Marquette’s Race and Ethnic Studies Program: Stacking the Faculty with Leftists, Diverting Students into Victim Studies

Yet another of the many “initiatives” at Marquette, and like most of them it promotes political correctness in a way that degrades the fundamental quality of a Marquette education: the Race and Ethnic Studies Program.

The university website explains:

Marquette University seeks to diversify its faculty and student body. In support of these goals, Marquette is planning a new Race and Ethnic Studies interdisciplinary program, and a hiring initiative to support the program is underway.

Translation: we want to hire a lot of new minorities as professors, and we might have trouble if we simply allowed more hires in traditional disciplines, driven by the need offer a balanced curriculum or allow reasonably sized classes. So we will define positions in a way such that minorities will be most of the applicants.

Here is the list of new positions:

Marquette University seeks six tenure-track faculty members in these areas:
Assistant Professor of Marketing (tenure track)
Assistant Professor of Multicultural Branding
Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Sciences – Sociology (tenure track)
Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies
Assistant Professor of Philosophy – Africana Philosophy (tenure track)
Assistant Professor of Philosophy – Non-Western Philosophy (tenure track)

As a Catholic, Jesuit university, our history and mission call us to provide higher education to first-generation college students. New programming and hiring, and plans to become a Hispanic-serving institution are only part of Marquette’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Needless to say, first-generation students who happen to be white will get short shrift.

The links to the job listings don’t work now, but we are including them in case they work in the near future.

Whose Interests Does This Serve?

The notion that you serve the interests of black and Latino (not “Latinx,” a barbaric politically correct term) students by having them study “Race and Ethnic Studies” is not merely risible, it’s absurd.

It achieves neither the traditional goal of a liberal arts education — “the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination, for the person’s own sake” — nor does it provide what parents often obsess about: preparing the student for a good job.

So why would minority students enroll in such a major? In fact, a lot will be sensible and major in something else.

But affirmative action, perversely, creates a market of this sort of major. Minority students, admitted under affirmative action, find themselves “over their heads,” especially in STEM fields, but often even in mainstream academic fields (political science, history). Thus they tend to gravitate to softer fields, such as education, communications or even the archetypal soft majors in victim studies.

There, sympathetic instructors hand out good grades, and the students marinade in a sense of victim-hood that allows them to rationalize their precarious situation, and avoid asking hard questions about public policy issues.

All this is in place of studying Plato, or Physics, or maybe accounting. These students are victims, alright. But they are victims of the politically correct campus bureaucrats who claim to be their allies.

Student Support for Marquette Warrior

We are rather gratified that, in our dispute with Marquette and politically correct leftists on campus (and across the nation) we have gotten support for a fair number of Marquette students.

First, there is a petition supporting us.

https://www.change.org/p/students-reinstate-john-mcadams

Second, Turning Point USA is sponsoring a demonstration supporting us, scheduled for Monday at 11:00 a.m. at Zilber Hall on the Marquette campus.

We expect to be there. It’s not a great day for a demonstration (cold, and with students gone for Christmas break), so we will greatly appreciate the folks who show up.

The Shinigans: Marquette Students’ Irish Band

Having retreated to the Union cafeteria this past Friday with our laptop computer hoping to get some undisturbed work done, we were at first slightly annoyed to find a band performance about to start.

But hanging around, thinking that we could ignore the distraction, we quite soon found ourselves enjoying The Shinigans, an Irish band made up of Marquette students.

According to their Myspace page, they have played Irish Fest and the Irish Cultural Heritage Center in Milwaukee. But mostly they have played around Marquette.

When you check the page, be warned that none of the audio clips (with the exception of “Springlands,” which features the supple fiddle of Therese Gotcher) does justice to the band. Between amateur recording on the clips and the fact that the band is improving both in terms of technical skill and repertoire, expect to be less impressed by the clips than you would be with the live performance.

They are good enough that we’ll probably seek them out when they perform again.

What Do You Write On Your Engineering Exam If You Are Clueless?

Well, here are some answers that real students have given when asked:

• Explain the shape of a graph showing overall mass over time
• Expand (a+b)ⁿ
• Given a triangle, find X
• What did an engineer do that caused his boss to fire him?
• Trying to solve an equation that turns intractable
• Find the field and potential that affect a proton
• What happens when you slide an object down a ramp?

We are happy to report that none of these come from Marquette Engineering students.

But who knows, Engineering faculty here may have some that are similar.

Campus Internet Connection Overloaded: Student File Sharing at Fault

Anybody who has tried to access the Internet on campus, especially during the afternoon, has noticed that web pages load slowly, and sometimes time out and fail to load at all.

Happily, attempts from outside Marquette to access web sites located on campus are not affected.

The situation is bad enough that the Marquette Tribune recently posted a story about it, and (correctly) reported that student peer-to-peer “file sharing” (read: illegal music piracy) is to blame.

We talked to Information Technology Services network guru Chad Gorectke about the problem.

The University has what, by historic standards, is a lot of bandwidth connecting it to the Internet.

There is one 45 Mb (megabit) per second link to WiscNet, one 70 Mb. connection to Time-Warner Telecom, and an additional 50 Mb. connection to Time-Warner Telecom.

But even that bandwidth can’t keep up with the voracious appetite of students who download music and (increasingly) videos.

These connections are used to full capacity from (typically) 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 a.m, leaving only the wee hours of the morning with any excess bandwidth. Of course, if the demands for connections merely equal, or only slightly exceed, the available bandwidth web pages may load fairly quickly. But during the afternoon, the amount of traffic has often caused web pages to time out and entirely fail to load.

The straightforward way to attack this sort of problem is to buy more bandwidth, much as you might junk a dialup connection from your home and go to DSL.

The problem is that bandwidth is expensive, and student demands for bandwidth are pretty much insatiable. Previous increases in bandwidth have quickly been overwhelmed by increased use.

ITS has long tried to limit peer-to-peer traffic. A few years ago, the strategy was to block Internet ports that Napster (the then-current way of pirating music) used. But technology rushes forward.

Gorectke declined to talk on the record about the current attempts to block this sort of traffic and the ways students get around it, not wanting to give out information that might help people abuse University resources.

But we can say that, while the University has more capability to block certain kinds of traffic now, the technology for evading any blocking attempt has progressed even faster.

The problem is hardly unique to Marquette. Indeed, it’s absolutely typical at universities all over the country.

Segregating Student Traffic

The strategy likely to be used is to segregate what Gorectke calls “real traffic” (faculty and staff internet access, workstations at libraries, etc.) from student traffic. Aggregate student bandwidth could then be limited, leaving a clear internet path for other users.

Might this result in students being unable to do research in their dorm rooms because of a lack of connectivity? Certainly. Might students have to go to the library to get any real work done? Quite likely. Will this increase the incentive to leave Marquette dorms and take off-campus apartments? Quite possibly.

But lacking the infrastructure to give each and every student limited and controlled bandwidth, there is really little choice.

This whole situation is a classic example of “The Tragedy of the Commons” in which, when some resource is shared by everybody and used at will, it will be overused and eventually destroyed.

The solution will be to install an infrastructure that can limit the bandwidth available to each individual student. For the moment, however, things are going to get worse (at least for students) before they get better.

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.

Middle School Students Protest Abortion, Run Afoul of School Officials

From Fox News, the story of a Christian anti-abortion protest that school officials tried to stifle.

Happily, the Alliance Defense Fund stepped in, and got a settlement that allowed students wear pro-life T-shirts and distribute leaflets in the future.

The argument school officials made was that students of middle school age need to be “protected” from issues such as abortion.

But these are the same kind of school bureaucrats who are happy to have first graders indoctrinated on the subject of homosexuality, with books such as Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate.

One person commenting on the issue observed:

I think the reason this is becoming such a big issue, is that it is an ugly truth . . . which is difficult for people to digest. If students were protesting the Iraq war, or apartheid, or saving trees/recycling paper, we would not hear a word about it . . . it would be tolerated and looked at as a healthy practice of free speech. But, the protesting of abortion, and the facts that support the beliefs of the pro-life students are hard to hear and thus, create an uproar from administrators . . .

And another:

Sadly, our children know far too much about sex, abortion, drugs, homosexuality, and who knows what else. Our society seems bound and determined to expose their young minds to every horror known to man.

So it seems that society is happy to expose young teens and even pre-teens to plenty of information about sex and reproduction, so long as the information doesn’t include the embarrassing reality of abortion.