Lesbian Dean Candidate Rejected: Marquette Administration Responds

It has created quite a brouhaha on campus: the decision by President Fr. Robert Wild to rescind an offer to a candidate for the Dean of Arts & Sciences.

We just got this via e-mail, apparently sent to all Arts & Sciences faculty.

Dear Colleagues:

It is with a true sense of disappointment that we write to inform you that the current search for the dean of the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences has closed without identifying an acceptable candidate for permanent appointment. Jeanne Hossenlopp will continue to serve as interim dean until Provost Pauly names her successor, as Dr. Hossenlopp can assume her new duties as Vice Provost for Research and Dean of the Graduate School.

To be appointed as the Klingler College dean requires a unique combination of scholarly accomplishment, administrative experience, and the ability to both represent our Catholic identity and articulate the central role of Arts and Science education in the Jesuit pedagogy. It is a very high bar to reach, as it should be. The Search Committee had, in fact, forwarded two names to the provost for further consideration, in each case identifying issues for further discussion, as was its charge.

Some of the concerns identified in the process should have had more careful scrutiny. After examining the cumulative published records of the candidates, particularly as they relate to Catholic mission and identity, subsequent discussion raised issues that had not been fully addressed earlier. We did make an offer to one of the two finalists; in retrospect that was done prematurely. While this person has an excellent background, a record of achievement and a strong academic track record, it was decided after further analysis that this individual was not the person who could best fill this very important position. This decision was not based on any candidate’s personal background nor does the decision in any way challenge a faculty member’s freedom to write in his or her area of scholarly expertise.

The rest, which you can read here, is meaningless blather about how good the Arts College is.

And then we have, also from the University, this e-mailed press release:

Statement regarding the College of Arts & Sciences Dean Search

Marquette University has closed its search for the dean of the Klingler College of Arts & Sciences without identifying an acceptable candidate for permanent appointment. While three candidates visited campus and an offer was made to one individual, in the final analysis it became increasingly clear that no candidate was the ideal fit to represent the college at this time.

To be appointed as the Klingler College dean requires a unique combination of scholarly accomplishment, administrative experience, and the ability to represent our Catholic identity. The Search Committee had, in fact, forwarded two names to the provost for further consideration, in each case identifying issues for further discussion, as was its charge. Some of the concerns identified in the process should have had more careful scrutiny, and publications relating to Catholic mission and identity should have been more fully explored early in the process. While we did make an offer to one of the two finalists, in retrospect that was done prematurely without as much due diligence as was warranted. While this person has an excellent background, a record of achievement and a strong academic track record, it was decided after further analysis that this individual was not the person who could best fill this very important position.

There were certain oversights in the search process, and we regret that deeply. As a result of this search, the university will revise some aspects of the search process.

In the past decade, Marquette has made significant strides in the area of diversity, making the university a more inclusive place to learn and work. This personnel decision was not about sexual orientation. Marquette takes seriously its nondiscrimination statement and our Statement on Human Dignity and Diversity. We have on our faculty and staff individuals of various faiths, ages, ethnicity and sexual orientation. These differences help us to promote a culture of learning, appreciation and understanding.

Provost John Pauly will make an announcement regarding an interim dean in the near future and will work with the faculty and staff of the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as university leadership, as we move forward. There will be opportunities for us to discuss this as a campus community in the coming weeks.

We have mixed feelings about this. In the first place, Jodi O’Brien appears to have been a lesbian affirmative action candidate. And we don’t particularly mind when stakeholders outside the circle of politically correct faculty have their say in the affairs of Marquette.

It’s also bogus to say this is a matter of academic freedom. Marquette has always maintained it has the right to “hire for mission,” which means hire people consistent with the claimed Catholic nature of the university. After a faculty member is hired, he or she has the right to take whatever positions he or she wants.

It’s also the case that administrators aren’t the same as faculty. Nobody has an “academic freedom” right to be a dean. Only a right to teach and publish.

However, there is no way around this being a major fiasco. If Jodi O’Brien is not qualified to be Dean of Arts & Sciences at Marquette, she should never have made it to the short list, much less been offered the position.

Thus, if Marquette really wants to hire only Deans who are consistent with the “mission” of the university, they should take the trouble to appoint a committee that believes in that mission.

And if they feel the need to overturn the recommendation of the committee they appoint, they should do it early on (which they have the right to do, because the committee is merely making a “recommendation”).

Instead, we have the administration (and Wild has to take the main responsibility here) accepting the committee recommendation and then weeks later backing out due to pressure from people outside the university.

It’s not just a fiasco. It’s two or three fiascos piled on top of one another.

Rescinded Offer to Lesbian Dean Candidate: More Sturm und Drang

One of the interesting things about the brouhaha over the withdrawal of an offer to Jodi O’Brien, candidate for the Dean of Arts and Sciences is the issue of whether the Selection Committee is at fault for not having properly warned Father Wild about the controversial nature of O’Brien’s writings.

Father Wild has been blaming the Committee, but at least one outspoken member of the Committee (Stephen Franzoi) has been blaming Father Wild. We just got this e-mail sent by lesbian faculty activist Nancy Snow dealing with the issue.

From: Snow, Nancy

Sent: Saturday, May 08, 2010 2:32 PM

To: Krueger, Christine; Ratcliffe, Krista; Zurcher, Amelia; South, James; Foster, Susanne; Bauer, Connie; Papanek, Paula; Grow, Jean; Gibson, Kevin W.; Tobin, Theresa; Crockett, Timothy; Trivigno, Franco; Melamed, Jodi; Marten, James; Monahan, Michael J.; Mulla, Sameena; Politano, Michael; Pasero, Anne; Gendron, Sarah; Garner, Ana; Turner, Lynn; Cordova, Sarah; Hay, Carla; Hathaway, Heather; Holstein, James; Franzoi, Stephen; de St. Aubin, Ed; Hlavka, Heather; Peressini, Anthony

Note that we have left the distribution list on the e-mail since it is pretty much a Who’s Who of politically correct liberals and leftists on the faculty.

Subject: Jodi O’Brien Next Steps

Dear Colleagues:

The past week has been very difficult for me, as I’m sure it has been for you. I send this e-mail regarding Fr. Wild’s decision to rescind the offer of the job as Arts and Sciences Dean to Dr. Jodi O’Brien. I include below, with his permission, excerpts of e-mails I received from Dr. Stephen Franzoi, a member of the Dean Search Committee. The Search Committee has now been discharged, and are free to speak as individuals. I do this to alert you to how corrupted this decision-making process has been. Dr. Franzoi will be sending an e-mail to members of the Executive Committee of the Academic Senate, and I have urged other Search Committee members to follow suit.

According to Dr. Franzoi, two candidates were forwarded by the Search Committee with their high recommendation to the Provost. Strengths as well as weaknesses were listed for each. The Search Committee included, not as a weakness in Dr. O'Brien, but as a recognition of the history and climate of Marquette, that an offer should not be made to her unless the Provost and President were willing to stand by her and her scholarship. As you know, Fr. Wild publicly berated the Search Committee for a failure of “due diligence.” I have been told by a reliable source that a public apology was requested from Fr. Wild; a private apology is all that has been received to date.

My involvement in the matter is this. On April 11, I was told by Dr. Pauly, in confidence, that an offer had been extended to Dr. O’Brien. Dr. Pauly gave me her cell phone number and asked me to contact her. I did so. Dr. O’Brien and her partner visited Milwaukee on April 15-18. I interacted with them on April 15, saw them on April 16, and spoke with Dr. O’Brien by cell phone on April 16. On April 16, she told me that she had accepted the offer to become Dean. She asked me to keep the matter confidential, and told me it would be announced in about a week. No announcement was forthcoming. I e-mailed her Dr. O’Brien on May 1 to inquire. She responded that there had been unexpected delays, but said she hoped for more positive news soon. Late on Monday, May 3, I received a request for a meeting with the Provost on Tuesday, May 4 at 9 AM. When I met with the Provost, he told me that Fr. Wild had decided to withdraw the offer. Dr. Pauly tried to explain that the reasons were to do with articles published by Dr. O’Brien. Fr. Wild apparently thought these articles showed that Dr. O’Brien would not be able to represent the Catholic identity of the University.

About half an hour later, Fr. Wild joined us and tried to explain his position. I was not then, and am not now, clear on what exactly the objectionable passages are. Same sex marriage was mentioned, as was a description of lesbian sex involving a sex toy. I consulted Dr. O’Brien’s work, which is not advocacy of a lifestyle or same sex marriage, and failed to find any connection with Catholicism.

On May 5, I spoke with Dr. Pauly and Fr. Wild by telephone. I implored Fr. Wild to meet with the Dean's Advisory Council and the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences before rescinding the offer. He met with the Search Committee. According to Dr. Franzoi, he berated them for a failure of “due diligence,” and they strongly objected to that characterization. Dr. Franzoi states that it was not clear to the Committee members whether the offer had, at the time of that meeting, been rescinded. At least two Committee members passionately appealed to Fr. Wild not to rescind the offer, due to the harmful consequences of doing so. Fr. Wild did not meet with the DAC until after the decision was made. Now “listening sessions” are to be scheduled. I find this contemptuous of the College, and offensive.

I include this, as well as the e-mail below, in an effort to throw some light on what has been a closed and corrupted decision-making process that has had a very harmful result. Already, junior faculty are frightened. Already, their students ask them if they will be fired. Already, lesbians involved in a sexuality study being conducted here have withdrawn, thereby harming our colleagues’ research.

I urge you to lobby your Academic Senate representatives for a vote of no confidence/censure on Fr. Wild at the Academic Senate meeting on Monday. A list of Academic Senate members is available at:
http://www.marquette.edu/provost/committees.shtml. I ask this not to harm Fr. Wild, though I believe he has egregiously failed us in his duties as President. I ask this so that we, as a University, can send a clear message to his successor that the way in which this decision is made will not be tolerated. The time has come to demand that faculty voices be engaged in decision-making processes. What happened in the Jodi O'Brien case is not shared governance.

Please forward this e-mail to all colleagues whom you believe will support this
initiative.

Thank you,

Nancy Snow

From Dr. Stephen Franzoi, included with his permission:

Excerpted from E-mail 1:

To All Regular Faculty Within the Psychology Department,

There is a struggle going on campus among various groups to define the social reality surrounding the events of the past few days regarding the rescinding of the offer to Jodi O’Brien. I am sending to you, unfiltered, various communications from Provost John Pauly, Search Committee Chair Rich Friman, and President Father Wild regarding perceptions of the actions of the search committee. My opinion is that Father Wild has now abandoned his initial response of accusing the committee of not properly vetting Jodi O'Brien and now the definition of the social reality blame game shifts squarely on the shoulders of either Provost Pauly and/or President Wild. As a social psychologist, these unfolding events are fascinating. As a Marquette faculty member, however, I am far beyond being despondent.

Steve

Excerpted from E-mail 2:

President Wild told us in a meeting on Wednesday that there was an article in which “sex positions” and “sex toys” are mentioned, and that it could be interpreted that this passage was autobiographical in nature. That is what he told us. From that, I found this article and found those italicized passages about two lesbians visiting a sex shop. In reading this article, I saw nothing that suggested that these passages were anything but illustrations of the article’s subject matter, namely, gender definitions. My interpretation was that this was a scholarly article discussing gender issues.

N.B. The reason for excerpts is that some people have not given permission, or have not been asked for their permission, to forward their remarks. I respect their right not to have remarks forwarded without their express permission.

Sincerely,

Nancy E. Snow
Professor of Philosophy
Marquette University

Yet Another Faculty Manifesto — This One in Support of Lesbian Arts & Sciences Dean Candidate

It seems like a lot of faculty members want to express their opinions on the recent dean search fiasco in which candidate Jodi O’Brien had her job offer rescinded because a number of her published writings were flatly at odds with the Catholic mission of the university.

Whatever one thinks of Catholic identity, it’s been a huge fiasco.

Now we have (this circulated for several days without our getting our hands on it) the Chair of the Psychology Department, one of the more politically correct departments on campus, weighing in with a letter to members of the Academic Senate. We will insert out comments, but the entire unedited text of the statement is included.

From: Nielson, Kristy
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2010 10:04 AM
To: [distribution list deleted]
Subject: A message to my Senate colleagues

Dear Senate Colleagues,

I write to you in what I consider to be the darkest hour of my time at Marquette. I came here 14 years ago starting on the same day that Father Wild began his role as President of Marquette. I respect him and I have learned from him; hopefully I have helped him learn too, at least a little about shared governance. However, today, I find that I must speak out against the actions that he has taken regarding the Arts and Sciences dean search. It is a decision that will have very lasting negative effects on the faculty, staff and students of Marquette, as well as for shared governance here. For the Senate, I see no alternative than a vote of censure of Fr. Wild to object to the actions and process that have been undertaken in this matter. I do not suggest this lightly. But in our role as leaders in the university and as representatives for our fellow faculty, we must firmly object to the failure of leadership that allowed the events to unfold in this manner. As we are reminded in all matters of shared governance, Fr. Wild has the final word and responsibility. Thus, we must hold him responsible.

Fr. Wild has been clear in multiple statements that he rescinded the offer to Dr. O’Brien because scholarly writings by her caused him to doubt whether she could effectively represent the College on matters of “Catholic identity.” The two topics repeatedly mentioned about such writings regarded challenges to ideas about marriage and family definitions, and sexuality or sexual behavior discussed in a way that “could be interpreted as autobiographical.” These are issues that are relevant to vetting a candidate in the early stages, but not to withdrawing an offer after it is made. This candidate has been under consideration for the position since the initial onset of the search for this deanship. These works have been available the entire time. The Search Committee asked all of the relevant questions about whether there would be any issues with her candidacy early in the process and noted in their summation that she would have to have the necessary support at the top to be effective if she were chosen.

In fact, we don’t know whether they gave Fr. Wild a full account of the parts of her writings that would later prove to be so controversial.

They did not dodge the sensitivity of her area of scholarship. After this final report and until the rescinding of the offer, it is clear that neither the Search Committee, the Chairs of the College, the Senate or any other faculty body was involved in any way in the process. If there were doubts or issues to resolve, none of the appropriate faculty stakeholders were involved. Obviously, other stakeholders were involved given the late reversal of the decision, but not those of us who clearly identified as having a role.

It is clear that the decision to hire O’Brien was kept secret until it leaked out to local Catholics who could be expected to oppose it. But would making it public have helped O’Brien? While her supporters could have mobilized earlier, so could her critics.

This looks for all the world like an attempt to foist a dean flatly at odds with the Catholic mission on the University, in the hopes that by the time opposition arose the issue would be moot.

This debacle will certainly cost Marquette considerably in financial terms, as well as in reputation, research, and in recruiting, retaining and placing students and faculty. Indeed, such effects can already be observed. Colleagues whose scholarship directly involves work with lesbians have experienced cancellations from participants on the grounds that they will no longer involve themselves in any work affiliated with Marquette.

In other words, they have decided to boycott Marquette. They have a right to do that, but maybe they should be more tolerant of a Catholic university that acts Catholic.

Students have been voicing their sadness that these events reinforce the non-inclusivity of our institution. Graduate students’ external placements are threatened because inclusiveness in training programs is an important factor considered in the competition for such placements.

Of course, nothing in the decision not to hire O’Brien prevents the Psychology Department from training students to counsel lesbians. If outside agencies hold the decision against Marquette, they are engaged in discrimination on the basis of religion, and should be held accountable for that.

Junior faculty have already exhibited great alarm about what they can and cannot pursue in scholarship. While Fr. Wild maintains that we have academic freedom to pursue any line of scholarship, he also maintains that our leaders are to be held to a higher standard. This means that anyone who might eventually seek a position of leadership must know early in his or her career that scholarship not fitting with Catholic ideology is quite dangerous. (You might note that Dr. O’Brien wrote most of the “concerning” pieces as an Assistant Professor). That speaks pretty loudly about the reality of academic freedom at Marquette.

This, quite simply, is complete nonsense. Faculty can do all kinds of things that make them ineligible to hold a Dean’s position. The people who make this argument would be the first to want to veto as dean a psychologist who felt that black people are innately inferior in intelligence to white people. They would quickly mobilize against a candidate who opposed feminism, and felt that patriarchy is inevitable.

The truth is that any dean candidate whose political positions create huge controversy that would overshadow his or her academic duties is ineligible. Faculty have a right to be controversial (as Marquette’s toleration of Dan Maguire shows). Deans don’t have that right.

Indeed, we have heard that certain possible dean candidates are not really well-qualified because they cannot “work a room,” meaning glad-hand potential contributors effectively.

And certainly, anybody who chooses to have a blog that airs the dirty laundry of Marquette bureaucrats can never be an administrator, since the person is not a “team player” willing to conceal information that the Administration might want concealed.

Anybody who does that can be assumed to have no aspirations whatsoever to an administrative role!

Financially, there are many donors who would be encouraged by this decision. Perhaps they are even the largest donors. But there are also many, many alumni and MU-affiliates who are equally discouraged and will decide that Marquette will never receive their donations. The great irony is that those most closely affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences likely represent the highest proportion of those who will be discouraged, just at the time when we seek to extend better reach to our alumni as donors. In that event, the damage will be felt for a long time to come.

This is an interesting argument, since O’Brien’s supporters have suspected (out loud) that Marquette made the decision at least partly to placate big-bucks donors. This has been seen as equivalent to Marquette selling its soul for filthy lucre.

But it seems to be OK if Marquette placates liberal alumni! Indeed, one such implicit but clear offer of money if Marquette is sufficiently “gay friendly” has been made.

So it seems that Marquette selling its soul is OK, just so long as the right people are buying!

This process also makes a mockery of our diversity statement. We all look to our leaders as models of our society; whether or not they want to be, they are role models. If our leaders must pass litmus tests, so must the rest of us. We cannot achieve a culture that respects diversity of thought and being if we cannot allow it in our leaders.

See above. Politically correct people are the last people who actually respect diversity of thought.

In this centennial year of co-education at Marquette, we need to be reminded of the courage it took to reject outdated ideas and loud opposition at the time to pursue progress and openness. This is nothing different. As a scholar, Dr. O’Brien has evaluated issues from a perspective that is not traditional and can cause discomfort. But that is the path of progress. When once educating women along with men seemed outrageous, at least most of us cannot fathom that today. It is through the examination and free discussion of such issues that we progress — an approach fitting with Jesuit ideals.

The problem here is that there is nothing in Catholic teaching that says there is anything wrong with coeducation. Further, it wasn’t in fact that controversial having been the norm in public colleges and universities during the late 19th century.

Regardless of your personal opinion on the candidacy of Dr. Jodi O’Brien as the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and regardless of your opinion on her scholarly work or her ability to represent Catholic identity at Marquette, as a Senator, it’s hard for me to believe that any of you would not support a strong vote of censure on Fr. Wild for how this situation was handled. This is where we find out if we do or do not have the courage to fight for shared governance. All of these events are attributable to the manner in which this decision was made — had it been decided early that Dr. O’Brien was not the best person to lead our College for “Catholic identity” reasons, I would have been disappointed and perhaps angry, but not surprised at Marquette. But to handle it in this manner is far more injurious to all parties and is poor leadership. More, given the supposed role of the Senate to “evaluate and endorse” administrative decisions with academic impact, yet the lack of role of any of the faculty bodies in the reversal of the decision, shared governance is in doubt at Marquette. Meetings and listening sessions only after the fact are fitting examples of the perpetuation of secrecy and top-down control of all meaningful aspects of our institution. It is our responsibility to assure that shared governance is a reality, not just a convenient fiction that can be pointed to when it is convenient.

Sincerely,

Kristy Nielson
Professor and Chair, Psychology
Former Chair, University Academic Senate

There can be no doubt that the process misfired terribly. And this has implications for the process as we move forward to find a dean.

The search process that led to the hiring of Michael McKinney as dean was likewise as fiasco, although not one so embarrassing as this. After three external candidates bombed, McKinney (who had served as interim dean) was chosen. A known quantity with years of service to Marquette and widely respected good judgment, he was a much better dean than Marquette had any right to have, given the incompetent selection process.

Is something like this the right course now?

Marquette Dean Search Fiasco: Offer to Lesbian Candidate Rescinded

It’s been obvious for quite a while that something was not going well with the search for a new Dean for the Arts & Sciences College.

Now we know why.

We didn’t consider any of the candidates very well qualified, but the least well-qualified, in our view, was Jodi O’Brien, whose publications were in mediocre outlets, and concerned race, gender and sexual orientation.

Nonetheless, she was the first choice of the Search Committee, which apparently wanted to strike a blow for “diversity.”

(Diversity, at Marquette, doesn’t seem to be about race any more, but about homosexuality.)

An offer was extended to her, and she asked for an exceptionally long time to consider it. As of last Friday, the assumption among Marquette administrators was that she would take it.

The fact that she is a lesbian was not seen as a problem.

Then, sometime between late Friday and late in the day Tuesday, Father Wild intervened and rescinded the offer. What caused the decision was two articles of hers, published in the 1990s, that appeared to advocate gay marriage. Wild expressed the view that she would be too occupied in defending herself against charges that she wasn’t an appropriate dean in a Catholic university to be effective as a dean.

A key factor was the intervention of individuals outside the university. One is identified as a “prelate” (who is understood to have had a relatively minor role), and other individuals (or an individual) who had a more important role.

By sometime this past Tuesday, the offer was rescinded, and on Wednesday meetings with various Marquette administrators informed them of the decision.

This won’t be the end of the issue. We have an e-mail (rather widely circulated) from a leftist, lesbian professor in the Philosophy Department protesting the decision. It was sent earlier this afternoon.

Good morning, everyone. As many of you know, I’ve been involved with discussions with Fr. Wild and Dr. Pauly over the last few days regarding the possible withdrawal of the offer to Jodi O’Brien. Dr. Pauly is clearly in favor of Dr. O’Brien. Fr. Wild believes he must withdraw the contract. Apparently, much of the issue centers on concerns that she will not be able to represent the Church’s position, and will need to spend an inordinate amount of time defending herself from detractors, thereby compromising her ability to perform her duties as Dean. Much of the controversy centers on publications she wrote in the late 1990’s. I’ve read both of these (available online) and find them unobjectionable pieces of sociological scholarship that contain vignettes of lesbian sex, that are then analyzed for the purpose of sociological study. Evidently the forthright sexual nature of some passages in these articles has led some (obviously uninformed) people to conclude that Dr. O’Brien is somehow against the Church, or cannot represent the Church’s position. To me, this is ludicrous. I suspect that some of the detractors are donors, and that Fr. Wild fears losing their support.

The time has come for the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences, who were not brought in at this latter stage of the process, to make our voices heard. I’m trying to organize a meeting between faculty and Fr. Wild. He has indicated a willingness to do this. The Arts and Sciences chairs are also trying to schedule a meeting with him. Needless to say, if the offer is withdrawn, the College and the University will be hurt in long-term, deep, and pervasive ways. We need to make the many issues at stake here clear to Fr. Wild in a very forceful way. Our central message must be: We will not stand for the withdrawal of this contract. Dr. O’Brien must come on board as Dean.

At this point, I would ask for your support in the following ways:

1. Forward this e-mail to anyone who supports Dr. O’Brien and is willing to take a stand on this.

2. Attend any meeting with Fr. Wild that is scheduled and publicized. If you can’t attend, send e-mails or other messages to Fr. Wild directly.

3. If a meeting with Fr. Wild cannot be scheduled, be prepared to e-mail Fr. Wild, Dr. Pauly, and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

4. At the meeting with Fr. Wild and in your e-mails to him and to others, do not be shy. Be clear and forceful. He needs to hear and heed the message of the majority of A & S faculty and administrators on this issue.

5. This is a teaching moment. Fr. Wild needs to be educated about what Dr. O’Brien’s scholarship means, and how to explain it to outsiders. Make it clear that we are not against him. We are here to support him in making the morally and prudentially right decision. We will help him do this; we will see this through with him. Take ownership of our college. Join with Fr. Wild to move this issue forward in the right way.

At this point the e-mail gets really interesting, since Snow makes it clear that she is going to use the Pere Marquette faculty dinner tonight as a political platform.

6. I will be emceeing the Pere Marquette dinner tonight. I heard that Krista suggested wearing pink -- great idea. I will be color-coded in a lavender mock turtleneck (lavender is for lesbians) and a pink pashmina shawl. I will point this out, and explain what these colors mean. I will explain that the pink in the house does not support breast cancer, but our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

7. At one point in my remarks I will refer to the great women candidates we currently have. I would appreciate a hearty round of applause in support.

8. I plan to conclude the evening by reading Marquette’s statement on dignity and diversity and asking all who support it to stand up and take a stand for Marquette.

Finally, I would like to thank you, my trusted and valued colleagues, for your support in what has been a truly difficult time for me. When John Pauly and Fr. Wild told me about the decision to withdraw the contract, I was cut to the bone. With your help, I have hope that we can prevent this moral and prudential travesty from occurring. Thank you for your support in this. Let’s take ownership of our College!

Best,

Nancy

Nancy E. Snow
Professor of Philosophy
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-1881

Snow, one might remember, was the professor who, in a class discussion of “racial profiling” tried to shut up a student who told the class about the issue from a police perspective. She then forced him to “apologize” to the class.

We’ll have more on this later. We won’t be at the Pere Marquette dinner tonight, having plans to dine with our wife.

Rossi Will Be Interim Dean

An e-mail to faculty from Provost John Pauly:

I wanted you to know at least a little in advance that later this afternoon, through the regularly scheduled News Briefs, we will announce the appointment of the interim dean and two new associate deans for academic affairs for the college. Rev. Philip J. Rossi, S.J., professor of theology, will become interim dean, effective July 1. Dr. Belén Castañeda, associate professor of Spanish, and Dr. William Donaldson, professor of chemistry, will be the new associate deans, effective August 1.

More information on all these folks is here.

Our first impression is that none of these folks has a particularly high ideological profile. None of them, for example, signed the petition objecting to the fact that Marquette refused to hire lesbian dean candidate Jodi O’Brien.

(That in no way rules out the possibility that one or more of them thought that hiring O’Brien would have been a dandy thing.)

Rossi, particularly, is somebody whom our sources simply cannot peg as liberal or conservative. He has strong internationalist leanings, and has worked to make the Theology Department more internationalist in orientation. But that is not, in fact, necessarily a trendy or fashionable thing to do. The Third World and the “Global South” tend to be orthodox, and to supply a large share of “vocations” for the Church.

And being a specialist in Kant (which Rossi is) isn’t particularly trendy either.

Rossi has been at Marquette for 35 years, was associate dean for graduate affairs for three years in the 2000s, and has chaired the Department of Theology several times. He has extensive committee service under his belt. He knows where the bodies are buried.

In this coming year, we face the likelihood of real battles over a new Arts & Sciences Dean, and (even more so) over a new President.

One can never be sure how these things will work out, but it’s distinctly possible that the secular left on campus -- its appetite whetted by the fight over O’Brien and better organized than before -- will make a major push for a liberal, secularizing candidate for either or both positions.

So the Administration, in picking Rossi, has opted for steady, competent leadership. We don’t expect a lot of drama from the Arts & Sciences College for a while, and we’re happy about that.

Arts & Sciences Dean on Her Would-Be Successor

A letter from Jeanne M. Hossenlopp, current (interim) Dean of Arts & Sciences, and Stephanie Russell, Vice President for Mission and Ministry.

We won’t quote the entire thing, but it seems to come down on the side of lesbian Dean candidate Jodi O’Brien, whose offer of the deanship was rescinded just last week.

It mentions “questions [that] range from issues with process to more fundamental concerns about our institutional commitment to diversity, inclusion, and academic freedom.”

Notice, there is no mention of the Catholic identity of Marquette. And this on a statement that Stephanie Russell, Vice President for Mission and Ministry signed off on.

Then there is the rhetoric about “inclusion.” Of course, the same faculty and administrators who talk about “inclusion” when the issue is homosexuality aren’t nearly so “inclusive” if the person in question advocates something they dislike. A dean candidate who was an outspoken opponent of affirmative action, for example, or one who was on record supporting the Catholic position on the sinfulness of homosexual acts would be axed early on in the selection process.

“Inclusion” is only for politically correct victim groups.

Then there is this:

We affirm that true academic freedom is essential to our work. Faculty and students must be free to engage in respectful, informed academic discussion on difficult topics in and out of the classroom. Scholarship must be evaluated on its intellectual merits and contribution to the field. Our mission of the search for truth and the discovery and sharing of knowledge demands no less. [emphasis in original]

The claim seems to be that rescinded the offer to O’Brien somehow compromised “academic freedom.”

Indeed, if the offer was withdrawn merely because she wrote about sex, this would be a reasonable concern.

In reality, it appears to have been withdrawn because she not only is an “out” lesbian, but has written extensively about her life as a lesbian and clearly supports things like gay marriage (with the caveat that she’s not keen on marriage at all).

It’s also the case that “academic freedom” is for faculty, and not deans. Faculty have a right to reach whatever conclusions they want in their research, to publish those conclusions and to teach what they think are the sound conclusions to their students. There is no “academic freedom” right to be a dean.

Stephanie Russell is quite liberal, and Jeanne Hossenlopp -- widely respected among faculty for her good judgment on academic matters -- has not been known for taking any sort of political positions.

What we seem to have here is a split among Marquette administrators with Hossenlopp, Russell and Provost John Pauly (who has kept his head down but is known to be a strong supporter of O’Brien) on one side and on the other side Father Wild and Vice President for Student Affairs Chris Miller. Miller not only defended Wild’s decision before the Student Senate, but described O’Brien’s work as “sub-par” to a student.

That assessment underlies the truth behind this whole fiasco. Many months before she was actually given an offer, O’Brien was slated by liberal administrators and faculty to be the affirmative action lesbian dean at Marquette.

Dominating the Search Committee, and having the support of Provost Pauly, they almost made it happen.

Marquette Heavily Recruited Lesbian Dean Candidate Jodi O’Brien

From Milwaukee News Buzz, the following in a story about the role of Archbishop Listecki in the rejection of Jodi O’Brien, lesbian candidate for Dean of Arts and Sciences at Marquette.

[Professor Nancy] Snow says the selection committee vetted O’Brien’s work and found nothing to object to before recommending her and another candidate for the job. She insists that university leadership has long been familiar with the professor since it sent a representative to Seattle to encourage her to apply for the dean position. Two years prior, she had applied for the same position, which has been occupied by an interim dean, but withdrew from consideration for family reasons. [emphasis added]

This appears to confirm our inference that O’Brien was the designated lesbian affirmative action candidate for the deanship, moved forward by liberal faculty and administrators who viewed her appointment as a move toward “diversity” at Marquette.

O’Brien Not First Gay Scholar Offered Arts & Sciences Deanship

From the Journal-Sentinel:

Jodi O’Brien isn’t the only Seattle University scholar studying gay and lesbian issues who had been offered a top-tier job at Marquette University.

Isiaah Crawford, Seattle University’s provost, was offered the job of dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 2001. It’s the same position that Marquette officials offered to O’Brien but later rescinded.

“Close to a decade ago, an offer was presented to me by Marquette University to become a member of their academic leadership team,” Crawford said in a statement to the Journal Sentinel. “I declined the opportunity because of personal and professional commitments in Chicago.” At the time, Crawford was a psychology professor at Loyola University Chicago.

Crawford declined through a school spokeswoman to comment beyond the statement.

Marquette announced May 6 that it was rescinding a job offer to O’Brien, a lesbian scholar, because of concerns relating to Marquette’s “Catholic mission and identity” and their incompatibility with some of O’Brien’s scholarly writings. The university said the decision to pull the job had nothing to do with O’Brien’s sexual orientation. Some members of the search committee that recommended O’Brien said they believed her sexual orientation played a role in the reversal.

Crawford, who also is openly gay, described O’Brien as “valued member of our university community” in a statement last week.

In response to an e-mailed question, O’Brien said Crawford has been very helpful since Marquette’s decision to pull the job offer. She said the two did talk about the fact that Crawford was offered the Marquette deanship several years ago.

As with O’Brien, some of Crawford’s scholarship at Loyola concerned the Catholic Church’s teaching about homosexuality. He and a colleague co-authored a paper, published in 2001, arguing there’s “nothing inherently pathological or disordered” about gays and lesbians and that the church should base any pastoral outreach on that argument.

In 1998, he co-authored a paper examining psychosocial and legal perspectives on gay and lesbian parenting.

He won an award in 2001 from the American Psychological Association, given to scholars who have disseminated science and scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.

Crawford was appointed provost of Seattle University in July 2008. He was a tenured psychology professor at Loyola when he received the Marquette offer, according to an online biography. He served as Loyola’s Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences from 2003 to 2008.

Asked to comment on the job offer to Crawford, Marquette spokeswoman Mary Pat Pfeil said in a statement: “Each personnel decision is made individually, based on a candidate’s record. . . . In no case does the university discriminate on the basis of age, culture, faith, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, disability or social class.”

Marquette held final exams last week, but the debate continues among those who remain on campus. A group of student critics of the decision on O’Brien called Wednesday for several professional and political organizations to censure Marquette. Earlier this week, a group gathered on Marquette’s campus in support of the decision.

It’s clear from this that the level of scrutiny applied to all external dean candidates (and Provost candidates, when that issue comes up) needs to be ratcheted up. Had Crawford taken the job the reaction might or might not have been the same as with Jodi O’Brien, but Marquette clearly needs to face these controversies earlier in the process, rather than later.

And if Marquette doesn’t want an Arts & Sciences Dean whose highly public positions are contrary to the Catholic mission, it should appoint a Selection Committee not inclined to flout Church teaching.

Or (probably better still) hire internally, promoting somebody who is a known quantity.

Rejected Lesbian Dean Candidate: Examining Her “Scholarship”

Before we had any idea that Jodi O’Brien, the Arts & Science Dean candidate whose offer from Marquette was withdrawn, was a not merely lesbian, but rather a gay political activist, we had decided she was unqualified to be Dean.

The reason is simple: her vita (what’s what academics call their résumés) showed her to be a mediocre scholar.

Oh, she has published a lot of articles. But none is in a top-level or even a mid-level sociology journal. She has authored and coauthored a lot of books, but all but one are simply edited volumes where she and a coauthor put together essays collected from other scholars.

Every single article is in the “victim studies” mould. In principle, studying race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation is academically legitimate. In practice, all of these fields are immersed in a stifling political correctness, and the sense among “scholars” in the field of being part of a grand political project to attack racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy and an entire range of other social evils is disasterious for scholarly standards.

Which brings us to O’Brien’s “scholarship.”

We have downloaded and put online three articles of hers, pretty much at random. (We lack the stomach to extensively examine this kind of literature.)

They are:

• “Seeking Normal: Considering Same-Sex Marriage”
• “Complicating Homophobia”
• “Wrestling the Angel of contradiction: Queer Christian identities”

And here is another that a friend brought to our attention.

• “Changing the Subject”

Some of the prose in this last one might raise some eyebrows. For example:

If I, as a biological male, log onto a dateline as “Hotpants,” a “36Ð24Ð34 red-headed female looking for some stiff action” and am pursued and “bedded” by someone whose biography reads: “young black male body-builder looking for a woman who can take all of me,” does it matter that I am really a white, forty-something male middle-manager? Does our sexual ranting constitute a heterosexual or homosexual encounter? Obviously the answer depends on whether one uses the physical or the imaginative as the site of authentication.

But in fact the one on same-sex marriage might seem the best candidate to be conroversial in terms of substance, and indeed it is.

She clearly favors gay marriage, talking about “the need to support same-sex marriage legislation as it has been currently framed.”

And further “I support the fight for everyone to make choices regarding how they wish to author their own lives and the meaning they seek for themselves and those they wish to define as ‘family.’”

But then she makes it clear that she’s not too keen on marriage of any kind, claiming “I work hard to educate others about the fundamental need to forge a strong disconnect between culturally accepted definitions of ‘family’ and the political economic assessments of the distribution of benefits and assurances for U.S. citizens.” (p. 471)

The quotes around “family” tell the story.

And further, “the power to define differences and the power to define economic well-being rest too strongly in the same ‘family.’” (pp. 471-472)

In other words, she’s “sort-of” in favor of gay marriage, but really doesn’t much like the notion of “family” centering on a married couple at all!

Read the others too, if you have some time, and want a taste of what the rarified and arcane rhetoric of victim studies in academia sounds like.

O’Brien was in competition with two candidates who had rather impressive scholarly credentials. One wrote a book on the French Revolution that won an awared from the American Historical Association.

Another was an anthropologist who has published a long string of articles in top anthropology journals.

One of the qualifications for being Dean is that the faculty must respect you as a scholar, and it’s a real disability when most faculty are saying of the Dean “she wouldn’t get tenure in this department.”

The fact that she got an offer, and indeed the fact that the the Search Committee explicitly invited her to apply, both suggest an agenda. Some people, almost certainly including members of the Search Committee but perhaps also including Provost Pauly, thought it would be a dandy symbol of “diversity” at Marquette to have an openly lesbian Arts & Sciences Dean.

And Father Wild, who has a history of being manipulable, went along. Only when he got pressure from the other direction did he change his mind.

But by then, it was too late to avoid a massive embarrassment.

Politically Correct Faculty Mobilize to Support Lesbian Arts & Sciences Dean Candidate

A series of e-mails that circulated among the more liberal and politically correct members of the faculty.

First, Nancy Snow urging a variety of actions to support lesbian Arts & Science Dean candidate Jodi O’Brien, who was chosen and then told that she could not be dean.

Dear Colleagues:

I’m appalled, but not surprised, that the Archdiocese and other outside influences were involved in this decision. I will tell you that Fr. Wild told me in no uncertain terms during our conversation on Tuesday, May 4, that Marquette has autonomy from the Archdiocese and that the decision to rescind the offer was his. Yet, the Archdiocese had considerable and in my view, inappropriate, influence. Fr. Wild has not yet told the truth about this. The admission came from the Archdiocese. The academic autonomy and integrity of our University have been compromised.

Here is the link to the photos from yesterday’s “listening” session. Please share the link to see the level of activity this controversy has generated. Marquette has never seen anything like this. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=212086&id=729450126&l=d5b199eeba

Next steps:

1. Faculty and student groups will be continuing protests during senior week and at commencement. Please join these if you can. We must stand up and stand together.

2. Concerned colleagues from Seattle join our protest. Among other efforts currently underway there, they are now exerting pressure on their Jesuit president to make a statement.

3. I attach a joint statement to be signed by concerned faculty of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences at Marquette and Seattle Universities. I ask supportive department chairs of the MU College of Arts and Sciences -- James South, Kristy Nielson, Krista Ratcliffe, and Jim Marten -- to make copies of this letter available in your department offices for faculty to sign, and to publicize this letter in your departments. I ask these chairs to intervene with other Arts and Sciences chairs to request their cooperation in gathering signatures. Similar actions will be taken at Seattle University. Let us get as many signatures as possible. We will purchase full page ads to have the letter published in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Seattle Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and, if possible, Chicago Tribune and New York Times. Please sign and urge your colleagues to sign as soon as possible. Let’s aim to have all signatures in by Tuesday of next week.

4. Colleagues here are trying to schedule a date and time for an open forum on this issue. Please stay tuned as plans solidify.

We must take back our College and our University. I fully support re-extending the offer to Dr. O’Brien, with an apology.

Best,

Nancy

Nancy E. Snow
Professor of Philosophy
“Be the change you seek in your world.” - Gandhi

The attached letter is as follows:

Statement from Concerned Members of Marquette University

Regarding the Rescinded Offer of Deanship to Dr. Jodi O’Brien (joined by concerned colleagues from Seattle University):

- We condemn the decision to rescind the offer made to Dr. Jodi O’Brien to serve as Dean of the Helen Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences.

- We condemn the involvement of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and other outside influences in this decision. The academic autonomy and integrity of Marquette University was compromised in this decision-making process.

- We believe this action has caused significant harm to the reputation of Marquette University. It threatens our credibility and integrity as a university. It has caused suffering among students, alumni, staff, and faculty, and it will cost Marquette considerably in terms of community relationships, research, and recruiting and retaining students and faculty.

- We reject the public rationale offered for this action: examples of Dr. O’Brien’s scholarship disqualify her from being able to represent Marquette University in its Catholic mission and identity. We reject the idea that scholarship published in peer-reviewed journals or presented at universities or academic conferences can disqualify a faculty member from leadership at a Jesuit University.

- We strongly believe the decision puts academic freedom at risk at Marquette University. We reject an intellectual “litmus test” for our faculty, staff, and leaders in the administration. Indeed we find the very idea of such a “litmus test” to be contrary to the tradition of excellence, faith, service, and leadership advanced by American Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

- We believe that the rejection of Dr. O’Brien because of her scholarship examining the social institution of marriage and the fluidity of gender roles and sexuality exposes a culture of unease and suppression at Marquette University, a culture which frowns upon the frank intellectual discussion of human - and especially female - sexuality. This is particularly chilling and ironic as we celebrate the Centennial of Women at Marquette.

- We believe that this course of events undermines Marquette University’s faith commitment to both foster diversity and honor the human dignity of every individual regardless of culture, faith, race, gender, and sexual orientation.

- We pledge to work to restore the integrity of our university.

- We pledge to defend academic freedom for all of our faculty, and the spirit of academic freedom for all students, staff, administrators, and leadership. We will reject vigilantly the imposition of “litmus tests.”

- We pledge to confront directly the chilly climate on campus for scholarship and discussion concerning issues of gender and sexuality. We demand that these issues be allowed the broadest horizons for inquiry and debate. We cannot allow the intellectual discussion and academic investigation of human sexuality to be constrained by overly narrow understandings of Jesuit mission and Catholic identity.

- We pledge to honor Marquette University’s Statement on Human Dignity and Diversity. We must not only talk the talk of nondiscrimination and inclusiveness; our rhetoric must be matched by courageous action.

- We pledge to help our students make sense of what has transpired here. We desire for them to inherit a tradition of Excellence, Faith, Leadership, and Service that is inclusive, fosters moral courage, and supports the free and open inquiry necessary to attain the highest standards of scholarship.

- We hope to engage in conversations with all levels of university administration to ensure more transparent process for hiring in the future and to develop a more open environment generally.

- We note with chagrin that while the administration encouraged the university community to discuss the name change of our basketball team or a full year, less than two weeks after this egregious action, which strikes at the heart of our functioning as a university, we were told it is time for “healing” and “moving on.” We will not be silent until the integrity of our university is restored.

- We believe that the appropriate response to the current situation is for the offer of the Deanship of the College of Arts and Sciences to be extended again immediately to Dr. O’Brien with an apology. If this is not possible under Father Wild’s administration, Father Wild should immediately resign and his successor should offer Dr. O’Brien the Deanship.

This provoked a response from Psychology professor Ed St. Aubin.

St. Aubin: Do Something at Graduation

From: de St. Aubin, Ed
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 9:19 AM

Hello,

It may seem to some that offering Dr. O’Brien the position now is like inviting her to step in a hornet’s nest. I am convinced of quite the opposite. Imagine the welcome she would receive. Dean of A&S is a difficult job. I believe that if Dr. O’Brien were to come, there would be strong support on campus and it would create an alumni coalition of support that has gone relatively untapped to date. I am not sure that the current mode in the very large Advancement office is ideal for reaching out to these individuals/groups, but that is a different topic.

Further, the act of re-offering the position to Dr. O’Brien provides a tangible rallying point. It becomes our charge as we try to maintain energy around this issue even as campus begins to drain for the summer. Also, we have one more major public event that allows for a strong statement – graduation. This is attended by faculty, students, parents, and many alumni. We need a strategy there.

Also, what about key administrators? My take is that these folks have been very quiet.

Am I correct? I’m talking about Deans, interim Deans, Chris Miller, etc… The May 10 letter from Jeanne Hossenlopp and Stephanie Russell was all about healing the hurt and moving forward. I have tremendous respect for both those women but it read as patronizing to me. And is stripped us of any power to DO something real.

So, my questions are how do we get support from people in positions of power on campus? What would we need to do to have Fr. Wild re-offer Jodi O’Brien the position? and, How do we most effectively use graduation as a time/place for our position to be heard?

Finally, I have no clue who this email is heading towards. I simply hit “reply all” to the most recent message. How do we make sure that all stakeholders are part of this conversation?

All for now,
Ed

Ed de St. Aubin
Psychology Department

Snow Backs Off a Bit

Snow got some flack for the demand that Fr. Wild resign. So the following e-mail went out.

Dear Colleagues,

After circulating this, a broad consensus has emerged that we should leave off the ending - the conditional call for Wild’s resignation. Attached is the amended statement. If you chose to add your name to this list, it will ONLY BE for this version.

Please read the attached “Statement from Concerned Faculty Members of Marquette University” (joined by concerned colleagues from Seattle University).

If you wish to be a signatory to the statement, please send an email to mufacultyresponse@gmail.com.

Please state clearly how you would like to be identified on the statement (i.e., “Dr. Nancy Snow, Professor, Department of Philosophy”).

Please forward this email to supportive colleagues and other members of your department so that they have the opportunity to sign the statement, should they wish to do so.

Thank you for standing up for the integrity of our university!

Very best,
Nancy Snow

Attached to this latter e-mail was a draft of a revised letter of protest.

It omitted the final sentence (“If this is not possible under Father Wild’s administration, Father Wild should immediately resign and his successor should offer Dr. O’Brien the Deanship”).

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.

Christopher Wolfe on the Lesbian Dean Candidate Fiasco

Our former colleague Chris Wolfe has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the (now rescinded) job offer to Jodi O’Brien, “out” lesbian and choice of the Search Committee to be Dean of Arts and Sciences. Here are some excerpts from his article in the Journal-Sentinel.

Marquette University has moved quietly but consistently away from its distinctively Catholic roots during the past 30 years, so the events of last week are not surprising: They are simply a working out of long-term trends. But the problem is even deeper than it appears.

Marquette offered the position of dean of the College of Arts and Sciences to a lesbian sociologist from Seattle and then withdrew the offer. Besides articles explicitly advocating gay marriage, her writings included an article (“Changing the Subject”) on whether there are closets in cyberspace, which alternated turgid post-modernist prose with imaginative lesbian sex vignettes and dialogue, including gender-bending and domination.

The withdrawal of the job offer led to outrage among some of the university faculty. A call to arms went out, demanding that the faculty make it clear that they will not stand for this.

The question that should be asked is not why Marquette President Father Robert A. Wild backed off the hiring but how in heaven did the hiring ever occur in the first place? If trendy post-modernism is a qualification for being a dean, that would explain it, but why should it be? The premise of her writing on sexuality is that sex is “socially constructed” and cybersex is especially fluid, since people can try on many different sexual personae.

The problem with theories of social construction - which assume that there are no fixed “natures” of things that determine what they are - is that they are self-contradictory. If everything is socially constructed, then the theory of social construction is socially constructed - we have no reason to think it says anything about reality itself.

That is not a problem for social constructionists, who always put “reality” in quotation marks because they deny that there is such a thing. But for others, it is a serious problem. Why should we bother attending to social constructions at all? Their answer is simply that we can or cannot, depending on whether we feel like it. But there is no reason to do so or not do so.

Wolfe doesn’t use the term “intellectual corruption,” but he clearly feels that this is the reality here.

Wolfe goes on to argue that recent statements from the current and immediately preceding Popes have not been merely calls for decadent Europe to embrace religion, but calls to embrace reason.

And then he turns back to Marquette:

Marquette’s action in withdrawing the offer comes far too late. Whether it hires as dean a person whose scholarship is informed by a morally disordered sexual inclination is minor, compared to the fact that the university has over the years built up a faculty that takes her fashionable scholarship seriously, that its search committee recommended her and that the president initially signed off on her appointment.

It’s not just the Jesuits who built up Marquette over decades, to foster the pursuit of truth in light of the Catholic faith, who are turning in their graves. Anyone who cares about the serious pursuit of truth at all should be shaking their heads.

Our critique of O’Brien’s “scholarship” is not so much that it traffics in post-modernism as that it is vacuous.

We have read “Changing the Subject”, which Wolfe references (above).

It really doesn’t get beyond country singer Brad Paisley’s song “I’m So Much Cooler Online.” O’Brien adds that you can be gayer online, or if you are gay, you can be straighter.

OK, so she should strip out the turgid prose and make a fun song out of it.

Dean Search Fiasco: Demonstration in Support Catholic Identity

The demonstration that we blogged about Saturday came off today, in front of Gesu Church.

It was orderly and sedate, actually. The small crowd was heavy on staff and administrators, but included one family of four (with a Marquette mom) who drove an hour to participate.

They numbered 17 people at the peak (near 12:15). Not a huge number, but probably more grown-ups than have taken part in any of the pro-Jodi O’Brien demonstrations, which have overwhelmingly consisted of students.

Students, of course, have largely left town (the semester is over) and faculty are under the gun to get grades in (tomorrow noon is the deadline).

The gathering broke up promptly at 12:15 p.m.

As we have said before this, combined with several manifestos from various faculty members, may not show a “silent majority” opposed to Jodi O’Brien being Arts & Science Dean, but it does show considerable resistance.

It’s also the case that a fair number of people who think she should not be Dean were also disturbed at the way Marquette first offered her the job and then rescended the offer. Marketing Professor Gene Lacniak is one of them.

What all sides can agree on is that the Marquette administration performed very badly.

Student Government Senate Supports Rejected Lesbian Arts and Science Dean Candidate

Not really a surprise from a body that has pretty much bought into the entire gay agenda, but the Marquette Student Senate tonight voted to support Jodi O’Brien by a vote of 16 in favor, and 6 opposed and 2 abstaining.

The resolution read:

Therefore: Let it be recommended that, in the future, Marquette University be more honest and transparent in its hiring rationale.

Furthermore: Let it be resolved that Marquette University Student Government abhors the University’s decision to rescind Dr. O’Brien’s offered contract.

Of particular interest in the press release from Student Government describing last night’s meeting is this:

Dr. L. Christopher Miller, vice president for student affairs, discussed issues regarding the release of Dr. Jodi O’Brien, former candidate for dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, with the MUSG senate on Thursday night. Dr. Miller encouraged senate members and all university students to attend a discussion forum to be held on Tuesday, May 11 at 5:30 p.m. in the AMU ballrooms.

“Pieces of scholarship were not reviewed when offered the position, then once reviewed were found to be in disagreement with Marquette values,” said Dr. Miller.

Dr. Miller also stressed that the release of Dr. O’Brien as a candidate was not due to discrimination: “It is not a part of who we are,” said Dr. Miller. “That is not the case.”

This statement from Miller is plausible, but consider how damning it is.

O’Brien was, according to the gay journal The Advocate, in the Dean search that took place in 2009. And then she made the short list for the 2010 search, interviewed and was extended an offer.

And all the while nobody bothered to read her scholar work.

(Or perhaps did read it and had no objection, and failed to honestly report what she had written.)

No matter how you cut it or slice it, it’s a fiasco.

Another Voice on Jodi O’Brien From the Philosophy Department

A comment, appended to an essay by Matt Wion, is one of the more cogent things we have seen on the Jodi O’Brien fiasco, in which a rogue Search Committee almost got an outspoken lesbian candidate hired as Arts & Sciences Dean at Marquette.

I would add two points to your fine analysis.

1) The question of what is core to Catholic theology is one that Catholics need to decide. I, you, and Dr. O’Brien really need to stay out of it. Suppose that, internally, the Church decides that traditional teachings concerning family are stable and central to Catholic ethics. Suppose that we find such teachings ethically reprehensible. Then we should leave the university. A parallel situation: for a while the Mormon church had a racist theology. Were I on the job market then, I would not be able to teach at Brigham Young in good conscience. But why should a Jew be the one to say what is authentic LDS teaching?

2) I think that if MU had offered the position to a gay activist arguing for his position from within the Catholic intellectual tradition -- someone like Mark Jordan -- this would have been a courageous move, and I’d be out there with the protesters if the appointment were rescinded. But MU has been moving away from being grounded in this tradition (one I honor and learn from). The O’Brien appointment was double pronged stick in both of the eyes of MU’s Catholic identity -- its historical intellectual tradition, and Catholic teachings. Her scholarship represents that of nontheistic mainstream scholarship in the humanities -- where values are human creations, grounded neither in nature nor the Divine. And it takes her places where she attacks teachings apparently central to the church -- such as the natural basis of the family. Her appointment as dean was the reductio ad absurdum of the idea that scholarship at MU should be indistinguishable from that at secular universities. The most public face of Arts and Sciences would have been one whose scholarship encourages Catholics to invent their own sexual identity and accept fluid family arrangements for children.

I suggest that MU find a wealthy donor to allow it to offer her an endowed chair for a couple hundred thousand a year, and then find a traditional Catholic intellectual as dean. Such a move could bring everyone together and heal the damage.

Owen Goldin
Dept. of Philosophy

Of course, we don’t think that O’Brien deserves any sort of endowed chair. Indeed, her scholarship would not even merit tenure at Marquette -- although some politically correct department like Sociology would probably give that to her.

But the temptation to try to buy off the campus gay lobby with more “programs” and courses on “human sexuality” (taught from a pro-gay perspective) will be great. Indeed, Fr. Wild has suggested he would do just that.

Such would be foolish indeed. When you have won a battle at substantial cost, you don’t turn around and surrender.

Journal-Sentinel’s Bizarre “Bullying” Attack on Warrior Blogger

It was a screaming headline: “MU report suggests pattern of bullying by suspended McAdams.”

Written by education reporter Karen Herzog, it claims to be based on the Report of the Faculty Hearing Committee, which heard our case last September. Unfortunately, there are two massive problems with the story.

In the first place, Herzog has taken the claims of the Faculty Hearing Committee absolutely at face value, and never asked us or our lawyers for our side of the story.

In the second place, she mischaracterizes the Report. It nowhere in the 123 pages ever claims we were responsible for bullying anybody. So where did Herzog get that? Our guess is that it came either from leftist faculty at Marquette, or from Marquette administrators who have been flailing around in a sea of bad publicity, and are desperately trying to discredit us.

Let’s take the claims one at a time (with the Herzog claim in sans serif type):

Documents released by Marquette University in response to a lawsuit by tenured associate professor John McAdams suggest a pattern of bullying leading up to the targeting of a graduate student that resulted in his suspension.

Note the biased use of the word “targeted.” We reported on a graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, who told a student in an after-class confrontation that he could not express opposition to gay marriage, since such opposition would be “homophobic” and would “offend” any gay students in the class.

If this is “targeting,” then any negative reporting on anybody could be called “targeting.” Did the Journal-Sentinel “target” Scott Walker in the John Doe investigation? Their biased reporting was far closer to “targeting” than our accurate reporting on Abbate.

The report cites nine prior incidents of conflicts with administrators, other faculty members and students at the private Jesuit university since 1995.

Of course, if one reports misconduct in an institution, and especially if one is a whistle blower within the institution, there will be “conflicts.” Apparently, the assumption is that no faculty member should ever cause a “conflict” by criticizing anybody within the institution.

Notably, McAdams was never reprimanded or given a written warning. In addition, the report says, there are few indications in course evaluations that he attempted to intimidate students with opposing views in his classes.

These things are true, and the reason is that Marquette never had any basis to reprimand or warn us. Lots of people didn’t like our blog posts, but we violated no rules, and we were entirely within our rights, given Marquette’s guarantee of academic freedom.

The Faculty Hearing Committee explicitly said our teaching was quite satisfactory, and so was our scholarship. Marquette’s whole beef with us is our blog.

In March 2008, he posted a blog asking why the student newspaper had rejected an advertisement discouraging use of the “morning-after pill.” McAdams originally identified the student advertising director by name, but later deleted the name after discovering the student had played no role in rejecting the ad.

And what, supposedly, is wrong with this? Marquette seems to believe that we should not name people engaged in misconduct, even if they are functioning in an official capacity at Marquette, or are engaged in high-profile political activity.

The student in question was functioning as the Advertising Manager of the Tribune, and she did in fact reject the ad from Pro-Life Wisconsin. The Tribune ignored an e-mail of ours, and a voice mail of ours seeking more information before we posted the article. After the article was posted, a faculty advisor of the Tribune called us and told us that the Advertising Manager was in fact not responsible for the rejection of the ad. So we modified the article to reflect that.

In February 2011, he emailed a student listed on a Facebook page as the contact for a production of “The Vagina Monologues” at Marquette, then called her at her permanent residence, disturbing her parents. He wrote a blog post mentioning her by name, and continued to blog about her by name when she complained about his behavior. . . . The student filed a harassment complaint against McAdams and requested an “MU Stay Away Order” from the Marquette Public Safety Department.

The student (Anahi Sanchez) had listed herself as the Marquette “contact” for “The Vagina Monologues” on the national Vagina Monologues website (not Facebook). We had heard there would be a Marquette performance, and wanted to confirm that. We e-mailed her listed e-mail address, and got no response. We then called her listed phone number. She was not home, so we left a message asking her to call us.

She freaked, and went to the campus cops and Student Affairs to complain. The campus cops apparently blew it off (since we never got any Stay Away Order). We were contacted by university bureaucrats, including the Provost. We blogged about this, since at this point we were being harassed. And indeed, harassed by Sanchez and also by Provost Pauly.

prompting a reader to send a message to the student “to simply demonstrate that actions have consequences.”

And you can read the message (by James Diamond) here, and it’s perfectly civil.

The provost responded by asking McAdams to meet with him, the acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the chair of the political science department for a conversation about the blurring of McAdams’ roles and his possible misuse of the student information system.

Of course, we were being bullied here. In what kind of bizarre world do campus bureaucrats try to intimidate a faculty blogger, and then accuse him of being the bully?

In November 2011, he blogged about a complaint that a student filed alleging that McAdams, in casting doubt on commonly cited rape statistics, had made comments belittling rape victims. McAdams referred in his blog to the complainant as a “prissy little feminist.”

What happened is this: in our American politics class, we discussed media bias, and the bogus statistics often bandied around. We explicitly mentioned the claim that 25% or 20% of college women are victims of date rape as such statistics.

A female student in the class took offense, and filed a sexual harassment complaint against us.

That’s right. A student claimed to have been sexually harassed simply because a professor said something she didn’t like hearing.

The Committee apparently thinks our calling the student (whose name we did not know) a “prissy little feminist” was terrible.  But what would be the correct term for some student who claims to have been harassed when she merely hears something she disagrees with? Would “snowflake” have been better? Unfortunately, that was not in common use when the incident happened.

We did not belittle rape victims. However, in the minds of feminists, any dissent from the orthodoxy of a rape epidemic apparently translates into “belittling rape victims.” But in reality, feminist researchers who classify women as “rape victims” when the women themselves insist that what happened was not rape are doing the belittling.

In September 2014, he was called to a meeting with his college dean over a confrontation with a student group called “Students for Justice in Palestine.” McAdams warned the dean to be careful what he put in the letter that would follow because “you don’t want to be in my blog.” McAdams later admitted that his statement was intended to affect the dean’s actions during their meeting.

Translation: we made it clear to the Dean that any reprimand or any punishment for our blogging would be immediately reported on our blog. And this is somehow bullying? Do we have the power to bully the Dean? Apparently, we had an obligation to submit to being censured or reprimanded. Or else, we should have said nothing, and then blindsided Dean Holz by denouncing him on our blog.

The president of Students for Justice in Palestine had complained that he felt “intimidated” when we tried to interview him about “Israeli Apartheid Week” which that organization was sponsoring. He secretly recorded the conversation, and the recording shows us merely politely asking him for information.

(One piece of hypocrisy here: the Faculty Hearing Committee objected to our use of a recording of the student confrontation with Cheryl Abbate, but Marquette had no problem with the student recording the exchange with us.)

Snowflakes

Are we noticing a pattern here? Social Justice Warriors, if ever challenged or merely asked for information, run and start whining about how they have been bullied or harassed or intimidated. They specialize in playing the victim, even as they are victimizing others.

The Abbate Affair

Herzog then recounts the details of the student’s confrontation with Abbate, and adds:

McAdams targeted the graduate student instructor by name in a November 2014 post that prompted dozens of harassing emails to Abbate. She ultimately transferred to another university to finish her doctoral work, because she said she feared for her safety and was unable to focus on preparing her dissertation topic defense at Marquette, according to the documents released this week. Transferring required her to repeat three semesters of coursework.

Abbate was “ABD.” That is, she had finished all her coursework, and lacked only her dissertation. One can write a dissertation anywhere. She could have flown off to India, finished it, and e-mailed it back. She might have had to fly back to defend it, but in this era of Skype, even that would be unlikely.

So why would she transfer to another Ph.D program? Simple. She transferred from a Marquette program that barely ranks in the top 100 nationally, to one at Colorado that ranks in the top 40.

McAdams has repeatedly argued he was obliged to identify Abbate on his blog “because the norms of journalism require such identification," the faculty hearing committee report said.

“This would be a far stronger argument if Dr. Adams were employed by Marquette as a journalist," the report says. “But he is not; Dr. McAdams is a professor, and therefore his first loyalty must be to the obligations of the academic profession.”

This is beyond bizarre. Apparently, telling the truth, or at least telling the truth about one’s own institution, is not one of the “obligations of the academic profession.” Apparently, the most important obligation, for the Faculty Hearing Committee, is to not make trouble for anybody, or at least not for the forces of political correctness at Marquette.

Ironically, many of the same faculty who want us fired signed a statement condemning Marquette for its failure to hire aggressively outspoken lesbian dean candidate Jodi O’Brien.

The report argues that McAdams could have avoided naming Abbate or linking to her contact information

We did not link to her contact information. We linked to a post on her blog about how “All Men Contribute to the Prevalence of Rape.” It may well be that Abbate’s contact information was on that blog. The point of the link was to show the anti-male sexism of Abbate.

could have confirmed what Abbate’s views were on the conflict

We in fact e-mailed her on Sunday morning to ask her perception of what happened. By the time we went live with the post Sunday evening, she had contacted Nancy Snow and James South, who advised her not to respond to our query. Since we had a recording of the confrontation, there was no doubt as to what she had said to the student.

and could have helped the student — his academic advisee — internally pursue his complaint against Abbate instead of publicly shaming her and exposing her to harassment.

The student had lodged his complain, and was greeted with hostility.

Bureaucrats in any organization would prefer to keep misconduct quiet, handled internally, with people outside the organization none the wiser. That’s the way the Catholic Church dealt with the priestly sex abuse scandal.

But letting the bureaucrats keep the abuse quiet removes the incentive to fix systemic problems. And if the institution is claiming to be one thing (a Catholic university) while actually being something else, to conceal systemic abuses is to be a party to fraud.

Journalists function by exposing wrongdoing, not by covering it up.

A Pretext

This recital of grievances various people at Marquette have against this blogger make clear one thing the University will not admit: the Abbate affair is simply a pretext to get rid of a professor who has created trouble for administrators and politically correct faculty and activists.

Conclusion

Thus, the Faculty Hearing Committee produced a shoddy document, and Herzog merely accepted it as face value, and even added a spin (“bullying”) that the Report did not contain.

But in fact, the incidents the Faculty Hearing Committee recounted are a story of years of bullying and harassment — the bullying and harassment of this blogger, by people who piously pretend to be victimized.

And the biggest example of bullying is Marquette’s attempt to fire us.

Dean Search Fiasco: More Push-Back From Faculty Supporting Catholic Mission

While the most assertive voices among Marquette faculty have been supportive of the appointment of outspoken lesbian Jodi O’Brien to be Dean of Arts & Sciences, some significant opposition has arisen.

While the Academic Senate seemed to support her when it voted to condemn the decision to rescind her offer, doubtless a substantial number of those senators would not have selected her in the first place. as Marketing Professor Gene Lacniak admitted was the case with him.

It’s also the case that the Academic Senate doesn’t necessarily represent the attitudes of all faculty.

Still, it would be premature to say that statements like those of Bob Ashmore, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy or Associate Professor Javier A. Ibáñez-Noé represent a “silent majority” of faculty.

But add in statements like the one below, coming from two Theology faculty, and it becomes obvious that there is considerable faculty resistance to O’Brien.

Our purpose is to invite discussion on the hiring decision regarding Dr. O’Brien from the perspective of Catholic mission and identity.

In recent days there has been much consternation at Marquette University over rescinding the offer of the deanship of the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences to Dr. Jodi O’Brien of Seattle University. At a procedural level, there is little that is defensible in making an offer and then withdrawing it (though, of course, if pre-hiring decisions were mistaken, the university should not necessarily be prevented from rectifying those mistakes before it has made any contractual commitments). For many faculty members, it remains a mystery how things proceeded from the search committee’s forwarding of names to the provost, to what took place between him and the president of the university and others in making a final decision and extending an offer. Protests have been registered over these procedures, including the unfair treatment of Dr. O’Brien in the matter.

However, other substantial issues have also been raised. One letter circulated refers to “more fundamental concerns about our institutional commitment to diversity, inclusion, and academic freedom.” Many feel that the decision by Fr. Wild and Provost Pauly to rescind the offer violated these principles. Apart from the procedural issues involved and affirming these principles, we believe even more is at stake for Marquette University.

We defend the stated reasons in the Wild/Pauly letter that the primary concern for rescinding the offer had to do with Catholic mission and identity. Since this is not a regular faculty hire (where “hiring for mission” must also be taken into consideration) but a significant public leadership position at the university, it is important that the candidate be able to represent that identity and support it before constituencies on and off campus, as it is well spelled out in our official mission and identity statements, and more significantly, not oppose it in action or scholarship. There is little to dispute that Dr. O’Brien’s advocacy of “queer Christianity” (her nomenclature in her article “Seeking Normal? Considering Same-Sex Marriage”) and LGBT cultural strategies vis-à-vis the family, same-sex marriage and alternative partnering (not to mention her analysis and apparent promotion of cyberspace promiscuity-- see her article “Changing the Subject”) cannot be squared with Catholic teaching on this very public issue, which is so controverted in our society, and in Christian churches—witness its divisive effects in nearly every mainline Protestant denomination. As these viewpoints are integral to her scholarly vocation why should a Catholic university invite her to lead its “flagship college” which cultivates the arts and sciences, when from the perspective of Catholic vision and Christian humanism such advocacy undermines human flourishing?*

No doubt, many (faculty and students alike) will disagree with this Catholic vision or say that they take exception to this particular manifestation of it as it concerns theological and philosophical conceptions of the human person, of human sexuality, and of the moral life. Even many Catholics (some Jesuits included) do not accept this teaching. Nevertheless, it is not a foregone conclusion that in the interests of preserving Catholic identity -- an issue that we agree should remain dialogical -- the university somehow violates principles of the academy if it does not offer major governance positions to candidates who oppose aspects of that same identity. After all, Catholic universities exist “From the Heart of the Church,” the English title of Pope John Paul II’s 1990 Apostolic Constitution on Catholic universities, Ex corde ecclesiae. This applies not just to theology departments and campus ministries, but to all units of the university because they are at the service of truth and of Catholic intellectual life. Marquette University does state under the rubric of faith that:

As a Catholic university, we are committed to the unfettered pursuit of truth under the mutually illuminating powers of human intelligence and Christian faith. Our Catholic identity is expressed in our choices of curricula, our sponsorship of programs and activities devoted to the cultivation of our religious character, our ecumenical outlook, and our support of Catholic beliefs and values.

It is true that not all faculty members at Marquette University see themselves as agents of Catholic intellectual life, and the dialogical nature of a university invites critical discussion and disagreements over a vast array of issues with other Christians, adherents of other religious traditions, and all people of good will who can support the mission of Marquette University. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine how Dr. O’Brien’s scholarly project is consistent with “Catholic beliefs and values.” Therefore, while we regret the procedural debacle and any injustice done to Dr. O’Brien, we are grateful that in the hiring process for an Arts and Sciences dean, Catholic mission and identity became a deciding factor.

Ralph Del Colle
Associate Professor of Theology

Mark Johnson
Associate Professor of Theology

*The Catholic position on homosexuality was succinctly stated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in their 2006 statement Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care which (quoting a Vatican document) says the following:

“Moral conscience requires that, in every occasion, Christians give witness to the whole moral truth, which is contradicted both by approval of homosexual acts and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons.”

Nobody, and certainly not Del Colle and Johnson, defends the absurd process that resulted in the offer of the job to O’Brien, and then the rescinding of the offer when word got out that O’Brien was a very controversial person indeed.

But we need to know exactly what process led to an offer to a person so controversial. It’s obvious that she was pretty much the pet of some in the Administration and then of the Selection Committee long before the offer was made.