Where are the Leftist “Diversity” Faculty at Marquette?

Whenever Marquette does something contrary to the desires or interests of the politically correct leftist faction of faculty, some petition will doubtless follow.

For example, when Marquette refused to hire aggressively lesbian Arts & Science Dean candidate Jodi O’Brien, a petition attacking Marquette for the decision appeared in the Journal-Sentinel.

More recently, “about 60” Marquette faculty and staff signed a petition protesting the removal of a mural of cop killer Assata Shakur from the wall of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. (The identities of the signers are apparently secret.)

And now, when a group of Marquette students blocked traffic on Wisconsin Avenue to protest a supposed “lack of diversity,” yet another faculty petition has emerged.

We won’t discuss the claims in the petition in this post. They are pretty much the usual politically correct cant. But we will discuss who signed the petition.

Politically correct attitudes (and the intolerance that comes with them) are not evenly distributed across the faculty. Rather, they are concentrated in certain departments and schools. The signers of the most recent petition are distributed as follows:

Education / 4
Counseling Center / 2
Communications / 2
Business and Management / 6
English / 16
Foreign Languages and Literatures / 4
History / 2
Information Technology / 1
Libraries / 6
Philosophy / 6
Political Science / 1
Psychology / 7
Social and Cultural Sciences / 14
Theology / 2

What is missing? All the “hard” disciplines with well-defined theoretical constructs, actual data that prevents their going too far off into wild flights of politically correct fancy, and/or some real-world application that constrains the discipline to care about what works in practice.

In other words, no natural science, math, economics, engineering. The representation from business might seem odd, but indeed the Business School has been found to be inflicting a leftist video called “The Story of Stuff” on its students.

Of course, other departments, not represented among signers, certainly have some leftist (as opposed to, say, moderately liberal) faculty, and indeed perhaps some who would be sympathetic to the petition. But they must be fairly sparse, or they would show up among the signers.

And context matters. In any department, even a few conservatives (if they have the courage to speak up) and some additional traditional liberals (you know, the kind who believed in free speech and liked to debate) can temper the intolerance of politically correct faculty and create some space for diverse opinions.

But in some departments, a hothouse atmosphere prevails, and it is possible for a graduate instructor to tell a student that any opposition to gay marriage would be homophobic and can’t be expressed since it would be offensive to gay students. This is the sort of department where a professor might try to silence a student presenting a cops’ perspective on “racial profiling” and then force him to apologize for doing so. This, of course, would be Marquette’s Philosophy Department.

Not all departments at Marquette are like that. But it’s an outrage that any are.

The Faculty?

Of course, a handful of faculty in the most politically correct departments are going to claim to be “the faculty” and they are going to claim that a handful of their leftist students are “the students” at Marquette. Thus, any failure to give them what they want will be claimed to show disrespect for  “the faculty” and “the students.”  That claim will be bogus.

But Marquette’s administration will lack the courage to say that publicly. And they will feel the need to pander to the minority of politically correct leftists.