Just how far gone some of our colleges and universities are is revealed in the latest airing of grievances (and it’s not even Festivus!) at Marquette. A group of students at the Milwaukee school is really unhappy and wants action from the administration. (College Fix has the story.)
For one thing, the students say that they are victims of “discriminatory violence.” Have they been beaten up? No, but in Newspeak, violence doesn’t mean, you know, violence. They feel that they’re under attack because the university’s seal has a likeness of Father Marquette, but he, a white guy, is standing over a Native American holding an oar in a boat. That could create bad feelings, so must be either “cropped or altered.”
For another, the students demand that the university expand its core curriculum so that students will have to take more courses on “diversity and inclusion,” especially one that addresses “white privilege.” It certainly doesn’t say much for their commitment to peaceful coexistence that they’re determined to force other students to endure the tendentious blather of such courses. Nor does it speak well for their own seriousness as students that they’d rather sit through such courses than take something of substance.
Will the Ad Hoc Coalition of and for Students of Color get its way? Perhaps so, given the way the university reacted to a minor dustup between a tenured professor and a teaching assistant, firing the former in an Alice in Wonderland fashion. (Professor Howard Kainz wrote about that incident for the Pope Center here.) An administration that would fire a professor because he made a TA feel bad is likely to cave in to demands like these.