Marquette Tribune: Coming Down Against Free Speech for Warrior Blogger

One expects a liberal/left bias on the part of the mainstream media, but where campus free speech is concerned, those folks have been pretty solidly behind free expression, and rather critical of campus intolerance.

But that doesn’t apply to the fledgling journalists at the Marquette Tribune. They have endorsed Marquette’s attempt to fire us in an editorial that is breathtaking in its lack of logic and tortured reasoning.

The bias starts in the description of the incident that provoked our blog post of November 9, 2014:

Last year, Marquette was embroiled in controversy after McAdams was suspended from campus in November 2014 when he wrote a post on his blog, the Marquette Warrior. The post criticized the way former teaching assistant Cheryl Abbate handled a disagreement in class with a student concerning gay marriage in a Theory of Ethics philosophy class.

How did she “handle a disagreement?”

When the student confronted her after class, and made it clear that he wanted the opportunity in class to argue against gay marriage, she told him “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments.” She further asked if there were any gay students in class, and said that any gay students would be offended if arguments against gay marriage were allowed. She went on to say: “In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.”

The Tribune, in other words, entirely sanitized the intolerant comments of Abbate.

The Tribune goes on:

McAdams used his personal blog to demean a student. Abbate may have been a teaching assistant, but she was still a student equally deserving of the right to free speech, whether she chose to engage in the disagreement or not.

Thus reporting on the intolerant conduct of an instructor becomes “demeaning” a student. Abbate was not merely a student, she was the Instructor of Record of the class, a person in authority over the student. When the incident occurred, she was 29 years old and a member of the U.S. military, and had been teaching the course for two years.

But somehow, for the Tribune, Abbate calling an undergraduate a “homophobe” for opposing gay marriage is not demeaning.

But what is out and out bizarre is the invocation of “free speech” to defend the intolerant behavior of Abbate. Abbate, who had authority over the student, told him he was not allowed to speak. We, who had no authority over Abbate, criticized her. Marquette has tried to fire us for criticizing her.

The Tribune doesn’t think the student had a right to free speech, and doesn’t think we have a right to free speech. The only free speech they are defending is the right to shut up speech.

Threats?

The Tribune goes on:

McAdams has written skeptically about Marquette’s administration, other professors and various organizations on his blog. But when he publicly shamed Abbate, he stopped working to create an educational environment. After McAdams’ post, Abbate received threats against her life and eventually left Marquette because of the intense criticism.

So the undergraduate, who wanted to discuss gay marriage in class, had an “educational environment,” but Abbate, who wanted to stifle the student, was the victim?

The claim that Abbate received “threats against her life” is simply untrue, as she admitted on her blog.

She did received some quite nasty comments. Of course, anybody whose misconduct is exposed by journalists might be the object of nasty communications. This had never happened with our blog until the November 9 post.  But when fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University of Oklahoma engaged in a racist chant and it was reported, some of them received death threats. Nobody seems to be blaming the media for that.

Promoting Only One Sort of Speech

The Tribune then goes on to laud Marquette for its efforts to promote free speech:

For Marquette to make FIRE’s list solely for the McAdams controversy is an unfair representation of the university. In placing Marquette on this list, FIRE overlooked the university’s several efforts over the past year to foster freedom of speech.

For example, Nov. 12, 2015, Marquette students held a silent protest standing in solidarity with University of Missouri students outside of Raynor Library. The protest happened shortly after Missouri’s president Tim Wolfe resigned when he mishandled racial controversy on campus. Faculty and administration here at Marquette, including University President Michael Lovell, stood in solidarity with the students.

Additionally, on Dec. 8, 2014, a Black Lives Matter ‘die-in’ took place on the second floor of the Alumni Memorial Union with no interference from the university.

So for the Tribune, free speech is for leftist student organizations. It’s not for students who want to oppose gay marriage, or for professors who blog about the stifling of discussion on campus.

That is to say, it’s only for people with whose politics the Tribune editors agree.

Going International: Marquette Makes Jerusalem Post

An article on intolerance on American campuses, focusing especially on anti-Israel activism, mentions several instances of censorship and silencing of non-leftist views:

Not by accident is the most leftist dominated segment of American life also that in which free speech is least protected. Kirsten Powers (a Democrat) has written a new book called The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech. Much of that book is devoted to American universities where left-wing students, administrators and faculty have sent the message that “anyone [who] strays off the leftist script... might find themselves investigated, harassed, ostracized, even expelled” because their speech has given offense.

Nearly 60% of the colleges and universities in America have campus speech codes that dramatically restrict, if not obliterate, freedom of speech. One, for instance, bars students from “offending... a member of the university community.”

Fordham University prohibits using email to “insult.” Offense and insult are determined by the ones so offended. Numerous universities have instituted “trigger warnings” on course content to warn students that course material may cause them distress by challenging their worldview.

Janet Napolitano, chancellor of the University of California system, the nation’s largest, recently instituted seminars for deans and department chairs to guide them in things that should no longer be said because they constitute “micro-aggressions,” defined as “brief, subtle verbal or non-verbal exchanges that send denigrating message to the recipient because of his or her group membership.”

Included are such statements as “America is a land of opportunity”; “I believe that the most qualified person should get the job”; “America is a melting-pot” and “affirmative action is racist.”

Each of these “suggestions” seeks to impose a particular societal vision and/or foreclose societal debate. They constitute a liberal version of the Gulag’s reeducation centers. Objections to the first two statements are based on a desire to portray America as so racist that individual talent and hard work are virtually irrelevant and it is impossible to speak of a hirings based on merit. “America is a melting-pot” is objectionable, because it prefers the traditional view of America as an affirmational society bound together by certain common ideas over the multicultural vision of a balkanized society based on ethnic, racial and sexual identities. The view that non-colorblind admissions and hiring is inherently racist is one side of a long-standing debate, and it just happens to be the view adopted by the US Supreme Court of late.

A group of Scholars of Color recently disrupted a class at UCLA, charging that the tenured professor had committed “micro-aggressions” against them. Example: The professor changed one student’s capitalization of “indigenous” to lower case, and thus disrespected her ideological point of view. Were the students punished for disrupting a class? No. The 79-year-old professor was instructed to stay off the graduate campus for a year, and UCLA commissioned an “Independent Investigative Report on Acts of Bias and Discrimination Involving Faculty.”

At Marquette University, a Jesuit school, Prof. John McAdams was stripped of tenure and fired for a blog post, in which he criticized by name a graduate teaching assistant who had told a student that he could not defend the traditional Catholic teaching on same-gender marriage in class because it might offend other students.

McAdams wrote that the graduate student had used “a tactic typical among liberals now.

Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

His firing proved how right he was and how effective those tactics have proven.

Of course, part and parcel of this intolerant leftism is hostility toward Israel.

Not all offense is equal. Jewish students live in a hostile environment, which can at times be genuinely frightening, on many campuses across America. Last summer, Boston police had to protect pro-Israel students over three successive days from pro-Palestinian mobs shouting “Jews back to Birkenau.” Over 50% of Jewish students report that they have personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism.

No one, it seems, is particularly concerned about aggressions – micro or otherwise – against them, even though Jew hatred is not exactly an unknown phenomenon throughout history.

On about 200 campuses, there are annual Israel Apartheid Week rallies calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. Many of the events are formally sponsored by academic departments and promoted by professors on their emails.

Ruth Wisse, in “Anti-Semitism Goes to School” (in the May Mosaic) describes how a group of pro-Palestinian student groups demanded that candidates for student government at UCLA and Berkeley sign a pledge that they will not participate in trips to Israel organized by groups like AIPAC or Aish International’s Hasbara Fellowships. Most candidates refused to sign, but the student government president did.

While expressing discomfort with the pledge, UCLA’s Jewish chancellor declined to go further on the grounds that promotion of the pledge is a form of free speech. When it comes to leftists, minorities and those otherwise easily offended, the subjective hurt of those offended trumps free speech; when it comes to insult and intimidation of Jewish students, however, the value of campus free inquiry and speech is suddenly rediscovered.

As Wisse puts it, “Institutions that enforce ‘sensitivity training’ to ensure toleration for gays, blacks and other minorities may inadvertently be bringing some of these groups together in common hostility to Jews as the only campus minority against whom hostility is condoned.”

Jews, for a few decades after the Holocaust, had the status of a politically correct victim group, toward whom liberals were sympathetic. But that era is gone.

Why is this? First, because Israel is an ally of the United States, and liberals and leftists, not liking America, instinctively dislike America’s allies also.

Secondly, liberals and leftists pride themselves on being champions of the world’s victims. Jews, and the state of Israel, have not played the part of victim. Jews have succeeded splendidly in American society, and Israel has not only prospered as a free society, it has decisively beaten off Arab attacks. Not the sort of place that can be portrayed as victimized.

Thus we have the (happily) unsuccessful attempt on the Marquette campus to divest from companies doing business with Israel. Some flavor of this campaign can by seen in the Twitter feed of Students for Justice in Palestine.

But the anti-Israel campaign has been supported by several official units of Marquette.

Marquette Tribune Taken to Task for Intolerance of Academic Freedom

Given the leftist bias of journalists, and especially schools of communication, it was not a huge surprise that Marquette’s student newspaper, the Tribune, came out in support of Marquette’s attempt to fire this blogger.

Of course, the editorial taking that position was a model of journalistic bias and illogic.

Three commenters quickly responded, taking the paper to task. First, Paul Quirk:

Punishing McAdams for what third parties wrote to Abbate is obviously not justified. For one thing, he has criticized a lot of people, and praised others, over many years, and there has been no other case of such abuse. Someone who reads your editorial may threaten McAdams. Will you expect to be punished?

The language of the post was not “demeaning,” unless all sharp criticism is demeaning.

In any case, none of this matters. Freedom of speech and academic freedom do not have a limiting condition: “as long as the speaker is (in the authorities’ opinion) polite, no one is seriously inconvenienced, and no one who hears or reads the expression acts improperly.”

The reason that all the significant national commentary (FIRE, AAUP, the Atlantic, Slate, the Washington Post, not to mention conservative outlets) has rejected the University’s position is that the principles here are not in doubt. If the University fires McAdams, he will sue and he will win. (BTW, FIRE participates in such lawsuits, and thus far, has never lost.)

It would be better if the University faced up to its serious, damaging mistake and dropped the matter. The stalling tells you how strong its case is.

Quirk is a Marquette alum, and Phil Lind Chair in US Politics and Representation, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia. Quirk is a liberal, and apparently one of the old-style liberals: the sort who liked to argue politics. The sort who, if a conservative student spoke up in class, would welcome the debate and discussion.

The kind that are becoming much rarer in academia.

The next comment was from Marquette’s own Dan Maguire:

The Editorial on McAdams misses the main point of this case. McAdams was severely punished without due process. The American Association of University Professors allows for the suspension of a professor but never without due process.

Maguire has openly supported us in a previous statement. In that statement, he notes that we have excoriated him on this blog, which is absolutely true.

So why would he support our academic freedom? Maguire is apparently a happy warrior. He will dole out criticism on popes, archbishops, and presidents of Marquette University. But when he is criticized in return, he doesn’t whine about it.

A final commenter is Sterling Silver (not a pseudonym):

The snowflake response to free speech is embarrassing. I’d like to point out that the two actions you predominantly go after McAdams for were actually not done by him. His release of the blog post may have “offended” some individuals, but the nationwide criticism and death threats were from other people, not McAdams. Also, Abatte’s choice to leave after the criticism was also her choice, not something McAdams told her to do or pressured her into. Ultimately, she made the final decision.

The use of the Nov 12, 2015 story is also laughable. Although I am proud of the students for having a safe and responsible protest, protesting in support of the student actions at the University of Missouri goes against the idea of the First Amendment. You want freedom of speech and (later mentioned in the story) freedom of consequence but when the protest in Missouri blocked other journalists, the students denied both freedom of speech and freedom of consequence, even though the journalists were looking to ask questions. Those actions, the silent protest at Marquette, and the editorial seem to suggest that rather than enjoying the freedom of free speech, we should focus on suppression because it might offend someone or because it bothers people.

But, rather than looking for things to be offended by, students at Marquette should learn to grow up and get stronger in the face of adversity. Your not always going to be told that the actions you’ve made are great or may be criticized with offensive language in life, but how you respond is one of the ways you go from being a kid to an adult. Going after this list and its view on the First Amendment is child’s play.

(Also, the university has the right to hire and fire anybody, but to fire a tenured professor for a blog post is why the story has gone national).

The Tribune’s support of the Black Lives Matter protest, and the protest in sympathy with students at the University of Missouri, is revealing.

Black Lives Matter is a movement that fosters hatred of law enforcement, and has routinely called, before all the facts are in, for the arrest and charging of police officers who shoot black suspects. In several cases the officer in question was justified in shooting a black who attacked him.

Leftist students at the University of Missouri bullied and forced out of office their president over supposed racial incidents, some of which were faked or nonexistent, and none of which the president could do anything about.

Of course, the Tribune could have reasonably endorsed the right of Marquette students to protest in these cases.

But given that they endorsed free speech for the student protesters, but not the right of an undergraduate to argue against gay marriage, and not our right to blog about the stifling of the undergraduate, only one inference is possible.

The Tribune only favors free speech for people with whom they agree.

Mere “Reprimand” for Marquette Staffer Who Encouraged Fraud to Undermine Ben Shapiro Speech

It is yet another example of intolerant political correctness at Marquette: a staffer of the Center for Gender and Sexualities Studies encouraged fellow leftists to go online and get tickets to the upcoming Ben Shapiro speech, and then fail to show up, to “take away a seat from a student that would be interested in going.”

In fact, she encouraged people to lie about their student status, since “they can’t tell, quite honestly.” This was after the staffer had talked to a “director of diversity” who recommended that tactic.

The Young Americans for Freedom, who sponsored the talk, found out about this on Thursday, January 26, and brought it to the attention of Corey Lansing of the Office of Student Development. Neither Lansing nor anybody else in the Marquette administration did anything about it until Young Americans for Freedom went public this past Monday.  Thus, Marquette allowed the post, urging fraud to sabotage an approved event, to remain up for four days.

Marquette finally went into damage control mode, with Brian Dorrington (Marquette PR guy) issuing a statement claiming “We have addressed this issue internally and will work to make sure that interested attendees have an opportunity to see Ben Shapiro on February 8.”

Slap on the Wrist

James Wigderson, a reporter for Wisconsin Watchdog, got a statement from Angelique Harris, director of the Center for Gender and Sexualities Studies:

“She [the staffer] does not at all speak for the center or for the university,” Angelique Harris, the director of the center where Nelson is employed, told Wisconsin Watchdog. “That is not at all what we’re doing at the university because we do feel and do believe in freedom of speech, etc. And so she’s being reprimanded and we’re dealing with her internally.”

That’s right. Reprimanded. Not fired. Not suspended or expelled from Marquette. Just reprimanded.

This is no surprise, given the absurdly light punishment given to members of the feminist group Empowerment when they vandalized an anti-abortion display on campus. They were required to write a three page paper confessing how they had acted “irresponsibly” in vandalizing the display. Two members who flatly refused were given probation (not suspension) for a semester.

Marquette’s failure to impose any significant punishment on people who sabotage and undermine free expression on campus speaks volumes. The university is unwilling to hold the forces of intolerant political correctness accountable when they attack free expression. How much of this is rooted in fear of leftist faculty and students, and how much flows from the fact that a lot of campus bureaucrats share the intolerance of the left is unclear. But the results are perfectly clear.

Apparently, the “director of diversity” who suggested the scheme has gotten off scot-free. At least, Harris claimed that she “had ‘no idea’ who gave Nelson the idea.”

Really?

Marquette ought to know. But if they do, don’t expect them to admit it.

Center of Intolerance

In spite of Harris’ pious words about free speech, the Center she runs has been a source of intolerance on campus. Not only was the staffer involved in this scandal working for the Center, but a student who vandalized the anti-abortion display was on the staff of the Center during the 2015-2016 school year. Even more scary is that this staffer, who bragged about her vandalism on Facebook and to a faculty “workshop” on racial issues was on the Presidents Taskforce for Diversity and Inclusion.

That’s right. “Diversity” and “inclusion” at Marquette means shutting up speech you dislike.

Thus the Center for Gender and Sexualities Studies is part of a large infrastructure of politically correct intolerance at Marquette, as the Administration adds more and more offices and staff to pursue identity politics, pandering to each and every group with a claim to victimization.

Marquette may be no worse than a lot of other universities. But it is also no better. And any notion that Marquette is a “Catholic university” is a transparent, fraudulent marketing ploy.

College Students: Intolerant of Free Speech

From the (liberal) Brookings Institution, a national sample of college students on their attitudes toward free speech on campus.

College students’ views of the First Amendment are of profound importance for multiple reasons. First, colleges and universities are places where intellectual debate should flourish. That can only occur if campuses are places where viewpoint diversity is celebrated, and where the First Amendment is honored in practice and not only in theory. Second, what happens on campuses often foreshadows broader societal trends. Today’s college students are tomorrow’s attorneys, teachers, professors, policymakers, legislators, and judges. If, for example, a large fraction of college students believe, however incorrectly, that offensive speech is unprotected by the First Amendment, that view will inform the decisions they make as they move into positions of increasing authority later in their careers.

Clearly true.

To explore the critical issue of the First Amendment on college campuses, during the second half of August I conducted a national survey of 1,500 current undergraduate students at U.S. four-year colleges and universities. The survey population was geographically diverse, with respondents from 49 states and the District of Columbia.

The survey results establish with data what has been clear anecdotally to anyone who has been observing campus dynamics in recent years: Freedom of expression is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses. In fact, despite protestations to the contrary (often with statements like “we fully support the First Amendment, but…), freedom of expression is clearly not, in practice, available on many campuses, including many public campuses that have First Amendment obligations.

How to the specifics:

First, a question asked:

Does the First Amendment protect “hate speech”?

Of course, the First Amendment does protect “hate speech,” even aside from the question of who has the right to decide what is “hate speech” which must be shut up. But less than half of college students believe that:


Another question asked:

A public university invites a very controversial speaker to an on-campus event. The speaker is known for making offensive and hurtful statements.

A student group opposed to the speaker disrupts the speech by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker. Do you agree or disagree that the student group’s actions are acceptable?

This tactic, quite simply, is fascist, yet a narrow majority of students agree it is acceptable.

Then, another question is asked about the “controversial speaker:”

A student group opposed to the speaker uses violence to prevent the speaker from speaking. Do you agree or disagree that the student group’s actions are acceptable?

It might seem nice that this is only a small minority, but as the author of the study notes, “Any number significantly above zero is concerning.” Indeed.

The survey asked one more question about a controversial speaker:

Consider an event, hosted at a public U.S. university by an on-campus organization, featuring a speaker known for making statements that many students consider to be offensive and hurtful. A student group opposed to the speaker issues a statement saying that, under the First Amendment, the on-campus organization hosting the event is legally required to ensure that the event includes not only the offensive speaker but also a speaker who presents an opposing view. What is your view on the student group’s statement?

While presenting alternative viewpoints is typically good, in practice the “controversial speaker” will always be the conservative one, and leftist speakers like communist Angela Davis (who spoke at Marquette) will be considered uncontroversial, and allowed to speak with no opposing viewpoint presented.

Further, this imposes on conservative groups the burden of booking at least two speakers for any event they wish to hold. To burden speech is to restrict speech.

How Does One View Education

Finally, students are given a choice between two educational philosophies:

If you had to choose one of the options below, which do you think it is more important for colleges to do?

Option 1: create a positive learning environment for all students by prohibiting certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people

Option 2: create an open learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints, even if it means allowing speech that is offensive or biased against certain groups of people?

Of course, one cannot discuss any serious issue without some viewpoints being considered “offensive” or “biased” by some group. Feminists are offended when anybody expresses opposition to abortion. A lot of blacks get “offended” by a discussion of out of wedlock births and dependency in the black community. Defending police against charges that they constantly gun down innocent blacks is offensive to the politically correct.

This notion gives politically correct groups a veto power over any ideas they dislike.

Conclusion

Of course, not every student who gives an intolerant answer will necessarily act intolerantly. Many are probably giving what they think is the “socially acceptable” answer. They wouldn’t shout down a speaker, and in fact wouldn’t care one way or the other that the speaker was on campus. But what does it mean that shutting up speech on a university campus is the socially acceptable response?

While the intolerance of many college faculties is well known, probably more attention needs to be paid to indoctrination in middle and high schools. How much is identity politics turning students into little social justice warriors who believe that “marginalized groups” have a right to be protected from any speech that offends their tender sensibilities.

Gay Fascism on Campus: Livid Lesbians Shut Up Speaker They Dislike

From World Net Daily:

Rioting lesbians have stormed a speech by “Born Gay Hoax” author Ryan Sorba on the campus of Smith College in Massachusetts, shutting down his address, according to two major pro-family organizations, Americans for Truth and Mass Resistance.

“Beware lesbians with frying pans (if you care about free speech),” AFT said in his announcement. “Lesbian activists at Smith College just couldn’t stand by and let a young critic explain his views about the supposed innateness of homosexuality – so they stormed Ryan Sorba’s speech on the ‘Born Gay Hoax’ and forced him to end it prematurely.”

“Thus they decided for everyone in the room – supporters, foes, the curious and the undecided – whether Sorba’s arguments would be heard. Stalin would be proud,” said AFT’s Peter LaBarbera.

Shouts of “We’re here, we’re queer, Get used to it!” combined with various shrieks and screams punctuate the protests.

With police officers standing idly by, a homosexual protest leader takes the microphone and orders, “They have told us to leave, so everyone needs to stay.”

While security officers are shown doing nothing to eject the mob, Sorba is told to leave the room.

You can watch videos of what happened here.

If the actions of these bigoted leftists are not appalling enough, even worse are the people who support them.

Consider, for example, a blog called “Pam’s House Blend,” which is populated by this sort of people.

The title of her post is “Smith College students give ‘Born Gay Hoax’ author a piece of their minds” -- an absurd euphemism.

Pam, in an update, backs away a bit from endorsing the Nazi behavior the the Smith lesbians, but her commenter have no such compunctions. One said, for example:

Personally I don’t see a problem with the protest. In fact, I think we need more of such actions these days, as long as they are not physically violent. I’m as big a fan of free speech protection as the next person. But what would the rightful reaction on campus have been if the speaker were someone plugging a book saying the Holocaust never really happened? Or one promoting the KKK? I don’t see a problem disrupting hate speech which is ultimately responsible for horrific events like the murder of Lawrence King.

Of course, this person would never object to a speaker saying that the U.S. government invented AIDs to kill black people, or that Dick Cheney planned and executed the 9/11 attacks. Apparently she is OK with free speech if the speaker doesn’t say anything “really bad.”

And she and her friends get to decide what is “really bad.”

Another poster:

I do not like being measured as wanting by a conservative Republican college student who gets to preach bad science, a single biblical interpretive viewpoint and who arrogantly expects not to be challenged on trying to cut the basis of our citizenship out from under us.

This is very standard thinking on the part of the politically correct crowd on campus. What they “do not like” must be banned. What they consider “bad science” must be banned. A “single biblical interpretive viewpoint” (unless it is their own) must be banned.

Another, even more chilling comment comes from a poster who is proud to have shut up a speaker.

When I was an undergrad at New Mexico Tech in the late 80’s we had a “Faith Healer” (forget who, but Benny Hinn comes to mind) who wanted to hold his revival on campus in our auditorium. NMT is strictly science oriented and the vast majority of students and professors joined together to protest the upcoming event as being contrary to our educational agenda of fact-based instruction.

As a result, the on-campus event was cancelled and moved to an off-campus location. HOWEVER, we continued the protest and got the Townies involved as well. Socorro has two primary populations: 1) The College, students & professors, fairly liberal; and 2) The Townies, Hispanic, very Catholic, conservative. Needless to say, it wasn’t hard to get the everyone worked up against a non-Catholic and he ended up just cancelling his appearance in town all together.

It was totally peaceful, we did not silence him or prevent him from coming to town, but we did drown him out and let him know that we were not going to stand by quietly to let him spread his fraudulent propaganda on our campus or in our town.

New Mexico Tech is a state university, and speakers have the full rights of the U.S. Constitution (unlike Marquette, which has the legal right to shut up faith healers, or pro-abortion speakers, if it wants). So demanding that the college cancel the speech was a direct attack on the Constitution.

Notice how the woman in question is bragging about the fact that she and her leftist friends could exploit anti-Protestant religious bias.

One has every right to say faith healing is nonsense, but it’s hardly hate speech. It’s just something that secular liberals don’t believe in.

(It would be interesting if Marquette banned a faith healer, since the Catholic Church has a rite of exorcism. But then, Marquette might insist that Protestants can’t be faith healers.)

There is, of course, plenty of this sort of intolerance in Wisconsin.

A local liberal blogger (“Wallah”) found it “encouraging” that students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee tried to disrupt a speech by David Horowitz.

And students at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point vandalized an anti-abortion display on that campus.

This folks, is the campus left in 2008, with a festering hatred for ideas they disagree with, and a fascist willingness to shut up those ideas.

Why Liberals Don’t Want Free Speech

Via Sykes writes, columnist Peggy Noonan on the intolerance of liberals and leftists when faced with speech they disapprove.

She deals with one case we have blogged about (the uproar at CBS over giving a Christian parent of a Columbine student victim a chance to speak).

She also discusses three other cases of liberal or leftist intolerance, and observes:

It is not only about rage and resentment, and how some have come to see them as virtues, as an emblem of rightness. I feel so much, therefore my views are correct and must prevail. It is about something so obvious it is almost embarrassing to state. Free speech means hearing things you like and agree with, and it means allowing others to speak whose views you do not like or agree with. This--listening to the other person with respect and forbearance, and with an acceptance of human diversity--is the price we pay for living in a great democracy. And it is a really low price for such a great thing.

We all know this, at least in the abstract. Why are so many forgetting it in the particular?

Let us be more pointed. Students, stars, media movers, academics: They are always saying they want debate, but they don’t. They want their vision imposed. They want to win. And if the win doesn’t come quickly, they’ll rush the stage, curse you out, attempt to intimidate.

And they don’t always recognize themselves to be bullying. So full of their righteousness are they that they have lost the ability to judge themselves and their manner.

And all this continues to come more from the left than the right in America. [emphasis in original]

This is certainly true on the Marquette campus, where the President of the Gay/Straight Alliance insisted that no speaker should be allowed on campus who opposes gay marriage, since opposing gay marriage is “hate speech.”

Likewise, Philosophy Department Chairman James South tore down a quote from columnist Dave Barry that was posted on the office door of a graduate student. He claimed it was “patently offensive.” What did it say?

“As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.”

So here at Marquette, as in the broader culture, liberals and leftists think they have the right to shut up ideas with which they disagree.

They are a very unattractive bunch.

Bernard Goldberg: What Happened to Free Speech at Marquette?

From Bernard Goldberg: Yet another article taking Marquette task for its intolerance of speech. Much of it repeats material that is familiar to readers of this blog, but we’ll post some of the money quotes.

The closest things we have to re-education camps in this country are college campuses. In the old Soviet Union, to use but one example of authoritarianism gone wild, if you said the “wrong” thing you might lose your job, your freedom or your life. Here in America, expressing the “wrong” opinion can cost you dearly, too. Just ask Professor John McAdams, who used to teach at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

Goldberg then recounts the discussion between a student and Philosophy instructor Cheryl Abbate, and says of the student:

[H]e also told Professor McAdams about it. The professor, who earned his PhD at Harvard, teaches political science and writes a blog. So he wrote about what happened, saying the instructor was “using a tactic typical among liberals now. Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

The blog went viral and the instructor got nasty, ugly emails.

That’s when the re-educators stepped in – they have titles at Marquette like dean and university president – and suspended Professor McAdams without pay and said he would not be allowed to teach at Marquette unless he admitted his conduct was “reckless” and he apologized.

If you haven’t guessed, McAdams said in effect, don’t hold your breath. He compared the demand to the “Inquisition, in which victims who ‘confessed’ they had been consorting with Satan and spreading heresy would be spared execution.”

Technically, the university is punishing Professor McAdams because he published the instructor’s name, resulting in those hate-filled emails sent to her. But if we follow this reasoning, a professor is not only responsible for what he writes but also for the reaction it produces.

What if university professors signed a petition against student athletes who supposedly raped an exotic dancer – which resulted in the athletes being maligned and put in the crosshairs of the angry mob? It happened at Duke with those lacrosse players who didn’t rape anybody. Should the professors — who already found them guilty absent a shred of evidence — be fired for causing innocent students distress?

Of course, the Gang of 88 at Duke were leftist professors, who were criticizing white males, so they get a pass on any negative consequences the white males endured.

And more recently, Oklahoma fraternity members were seen chanting a racist slogan in a video widely reported in the media. They got death threats. But then, they were affluent white males with very bad political opinions, so that’s OK too.

Unless something dramatic happens soon, Professor McAdams will lose his tenure and his job for expressing opinions the authoritarians – at a Catholic University no less – found objectionable.

There should be an outpouring of support for Professor McAdams – and it should come from professors at universities all across America. But such an uprising is not likely. Too many of these academic liberals have long forgotten what it means to be liberal. They claim to honor diversity but for them that doesn’t include diversity of opinion – the kind of opinion, as Professor McAdams has said, they would rather “shut up” than even listen to.

Our older — and even middle-aged — readers will remember having mostly liberal professors, although they probably had a few conservative ones too. And while some of the liberal professors were pretty intolerant, a lot of others weren’t, and even welcomed the expression of diverse opinions. And even the intolerant ones claimed to believe in free speech.

But in the last few decades, academics have produced elaborate rationales for shutting up speech. They will now explicitly insist that certain opinions are out of bounds, and need to be suppressed.

The Plight of the Campus Religious Believer

From the Intercollegiate Review:

If you’re an orthodox believer at a mainstream college, you don’t need me to tell you that you feel like an oddball, maybe even besieged. Your professors and most of your peers would treat your most deeply held beliefs with condescension and probably horror, if they knew about them.

So what should you do about it?

If you had asked my advice even a few years ago, I would have told you to be the turd in the ­liberals’ punchbowl. When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, I did everything in my power to challenge leftist orthodoxies. I saw offending liberals as a key public service, which I dubbed “insensitivity training.” I relied on, and fought for, the principle of free speech.

That’s long gone on campuses now.

My advice today? Grit your teeth, do your reading, make some friends, get your degree, and then make like Lot fleeing Sodom: never look back.

Sounds depressing, right? Well, I do have some good news, as you’ll see.

Big Mother Is Watching You

Colleges are much less tolerant than they were even back when I was in school. Instead of welcoming free, vigorous debate designed to prepare people for adulthood, many campuses are turning the classroom into a “safe space” where infantilized pseudo-victims can wallow in their phantom pains for four long, pricey years before the college dumps them into the real world and sends the bill. The tenets of your faith, if you stood up for them, might count as “microaggressions,” “trigger words,” or even “harassment.” Citing free speech won’t get you far on most campuses nowadays.

If your creed is anything like mine, it is by any contemporary secular standard “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “patriarchal,” “sexually repressive,” and opposed to “abortion rights.” There is no way to airbrush any orthodox mono­theist religion, especially biblical or ecclesial Christianity, to make it acceptable to secular progressives. It would take full-on plastic surgery, and you saw what that did to the Episcopal Church, Bruce Jenner, and every Jesuit college.

As someone who delighted in debating professors and students in and out of the classroom, it pains me to recommend a “covert-ops” approach. But the battlefield has shifted, and you are now deep behind enemy lines.

And what to do about this?

So keep your head down, and keep your faith. That last part can be difficult when peers and professors attack your religious beliefs as “retrograde” or “reactionary.” But you can do it. You can do it even if your campus ministry soft-pedals any supernatural aspect of your religion, privileging instead some social justice activism. If that’s the case, go find a local church and pray with the grown-ups at a faithful congregation. You may spot fellow students there. Befriend them.

You can also find like-minded students in organizations like the ISI-affiliated group on campus, Young Americans for Liberty, College Republicans, or your campus pro-life club. Maybe even a Greek organization, if those haven’t been banned from your campus. Their meetings could be a “safe space” for you.

It’s not quite as bad as this essay makes out, although anti-religious (or at least anti-Christian) intolerance can be pretty bad.

But:

Some institutions are better than others. A useful (but perhaps a bit dated) ranking of schools by religious commitment can be found here.

Sometimes the students are not as biased as the professors. At Marquette, for example, students apparently split about equally in voting for Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Mary Burke.

Some majors are better than others. Expect a lot of leftist indoctrination in the humanities, the social sciences (except economics and perhaps political science), communications and education. Other majors are better, although you will have to take some courses in those most biased departments.

Plot out your path carefully. You will indeed be in enemy territory.

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.

Marquette College Republicans Respond to Threat to Cancel Admission of Conservative Student

At the behest of a leftist mob, Marquette’s Admissions Office contacted Freshman admit Samantha Pfefferle over her supposed “discriminatory language” in social media posts.

Pfefferle had made it clear she supports Donald Trump, wants to end illegal immigration, and does not accept transgender ideology.

She was reminded she was “not a student” and subjected to a hostile interrogation concerning her political views.

The admissions office said they would “get back to her” in a couple of days, clearly implying her admission was now in doubt. But they did not get back to her. She went public on this blog, and after her situation was publicized on Milwaukee talk radio, Marquette (twelve days after the original interrogation) finally told her her admission had not been cancelled.

This threat to free speech and diversity of viewpoint has concerned a lot of people, but especially concerned have been the Marquette College Republicans. If conservative speech can be punished coming from a incoming freshman, are Marquette students who express similar views in danger? Pfefferle was a bit more vulnerable, having not begun classes, but intolerant leftist mobs routinely target conservative students.

Thus the Marquette College Republicans sent the following statement to Marquette officials.

The Marquette College Republicans want to commend our University for upholding their mission in the search of truth and discovery of knowledge by maintaining their decision regarding Samantha Pfefferle’s acceptance to Marquette this Fall. While, in the end, administrators made the correct decision, the way events transpired continues to concern our members. Our club has a standing offer that if people disagree with our points of view, they are welcome to attend any club meeting or event to discuss those disagreements. Instead of pursuing this appropriate course of action, emboldened upperclassmen (those meant to embody tolerance and maturity) mischaracterized and slandered one of our own. More concerning is the feeling that our school’s administration gave these schoolyard bullies legitimacy by forcing Samantha to defend conservative thought in an intimidating setting (outnumbered and answering trap questions) with the threat of university rejection looming. What transpired was unacceptable and must not be the procedure when conservative students share their views.

Marquette, as an institution of higher learning, has the responsibility of encouraging diversity of thought, not just skin color or ethnicity. It cannot endorse intellectual intolerance and certainly not partake in Cancel Culture. Our club members deserve the ability to share their views without the fear of an inquisition by our administration or threats of harm by fellow students. Marquette must stand strong against any threats of violence towards any student, including Samantha. We seek only equal treatment and equal respect. This affair highlights that too many people continue to misunderstand, willingly or unwillingly, our club’s intentions and opinions; but, while those who slander and threaten our members want us to retreat from our views, this matter will only strengthen our resolve and our mission. We believe great institutions like Marquette should be proud of diverse opinions, as well as people, and we hope our fellow students, faculty members, administrators and alumni feel the same way too.
-The Marquette University College Republicans

The College Republicans have asked for a meeting with Marquette officials. Hopefully, those officials will commit to free expression on campus.

And hopefully, they will live up to that commitment the next time the leftist mob gets mad.

Dave Barry on Marquette (And Other) Censorship

This was a big issue three years ago. And it’s not forgotten: the fact that the Marquette Philosophy Department was not willing to let a graduate student express a rather mild — but offensive to the hyper-leftist types there — opinion on the door of his office.

Dave Barry, in this video, comments on the intolerance that is so common on college campuses. He looks back fondly at the 60s, when free speech prevailed.

Unfortunately, libertarians like Barry very much enjoyed free speech in that decade, but the campus left didn’t like it at all — although they had to tolerate a fair amount. Indeed, they felt free to shout down campus speakers of whom they disapproved.

When they grew up, got Ph.D. degrees and began running things, their authoritarian true selves came out.

H/T The National Conversation.

Politically Correct Marquette Faculty Attack Marquette Warrior

Out over the weekend, a nasty attack on this blog by several Marquette Arts & Sciences Department chairs – and signed onto by a handful of Marquette faculty – posted on a blog that has been dedicated, for the last few days, to harassing us.

It resulted from our reporting of the misconduct of a Philosophy Department instructor who told a student who wanted to discuss gay marriage in class that his views were “homophobic,” and that any airing of opposition to gay marriage should not be allowed since it would “offend” any gay students in the class.

The list of department chairs who signed on is interesting.

Lowell Barrington, Political Science
Nancy Snow, Philosophy
James Marten, History
Jane Peterson, Social and Cultural Sciences
Krista Ratcliffe, English
John Grych, Psychology
Anne Pasero, Foreign Languages and Literatures
Robert Masson, Theology

With just a couple of exceptions, it’s pretty much a roll of the politically correct department chairs. Masson, for example, is a big proponent of the doctrine of “white privilege” which holds that white people owe what they have to the exploitation of black people. It doesn’t matter if you never owned slaves. It doesn’t matter if an ancestor died fighting on the Union side in the Civil War. You should feel guilty.

Snow was the lesbian philosopher with the bullhorn heading protests demanding the hiring of aggressively lesbian Arts & Sciences Dean job candidate Jodi O’Brien.

Snow, Marten, Ratcliffe, and Pasero all signed a petition to hire O’Brien. Barrington wore a button at the commencement following the hiring fiasco supporting O’Brien’s hiring.

Who’s Not There

Notable are departments not included: Economics, Math, and the natural sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics). Those departments are in “hard” disciplines where there is much less room for political correctness. And indeed, every one of the few people who have signed onto the statement in the comments section is (as of this writing) from one of the departments whose chairs signed, with the exception of Sharon Chubbuck in Education. Chubbuck wrote an essay where she demeaned two students who did not want to use the classroom to indoctrinate pupils saying they were showing “ the blinders of their common white, middle- to upper-middle class experiences.”

Of course, if the signers generally represent politically correct departments, it doesn’t follow that everybody in their departments is a politically correct leftist. There is a substantial number of more conservative and traditionalist scholars in the Philosophy Department. But they are a dwindling number, since the politically correct faction controls hiring.

Political Science leans clearly left, but isn’t very politically correct, Barrington’s signature to the contrary.

And it doesn’t follow that departments not involved in attacking us support us. More likely they simply haven’t been following this brouhaha, and/or don’t really care. But it remains the case that this is a tempest in a teapot, involving a very few faculty in the humanities and social sciences.

Evaluating the Claims

The illogic of the Department Chairs statement is not only evident when it is taken as a whole, but also in virtually every sentence. Let’s take them one at a time:

We support Ms. Abbate and deeply regret that she has experienced harassment and intimidation as a direct result of Prof. McAdams’s actions.

All we did was to report, accurately, the inappropriate actions of Abbate in demeaning a student, and claiming that gay students should not be exposed to any arguments against gay marriage. It is true that, when the story went national, she was subjected to some nasty e-mails and blog comments (although nothing required her to read the blog with the nastiest comments).

But then we got nasty comments too. When one does something that gets national publicity, some jerks are going to say nasty things. Neither we nor anybody at Marquette can help that.

Prof. McAdams’s actions—which have been reported in local and national media outlets—have harmed the personal reputation of a young scholar as well as the academic reputation of Marquette University.

If accurate reporting harms someone’s reputation, that is fair enough. And if accurate reporting harms Marquette’s reputation, that is also fair enough. The argument here seems to be that certain information needs to be concealed to protect reputations. No journalist would accept that. The rule should be “tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”

This, of course, is a classic case of blaming the messenger. It was Abbate’s actions toward the student which caused the problem, and even then it was not newsworthy until Marquette officials failed to address the problem.

When the student complained to the Dean’s office, he was directed to Philosophy Department Chair Nancy Snow. Snow could have told the student that Abbate was out of line, and that it was not Marquette’s position that opposition to gay marriage is “homophobic” nor that gays should be protected from hearing arguments against it.

Indeed, Snow could have had a little talk with Abbate and advised her against making inflammatory statements to students, and told her that Marquette’s policy is that all students (straight or gay) should equally be confronted in class with arguments they might dislike. No need for even a paper trail on that. But instead, Snow demanded the name of the employee who had advised the student to seek redress.

Having not received any redress, the student came to us.

Marquette’s “Reputation”

Ironically, Snow vigorously attacked Marquette over the issue of its failure to hire Jodi O’Brien. Snow was the lesbian philosopher with the bullhorn condemning Marquette for its action.


 So it seems we have a double standard here: attacking Marquette from the left is acceptable, but any attack from the right is evil since it harms Marquette’s “academic reputation.”

Abbate’s “Reputation”

Does our blog post harm Abbate, for example making it harder for her to get an academic job?

If there are some colleges out there who don’t want instructors who tell students that opposition to gay marriage is homophobic, Abbate might not get hired there. That is appropriate. We feel no obligation to suppress information to help her get a job

But of course, in an increasingly politically correct philosophy profession, hiring in a lot of departments is dominated by people who think pretty much as Abbate does.

Further, she has made no effort to conceal her political views, having on her blog an essay about how all men are responsible for rape.

(She has taken her blog private [https://aphilosophersblog.wordpress.com/] but we got a brief summary of her article from Google cache.)

They have negatively affected campus climate, especially as it relates to gender and sexual orientation.

Just how is this the case? Is the claim that female instructors can’t be criticized, but males can? Is the claim that a good “campus climate” for gays requires that views of which they might disapprove be suppressed? Saying so implies that gays are a bunch of either wimps (if they are fearful upon hearing certain opinions) or bigots (if they get bent out of shape on hearing things they disagree with).

Interestingly, the politically correct crowd cares nothing about the “campus climate” for groups other than their pet victim groups.

How did it affect the “campus climate” for Jews when various Marquette offices sponsored an “Israeli Apartheid” week?

And how about the “campus climate” for conservative Christians who don’t believe in evolution, but get taught about it in a biology class?

(We once had a student who was disturbed that he was being taught about evolution in Norman Sullivan’s Physical Anthropology class. We told him he had to suck it up and accept that if you take Physical Anthropology, you are going to learn about evolution.)

Politically correct people won’t accept these analogies, of course, since they sharply distinguish between victims groups who must be protected, and other groups who must bear the burden of having their beliefs contradicted. But we don’t accept this distinction, and Marquette can’t officially accept it.

And they have led members of the Marquette community to alter their behavior out of fear of becoming the subject of one of his attacks.

We don’t control anybody’s behavior. But if people fear that, when they do something dumb or prejudiced or inappropriate, we will out them, that’s dandy. The politically correct crowd seems to think they have a right to do things that are highly questionable and have them kept secret.

How might we have “altered” people’s behavior?

• In 2006, a graduate student in Philosophy (note how it keeps popping up) put an innocuous political quote on his door. Department Chair James South decided it was “patently offensive” and tore it down. We blogged about it. Will South be less likely to do things like this again? That’s his call, but we hope he will.
• In 2008, and student in Nancy Snow’s class responded to her lecture on “racial profiling” by giving the cops’ view of the issue. Snow tried to shut him up, and then, after class, insisted that he write an apology to two black students in the class. It was assumed they were “offended.” (There is that word again) We blogged about it. Did that make her less likely to shut down certain viewpoints?
• In 2013, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center sponsored a program called “Femsex” where a variety of sexual issues were discussed (often in ways contrary to Catholic teaching), and participants engaged in a variety of exercises, including coloring pictures of female genitalia in the “Cunt Coloring Book.” We blogged about it. Marquette, insisting that it was contrary to its Catholic mission, removed official sponsorship (although the participants were free to continue sans such sponsorship). Will Marquette bureaucrats think twice before sponsoring that sort of thing again? We hope so.

In short, we have only been able to “alter behavior” when people were doing something that could not stand scrutiny, and could not be defended when exposed.

Perhaps worst of all, Prof. McAdams has betrayed his role as a faculty member by pitting one set of students against another.

So all students are suppose to agree? So undergraduates exposed to abuse by an instructor are not supposed to seek redress? So if it hadn’t been for that troublemaker McAdams everything would be dandy? It would be from the standpoint of campus bureaucrats, but not from that of students who are attacked and demeaned and silenced.

by claiming the protection of academic freedom while trying to deny it to others, and by exploiting current political issues to promote his personal agenda.

Our “personal agenda” is to protect students from the excesses of political correctness at Marquette. The “personal agenda” of those to signed the statement is to subject students to the dictates of political correctness.

It’s deeply ironic that those who want Marquette administrators to shut us up are claiming that we want to deny “academic freedom” to others. We can’t deny academic freedom to anybody. We can only report what they do and say.

Professors have a long history of thinking that “academic freedom” includes freedom from being criticized. They happily say what they want to say, and then whine when others say their positions are wrong, or misguided, or downright evil.

But in a free society, freedom works both ways. The people who criticize the professors have the same free speech rights as the professors. And professors have the right to criticize other professors. The politically correct types, living in the insular little environment of an academic department, have trouble understanding that.

Conclusion

The intellectual shoddiness of the attack on us raises all kinds of questions, the most fundamental one being the lack of tolerance for free speech. Leftist professors who would be quite happy having Marquette attacked from the left on issues like “diversity” and “sustainability” go bananas when their own behavior is criticized.

The notion of a robust free market in ideas is fine when they are the only player in the market.

It’s “free speech for me, but not for thee.” And it’s a symptom of the increasing intolerance of academia.

Academic Intolerance at Duke

This isn’t new, but we could not pass up a good article on a Duke professor who dissented from the Divinity School’s “diversity” programs. For this he was called a racist and told he would have taken away many of the perqs of his position.

Duke University Divinity School professor Paul Griffiths is the latest faculty member to fall victim to the taboo against speaking out against “progressive” beliefs. His thoughtcrime: daring to say that a “racial equity” seminar would be a waste of time.

Back on February 6, Anathea Portier-Young, another professor in the Divinity School, sent around to the entire faculty an email. It encouraged one and all to attend a program she favored. “On behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee,” she wrote, “I strongly urge you to participate in the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training planned for March 4 and 5.” Attending it, she continued, would prove to be “transformative, powerful, and life-changing.”

The Racial Equity Institute is one of those organizations that capitalizes on the “progressive” notion that the U.S. remains a very racist nation and cannot progress unless we “develop tools to challenge patterns of power and grow equity.” Its guiding idea is that “Racism is a fierce, ever-present, challenging force…and dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, committed effort.”

Americans should be free to advance those ideas. But they should be equally free to challenge and reject them. Professor Griffiths has learned that professors on our college campuses exercise the latter freedom at their peril.

Shortly after receiving that email from Portier-Young, he wrote and fired off an email of his own. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he wrote. “There’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty,” but the substance of the program would reflect “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies.” And drawing a link to the Soviet Union, Griffiths observed that “(re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history.”

You can read both of the dueling emails here.

One professor says, “This will be good and you ought to attend,” while another says, “This will be a waste of time and you shouldn’t.” What’s the problem?

The problem, of course, is that leftist pieties about race (and other things) now hold privileged status, much as Marxist theory used to in the communist bloc. To paraphrase Orwell, “All speech is free, but some speech is more free than others.”

Professor Portier-Young was so incensed that she filed “harassment” charges against Griffiths with the Duke Office for Institutional Equity. Has our academic world fallen to the point where a professor who finds her ideas challenged would rather file a complaint than make a counter-argument? Sadly, yes.

Marquette: No Attempt to Censor Marquette Warrior (Yet)

A huge brouhaha erupted when we blogged about an instructor in the Philosophy Department who told a student (in an after class conversation) that his opinions in opposition to gay marriage were “homophobic” and that discussion of the issue had to be banned since any gay students in class would be “offended.”

 It went national in outlets that were appalled at the suppression of the Catholic Church’s position at a so called “Catholic university,” and at outlets that support free expression on college campuses.

It also created a backlash among leftist and politically correct academics who apparently agreed with the actions of the instructor, one Cheryl Abbate.

One of the nastiest (and most hypocritical) attacks came from some Marquette department chairs in humanities and the social sciences.

 Marquette reacted to the uproar with the following statement from the Provost:

I am writing to address recent discussions within the campus community concerning the issues of collegiality, professionalism and academic freedom.

The university has guidelines and processes to ensure that all of our faculty, staff and students are treated fairly. These processes allow us to thoughtfully address both incidents themselves and the ways that others have reacted to them.

Shortly thereafter, Brian Dorrington (Marquette PR guy) told various media outlets that Marquette was:

. . . reviewing both a concern raised by a student and a concern raised by a faculty member. We are taking appropriate steps to make sure that everyone involved is heard and treated fairly. In compliance with state and federal privacy laws, we will not publicly share the results of the reviews.

This claim of confidentiality, of course, sounds like a nice strategy for evading issues and keeping everybody happy. They can believe they are getting what they want from the Marquette administration, but that the whole thing must be kept “confidential.”

Consequences?

We don’t know what consequences came of all this, with the exception of the fact that Arts & Sciences Dean Rick Holz wrote a letter of reprimand to Philosophy Department Chair Nancy Snow for her verbal assault on us in a university café (in the presence of a prospective job candidate).

Marquette has made no attempt to censor the Marquette Warrior, nor have we received any sort of reprimand.

It would be nice to believe that this is because Marquette values academic freedom. But the reality is probably less flattering to Marquette.

Holtz Investigates

On Wednesday, November 19, we got an e-mail from Kim Patterson in the office of Holz. It said Holz wanted to meet with us.

We e-mailed him and made it clear to him that we would not accept any sort of reprimand or attempt to censor our blog. He wrote back with a conciliatory message:

Hi John. I think there has been a misunderstanding. I would like to meet with you tomorrow to just gather facts and listen to your side of the issue. As I have indicated before, I was asked by the Provost to gather information and do the fact finding investigation. So I have listened to the recording by the student and read your blog. I would like to hear from you directly and also hear from you about your run-in with Nancy Snow.

And then in a later e-mail:

Hi John. Your blog is your business but we will have to discuss aspects of what you blogged about as I think it is relevant to the issues. I am not planning to “reprimand, censure, or harass” you in any way. I simply want to have a conversation with you so I have a better understanding about what happened here.

Fair enough, we thought, and we even apologized to Holz for our initial testy response.

Intimidation

When we finally arrived at the meeting (on November 20) Holz was congenial enough and got some factual information from us.

But then he offered us some advice that could be interpreted as an attempt at intimidation (although he probably did not see it that way).

He noted that we had (before we went live with the story) e-mailed Cheryl Abbate from our Marquette account asking her for her version of what transpired. He suggested that we should keep our blogging separate from our Marquette business. He suggested we should consult Marquette’s guideline for computer use on that.

We told him that our blogging is a form of publication (if not a particularly exalted one), and research for publication is most certainly something for which we can use Marquette resources. We told him he would be opening a “can of worms” if he made an issue of that.

Then, worse, he told us we should consult Marquette’s guidelines on harassment – the implicit suggestion being that we were “harassing” people with our blogging. We told him we know the guidelines quite well, and that Marquette’s guidelines are absurdly broad, but that for anything to be called “harassment” it has to be directed against a “protected class.” People with politically correct leftist political opinions are not a protected class.

We asked Holz if he had completed the university “training” about harassment, and he replied that he had. We pointing out that the “training” clearly teaches that merely expressing opposition to gay marriage to a fellow employee could be considered “harassment.” He blandly replied [paraphrasing] “yes, the definition is getting broader.”

His response gave no indication that he had any reservations about defining the mere expression of a political opinion as harassment.

We explained to him that if we got anything from Marquette that even vaguely resembled a reprimand we would call our lawyer, and that “we have a lawyer who loves to sue Marquette.”

We have heard nothing further from Marquette

Evaluating Holz

Holz probably didn’t even perceive his statements as questionable. He came across as a conventional, bland, risk averse bureaucrat. Such bureaucrats find free expression problematic, since it creates complaints to the bureaucrats. Holz probably thought he was giving us good advice as to how to avoid controversy — and of course, our avoiding controversy would avoid controversy for him. He apparently didn’t understand that we don’t mind controversy.

And especially not at Marquette University, were outrageous excesses of political correctness happen quite regularly.

Evaluating Marquette

Generally, free speech can prevail on a college campus, but only if the speaker is willing to make a stink about it. The preferred mode of operation among campus bureaucrats is to quietly “handle” conflict, and to chill free expression.

Often, a stifling climate of political correctness can do the job for them, as students come to understand that they will be attacked and derided for stands unpopular among the politically correct activists, and as faculty avoid conflict.

All of this is the result of an unfortunate confluence of intolerance among the faculty (especially in the humanities and social sciences) and conformity and timidity among vision-less administrators.

In this, Marquette is probably no worse than a lot of other universities, but it’s also no better.

Slap on the Wrist: Trivial Discipline for Marquette Students Who Defaced Anti-Abortion Display

It was the kind of stunning intolerance that has become common on college campuses: members of the feminist group Empowerment (along with some other students) defaced a university-approved anti-abortion display this past October.

Marquette has failed to explain whether any punishment was meted out to the students guilty of the vandalism. They have not even issued any assurance that punishment would be imposed for an egregious infringement on free expression.

Now we know why.

An Admission

Yesterday, Marquette held a full-day “workshop” titled “Freedom Dreams Now: Whose Lives Matter? A challenge for academics.” Yes, it was as biased and politically correct as it sounds. But one particularly interesting session was a “faculty/student round-table.” One of the students, a black female, admitted she participated in the vandalism.

Actually, it was more than an admission. She outright bragged about her action, and felt it grossly unfair that a minor punishment had been imposed on her. She complained that an officer from the campus Police Department came to question her at her workplace.

Vandalism is a criminal offense, but multiple Marquette faculty intervened on behalf of the students, and there were no criminal charges brought. Rather, Marquette’s own internal student conduct process imposed a minor punishment: the students were required to write a three page paper on how they had acted irresponsibly in defacing the display.

The student on the panel refused to, saying “it’s finals week.” So did one other student. Both were thus put on university probation for a semester. Not suspension, but mere probation.

Marquette, in other words, treated a frontal assault of free expression as a minor peccadillo. If some conservative students had vandalized a “gay rights” display on campus, we can’t imagine any such lenient treatment.

Faculty Response

Rather appalling was faculty response toward this student and her vandalism, which was favorable. One female faculty member described the vandalism as “free speech” and expressed her joy at seeing the vandalized display. Other faculty expressed the hope that the incident would not appear on the permanent record of the student who spoke.

Of course, the expressed opinions of a few faculty may not have represented the views of everybody in the room, and indeed, the people in the room were probably heavily self-selected from among leftist politically correct faculty. But there can be no doubt that a considerable number of Marquette faculty welcome this suppression of politically incorrect opinions.

Marquette Touts Shoddy Faculty Committee Report: Our Lawyers Respond

Marquette has now released the Report of the Faculty Hearing Committee that reviewed our case. Interestingly, they did it without our permission, in spite of insisting for months that they could not do it without our permission.

Indeed, just last week, they asked the University Academic Senate for permission to release it, provided we agreed. The proposition they put to that group was:

• A motion to amend the confidentiality provisions governing Faculty Hearing Committee reports to allow their release (with appropriate redactions) upon request of the subject faculty member; or upon the request of the Faculty Hearing Committee (by majority vote) or university administration, with the consent of the subject faculty member

We, following the advice of our lawyer, have not released it. But now Marquette has released it unilaterally.

Why? Apparently, they have been feeling the heat of the bad publicity their actions have created, and they think it helps their case against us. But in fact, if anybody actually takes the time to read it, it becomes obvious how bogus that “case” becomes. Our legal team has issued the following press release outlining some of the problems.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty Responds to Marquette’s Release of Faculty Report re: Professor McAdams

The Faculty Hearing Committee was biased from beginning; does not exonerate university, Lovell mishandling of issue

May 4, 2016 – Milwaukee, WI – Monday, in response to the lawsuit filed by suspended Marquette University professor John McAdams, Marquette University released the written report of its Faculty Hearing Committee. The FHC is supposed to be the guardian of a tenured faculty member’s procedural and substantive rights against the power of the University Administration. But as shown in the attachment, the FHC failed in its mission.

On behalf of Professor McAdams, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty has objected from the beginning to the way in which Marquette has handled the entire matter. Those concerns were compounded by the composition and conduct of the FHC.

Marquette’s self-serving and selective references to the FHC report ignore the fact that the Committee did not exonerate the Administration. To the contrary, it found that Marquette’s summary suspension and banishment of Professor McAdams violated its own rules of conduct. And in many other respects the report is fatally flawed.

• The FHC refused to follow requirements placed in the faculty statutes to ensure that tenured professors receive a fair hearing.
• It permitted a clearly biased member to remain on the committee, did nothing to ameliorate the effects of a summary suspension it acknowledged was entirely improper, and refused to compel the administration to turn over evidence in its possession to assist Professor McAdams in preparing for its hearing.
• Furthermore, it gutted Marquette’s contractual promise of academic freedom and free speech by making up rules after the fact to justify punishing Professor McAdams.
• Finally, it lost sight of the fact that Dr. McAdams was standing up for a student who was being mistreated by a Marquette Instructor. Professor McAdams maintains that the academic freedom allegedly guaranteed by Marquette allowed him to write about any and all topics of public interest, in particular the mistreatment of an undergraduate student by his Instructor and the subsequent failure of the Administration even to consider his complaint.

A comprehensive response to the Faculty Hearing Committee and process can be found here.

So why would a faculty committee fail to uphold our academic freedom?

We have suggested two complementary theories: ideological bias and toadyism. One of the committee members, Dr. Lynn Turner, was allowed to remain on the committee in spite of having, along with other leftist faculty, signed a statement attacking us. And it attacked us not merely for the blog post about Abbate, but several other blog posts that have criticized leftist intolerance on campus. This, of course, is evidence that the Abbate affair was merely a pretext to get rid of a professor who has caused trouble by outing intolerant political correctness on campus.

The other element is probably toadyism. It’s a nice romantic notion that faculty will stand up for academic freedom, even the freedom of professors with whose ideas they disagree.  But in fact, the temptation to cozy up to an administration that controls budgets and can hand out all kinds of perks to favored faculty is huge.

That said, the Report may be a clumsy compromise between committee members who wanted us fired (which is what the University was demanding) and members who were willing to stand up for academic freedom. Given pressures for unanimity, both groups may have had to compromise on a one to two semester unpaid suspension.

The Report makes clear, however, that Lovell was being flatly dishonest in implying that his demand for an abject apology followed the committee’s recommendation. There is nothing whatsoever about any apology in the Report.