Marquette: How Do We Deal With Students Who Don’t Accept “Social Justice” Indoctrination?

And e-mail today, sent to all faculty (emphasis added):

One aspect of Marquette’s mission is to form “leaders concerned for society and the world and desirous of putting an end to hunger and conflict” (Kolvenbach, 1989b, 59). The skills and awareness students need are inexhaustible. Whether in STEM, health care, law, communication, the humanities (philosophy, history, English, theology, social and cultural sciences, languages), or business, MU courses should prepare our students to be leaders who will address “the gritty realities of our world.” Many faculty have taken on this challenge with assignments, readings, problems, experiments, service learning, international study, observations, clinics, and social innovation projects. Some teachers experience resistance when they address issues of social justice.

Faculty are invited to prepare proposals for mini-workshops for this interdisciplinary faculty day that will showcase their ideas, resources, assignments, and successes, but also any pushback they experience in the classroom when they treat social justice topics and concerns. These will provide the grist for interdisciplinary conversations that will spark new ideas and ways to proceed.

The University Working for Justice

Wednesday, January 7, 2015—Faculty Conversations on Learning

AMU 157 and AMU 163 from 8:45 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Lunch included. Co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and Manresa for Faculty in the Center for Teaching and Learning

The goals of this day are to:

• Provide a framework for justice education in the Jesuit tradition
• Build faculty capacity to respond across the disciplines with learning experiences in the classroom
• Explore strategies for confronting roadblocks and pushback
• Engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and conversation about Marquette/Jesuit education goals

What are some of the examples of “pushback” that instructors might face?

We blogged about one just yesterday: a student who wanted to discuss gay marriage in class, and what told that any such discussion would “offend” any gay students and would be “homophobic.”

So this looks for all the world to be a workshop in “how do we deal with students who resist indoctrination.”

At places like Marquette,  “social justice” is merely code for a liberal or left political agenda.  It’s not just “we should care for the poor,” it’s “we should support every standard liberal and leftist idea about how to help the poor.” It’s not just “we should oppose racism,” it’s “all whites should feel guilty about their white privilege.”

And indeed, it’s about opposing some things (like genetic engineering of crops or globalization of markets) that promise to lift millions of the world’s poor out of destitution, since they are seen as benefiting capitalist corporations.

Among these folks, opposition to abortion is not  a part of social judtice.  Neither is opposition to gay marriage.  On the contrary, any opposition to gay marriage is called “homophobia.”

In short, these folks think that by invoking “social justice” they can pretend to be supporting the supposed Catholic mission of the university.  But in reality their agenda is identical to secular liberal and leftist elites.

If Marquette actually cared about “leaders concerned for society and the world” the university would welcome “pushback” from students directed toward their professors.  That would indicate students are thinking and critically analyzing.  It would indicate they are intellectually engaged.

It would indicate the nature of “social justice” is an open question, and people may have different ideas about it.

But that would be highly inconvenient for professors who want to indoctrinate.

Marquette Campus Leftists Attack Paul Ryan Budget

Not news: a bunch of mostly leftist faculty recently signed a letter attacking Paul Ryan’s budget plan. The Journal-Sentinel puffed the story as though college faculty being liberal and opposed to Republicans really was news.

Now what is news: a majority of those faculty who signed the letter also signed petitions to recall Scott Walker, according to Entitlement Mentality Monitor.

In spite of the use of the language of Catholic social justice teaching, the impetus behind the letter was merely your standard liberal-left politics.

Although there were some exceptions (one person whose name was on the letter opposed the hiring of lesbian dean candidate Jodi O’Brien, and was attacked for it) the list of signers is laced with people who oppose Catholic teaching on abortion, oppose Catholic teaching on homosexuality, favor gay marriage, and only use the phrase “social justice” to promote a liberal political agenda.

One piece of evidence of this can be seen by comparing the list of people who signed the letter attacking Ryan with a letter signed by dozens of Marquette faculty in the wake of the refusal of Marquette to hire an outspoken lesbian (and opponent of Church teaching) as Dean of Arts and Sciences. Signing this letter were twenty of the same people who signed the anti-Ryan letter.

Indeed, the anti-Ryan letter was signed by faculty who are at the forefront of the gay lobby on campus, including Nancy Snow and Ed de St. Aubin. Indeed, if one omits eleven faculty in Theology who signed the anti-Ryan letter but not the pro-lesbian dean letter, almost half (20 of 41) of the faculty who signed the anti-Ryan letter also signed the pro-lesbian dean letter.

Add to this the fact that some Theology faculty who did not sign the lesbian dean letter are quite leftist and politically correct. Brian Massingale, for example, is a promoter of the notion of “white privilege,” a concept designed to guilt or intimidate whites into accepting a whole array of leftist policies — on pain of being labeled a defender of “white privilege.” Robert L. Masson likewise uses the same strategy in his classes to promote a narrow leftist policy agenda. In fact, Masson uses Massingale’s book in his class.

Which puts into perspective the claim of the anti-Ryan letter to be reflecting Catholic social teaching. At a place like Marquette, Catholic teaching is virtually always invoked to support a liberal agenda — more government programs, more social spending, more income redistribution — and virtually never to support a ban on abortion, or upholding heterosexual marriage.

The people who sign such letters, in other words, are (with a few exceptions) merely liberals or leftists. The “Catholic” stuff is just window dressing.

Blacks Leaving Liberal States

From The American Interest:

Two milestones in the long, painful decline of the blue social model were reached this week and reported, of all places, in the pages of the very éminence grise of the monde bleu: the New York Times.

The first was a piece of national and historical news: The Census reported that waves of blue state blacks fled the stagnant job opportunities, high taxes and rotten social conditions of the mostly blue northern states to seek better lives for themselves in the south.

The Census story is a shocker. First, according to the Times, the Blacks leaving tend to be the “younger and better educated.” Second, the three states Blacks left in largest numbers don’t just include snake-bit Michigan; the other two are Illinois and New York. Within those states, Chicago and the city of the New York (widely considered among the most successful cities in the country) are the places Blacks are deserting. 17 percent of the Black flight from Big Blue is from the Empire State; after almost a century of trailblazing social policy, New York State has succeeded in creating the most hostile environment for Blacks in the country.

It gets worse. One would think that the Blacks who choose to stay in the cold, unwelcoming North would cluster in the cities where more liberal and humane governance models mandate such generous policies as “living wage” laws and where all the beautiful features of the blue social model can be experienced at full strength.

But one would be wrong. Blacks across the North are fleeing the urban paradises of liberal legislation and high public union membership for the benighted suburbs. The Times interviewed a professor to get the straight scoop:

“The notion of the North and its cities as the promised land has been a powerful part of African-American life, culture and history, and now it all seems to be passing by,” said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark. “The black urban experience has essentially lost its appeal with blacks in America.” [bold italics added]

When whites leave failing blue cities and states, the pundits call this racism: all those white Californians fleeing Nancy Pelosi’s utopia for less ambitious jurisdictions where ordinary people can do things like get jobs and buy homes are clearly pathetic trailer trash hicks too dumb, too selfish and above all too racist to understand the gloriously multicultural blue beauty of California today.

So what are we going to call the young, educated Blacks making similar choices? Dumb cracker racists?

The failure of blue social policy to create an environment which works for Blacks is the most devastating possible indictment of the 20th century liberal enterprise in the United States. Helping Blacks achieve the kind of equality and opportunity long denied them was more than one of many justifications for blue social policy: it was the defining moral task that has challenged and shaped American liberalism for the last fifty years.

The Census tells us that in the eyes of those who know best, these well intentioned efforts failed. Instead of heaven, we have hell across America’s inner cities. Blue economic policy has cut the creation of new private sector jobs to a trickle in our great cities, while the high costs of public union urban services (and policies that favor government employees over the citizenry at large) impose crippling taxes and contribute to the ruinously high costs that blight opportunity. All the social welfare bureaucracies, diversity counselors and minority set-asides can’t make up for the colossal failure of blue social policy to create sustainable lower middle class prosperity in our cities.

Most Blacks of course still vote blue at the ballot box, but more and more of them are voting red with their feet. They are betting in massive numbers that southern Republicans will do a better job of helping their kids get good educations, police their communities more fairly (see this article, where NYT columnist Charles Blow blames the Black flight from New York on the racist police), offer more affordable housing and create a better business climate. Over time, this is going to affect the balance of power in Black politics and pull the Democratic Party (and the national consensus) to the right. Reapportionment is already pulling political power toward the South; New York today has fewer electoral votes than it did at the start of the Civil War and it is going to lose two more House seats in the next division.

This story has some strong implications for the “social justice” crowd at places like Marquette.

You claim to represent blacks (and Hispanics and other minorities), but the policies you favor — high taxes and government spending, strong unions, government educational monopolies, overbearing regulation of business — stiffle opportunity.

But, by some strange coincidence, they help people like you prosper.

Are your motives really so pure as you want to believe?

Indoctrination in a Marquette Theology Class

A student of ours provided this e-mail, sent out by an unnamed professor in a Theology Class the student is taking.

The e-mail above bears a strong resemblance to a recent essay by leftist Theology Prof. Daniel Maguire. Maguire has confirmed to us that he sent the message to students.

Thursday, February 17, 2011 6:30 PM

This fits into the exam question on the triangle of justice.

The Ed Schulz Show on MSNBC, Channel 46 is on at 9:00 pm broadcasting from Madison. I’m not assigning that but you might find it of interest.

************************************************

Neoliberalism (neoconservatism) is the operating system in the political economy of the Right.

It has these characteristics:

1) “Possessive individualism.” Greedy individualism would describe it better. It embodies the Social Darwinism—survival of the fittest—mentality. It is “Greed is good” theory.

(2) It is anti-government, wanting to minimize the role of the government, and remove regulations. Therefore it stresses “privatization,” taking things out of government hands and giving it to private business. Following the neoliberal script, George W. Bush tried to “privatize” Social Security, handing over retirement benefits to the mercy of the stock market. Water supply has in some places been privatized; airports and roads have been targeted for privatizing.

(3) Neoliberalism is anti-unions. Reagan went after the air traffic controllers union. Governor Walker is going after public worker’s union--teachers, etc.-- denying them the right to collective bargaining.

(4) Neoliberalism asks us to put our trust in the market and in corporations and to allow them to have unfettered freedom.

In England, Maggie Thatcher was an apostle of Neoliberalism. The results were clear: wealth was shifted from the bottom to the top. When she entered office one in ten Britons were listed as below the poverty line. When she finished one in four were in poverty and one in three children.

Ronald Reagan was another devotee of Neoliberalism. As Kevin Phillips, a Republican analysys [sic] and former aide to President Nixon reported in his book The Politics of Rich and Poor: in the 1980s the top 10 percent of American families increased their average family income by 16 percent, the top 5 percent by 23 percent, and the top one percent by 50 percent. The bottom 80 percent of families and workers all lost something and the lower they were on the scale, the more they lost. The bottom 10% lost 15% of their already meager incomes.

Neoliberalism lacks a sense of social justice. It is basically opposed to sharing. Therefore it is wildly opposed to taxes regardless of what taxes do for the common good. It particularly opposes taxes for the wealthy. The billionaire Warren Buffett pays 17%; his secretary pays 30%. It is the opposite of Jesus’ “Blessed are the poor;” it is “Blessed are the rich.”

Remember Aristotle said “Justice holds the city together.” and Thomas Aquinas said “Justice consists in sharing.”

Neoliberalism is basically opposed to justice. It naturally opposes government since government enforces sharing, e.g. in taxes and in curbing monopolies.

The current demonstrations in Madison are in effect protesting neoliberalism.

As is typical with leftist professors, especially those in disciplines far removed from empirical social reality, this message is absurdly ignorant of the facts. For example, during the evil neo-liberal Reagan Administration, the mean income of the poorest 20% of the population increased. It was $10,682 in constant 2009 dollars in 1980, and $11,681 in the same constant dollars in 1989. Of course, the income of the top earners increased faster. But does “social justice” mean that we should envy and want to hurt affluent people?

Poverty rates in the U.K. are misleading, since they are usually measured as the percentage of people below (say) 40% or 50% of the median income. That way if everybody gets equally better off, poverty fails to decline. And if most of society gets better off, and low income groups remain equally well-off, poverty “increases” (notwithstanding that the poor are no worse off).

So this kind of data is perfect for people who want to play games with statistics.

Neo-liberalism

Of course, neo-liberal policies have been all the rage in recent years, and not just in the capitalist USA. European socialist countries have slashed top tax rates, and privatized nationalized industries. And they have done that not because greed has triumphed, but because socialist policies don’t work.

The opposite of neo-liberalism, in fact, is not compassion or social justice, it’s statism.

Indoctrination

All professors, us included, have their biases, and students can usually figure out what they are. But the majority allow views on both sides to be presented, and don’t push one side of contemporary political conflict.

We, for example, have not said a single word to our classes either in support of or opposition to the union protests in Madison.

But this professor tells students that this e-mail “fits into the exam question on the triangle of justice.” Students, apparently, are supposed to write about the evil of greedy neo-liberalism and how social justice demands that they side with union demands.

It would require a very gutsy student to take a different view in this class.

Conference on Social Justice Starts Today

Here is a flyer on a conference my colleague Ryan Hanley put together on “social justice.”

The term gets thrown around at any Catholic university, but is seldom analyzed. Look for a lot of analysis at this conference.

It is typically assumed by campus activists that everybody knows what “social justice” is, with the only question being whether you believe in it or not. It’s not, as the conference will make clear, nearly so simple.

Students Collect Soccer Balls For Iraqi Kids

From an e-mail sent to all Arts & Sciences faculty:

The College of Arts and Sciences Student Council is collecting used soccer balls in support of the “Kick For Nick” project. The balls collected will be sent to the children of Iraq in honor of Pfc. Nick Madaras, a soldier who was killed while serving there. While alive, Nick realized what a travesty it was that children in Iraq were literally playing soccer with bags of rocks, so he started a drive to collect soccer balls for the Iraq children in his hometown. Although he is now gone, the drive continues to go on, and, to date, thousands of balls have been sent to Iraq in his name.

The soccer balls will be collected in the College of Arts and Sciences office after spring break from March 25 - April 4th. For more information, please contact muartsandsciencescouncil@gmail.com, or check out http://www.kickfornick.com/.

Somebody might tend to denigrate this effort as small potatoes. After all, groups of Marquette students have been trying to bring socialized medicine to America, or close down the School of the Americas, or fight the evils of rape, racism and coffee that is not “fair traded.”

We, on the other hand, are impressed.

A good motto for students who want to make the world better might be “do something small, but do something that unequivocally will make the world better, even if just a little bit.”

The “social justice” crowd at Marquette, in contrast, is likely to do things that either will have no effect (because the lack the political power to get what they want) or make the world worse (because they are promoting things they don’t understand, but which make them feel good).

Is this campaign an endorsement of the Iraq War? Logically no, one can try to improve the lot of Iraqi kids while still wanting U.S. troops out of that country.

But honoring a fallen American soldier puts a huge distance between these students and the leftists who want ROTC off the Marquette campus. Moral clarity on issues like this must start with an appreciation of the honor and patriotism of the troops.

Globalization Helps the Poor

From Alvaro Vargas Llosa, and account of a conference he attended where leftists derided free trade.

MONTERREY, Mexico—Is global capitalism making the poor even poorer, or is it in fact rescuing millions of people out of their misery?

I recently had the chance to participate in a series of debates here about this issue organized by Foreign Policy magazine and Letras Libres, a Mexican cultural publication. Nothing I heard at that meeting changed my conviction that the glass is half-full despite the doomsayers who predict horrific calamities.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, poverty has been significantly reduced throughout the world. Two hundred years ago, the average income per person worldwide was the equivalent of less than $2 a day; the figure is $17 today. This fact is relevant to the current discussion on globalization because, even though the information technology revolution, biotechnology, the emergence of new world players and outsourcing may give us the impression that we are in the midst of something entirely new, we are simply witnessing a new phase in the process of innovation that is the market economy—and this began a few hundred years ago.

The fact that 20 percent of the world’s population is extremely poor should not make us forget that millions of lives have improved dramatically in the last three decades. Illiteracy has dropped from 44 percent to 18 percent, and only three countries out of a total of 102 included in the U.N.’s Human Development Index have seen their socioeconomic conditions deteriorate. China’s economy used to represent one-26th of the average economy of the countries that comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; today it represents one-sixth.

If globalization is so good, why is it that leftist activists -- including the “social justice” crowd around Marquette -- don’t like it?

The reason is simple. It’s the market helping the poor. It’s global business, and not government bureaucrats, nor political activists nor multinational organizations that are creating the benefits.

Thus the process is going on without the transfer of a massive amount of power to the people with whom the “social justice” crowd identifies.

And truth be told -- although they would never admit it, even to themselves -- those folks would rather that poor remain poor than for the poor to prosper in a way that doesn’t increase their power.