Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas Has Been Approved by Student Government

A small committee of Marquette University Student Government plus Kate Kusiak of the Office of Student Development met last night, and approved Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas after a brief and rather non-controversial presentation about the group by Charles Rickert, President.

It remains to be seen what the organization can accomplish on campus, especially given the fact that Rickert will graduate this May. Thus, the future health of the group depends on younger members stepping up into leadership roles.

One potentially controversial idea that Rickert mentioned at the meeting was ending the policy whereby OSD has to approve each and every piece of literature that any student group distributes on campus.

OSD certainly isn’t going to like opposition to their power, but apparently is willing to let the student group agitate on the issue.

An earlier incarnation of the group, Students for Academic Freedom, proposed attacking ideological bias on campus, and OSD made it clear that that issue was not allowed to be even raised by a student group. Or at least, by a conservative student group.

OSD Approves Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas

Marquette’s Office of Student Development has approved the Constitution of Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas.

The approval came after OSD rejected a local chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, claiming it infringed on the “academic freedom” of faculty. Students for Academic Freedom submitted a Constitution that proposed that “note and object to” bias in all kinds of activities at Marquette, including teach-ins, faculty conferences, reading lists, and speakers’ programs.

OSD believed any such criticism should not be allowed.

The Constitution of Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas is sanitized, with the sorts of free expression that OSD objected to removed.

Note the huge irony here: Marquette approved Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas with the stipulation that a whole wide range of ideas, inconvenient for ideologically biased faculty and administrators, cannot be expressed.

The organization still has to be approved by Marquette Student Government. Such approval appears likely.

Students For Academic Freedom: Trying Again As Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas

In the wake of the rejection of their Constitution by the Office of Student Development, the students who tried to organize Students for Academic Freedom will submit a revised Constitution to OSD tomorrow morning.

The document is here.

The organization will now be called Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas.

The document has been sanitized of the things that offended the OSD bureaucrats, including especially plans to criticize ideological bias in instruction at Marquette, and affiliation with the national organization Students For Academic Freedom.

It remains to be seen how OSD will react to the new application. Students for a Free Marketplace of Ideas remains a group of conservative students unhappy at the leftist bias of discourse on campus, and particularly at the stifling of conservative speech.

And OSD bureaucrats remain liberals who don’t much like uppity conservative students.

But given that the document contains none of the things that OSD claimed were unacceptable, it will be difficult for people such as Dean of Student Development Mark McCarthy to find an excuse to reject it.

Any such rejection would be an utterly bald admission of ideological bias.

Not that Marquette is unwilling to be baldly ideologically biased.