gender or sex identity.
• Queer: An umbrella term for LGBT people that advocates breaking binary thinking and seeing both sexual orientation and gender identity as potentially fluid.
• Sexual Identity: Term that refers to the sex of the people one tends to be emotionally, physically and sexually attracted to; this is inclusive of, but not limited to, lesbians, gay men, bisexual people, heterosexual people and those who identify as queer.
• Transgender: An umbrella term referring to those whose gender identity or gender expression (previously defined) is different from that traditionally associated with their sex assigned at birth (previously defined)].

This seems a bit silly, and for the most part, that’s what it is.

But it does reflect the obsession of the politically correct, especially among college bureaucrats, who slice and dice the population into the most narrow groups possible. Each group, of course, is supposed to have a list of grievances, and each group needs a bureaucrat in the Provost’s office or Student Affairs to cater to their grievances.

Marquette’s Bizarre “Harassment” Training Getting National Attention

We broke the story here, and it’s been picked up by some national websites:  a Marquette online “training” program that supposedly warms employees about harassing behavior, but in fact tells them not to say anything that anybody, no matter how hypersensitive, might object to.

This was picked up by Campus Reform.

Another article appeared on the website Minding the Campus.

The latter article was noted and discussed at National Review Online.

Some of the comments on Minding the Campus are choice.  One commenter, for example notes that the course cautions people “Be alert to nonverbal clues indicating a colleague might not welcome certain conduct.”  He or she then notes:

At the same time, according to California, it is supposedly impossible for me to tell whether my sexual partner is okay with what we are doing based on nonverbal cues.

Okay, academia.

Another poster notes that one of the “harassing” images is a screen saver of a man who is shirtless, but fully clothed from the waist down.  He responds:

What if I have a crucifix with a shirtless Jesus? Is that offensive at Jesuit Marquette, too? Better investigate the chapel on campus!

This kind of ridicule is fully deserved by Marquette. But given the insular culture of the Marquette bureaucracy — and especially the part that specializes in “diversity” and “inclusion” — the University can be expected to blow this off and continue to do such silly things.

[Update]

Also noticing this fiasco is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is the premier organization in the nation protecting free expression on college campuses.