At
Marquette University, Professor John McAdams has been suspended without pay since
December, 2014, for a blog post. The
posting criticized an instructor for telling an undergraduate student that opposition
to same sex marriage would not be discussed in her classroom. Since Marquette is a Jesuit institution, this
is a surprising position for the university to take. The administration and its faculty supporters
say this is a matter of professional misconduct because it’s improper for a
professor to criticize a teaching assistant in a blog. This particular policy on blog posts appears to
me to be part of a pattern of discrimination in academia.
Let’s
consider the statistics. What percentage
of Marquette's social sciences faculty are known or suspected Republicans? If,
as in the case of most universities, it's less than 10%, this statistic is very
strong evidence that universities in general, and Marquette in particular, have
hiring and firing procedures which have a severe adverse impact. Ratios like
that must be the result of prejudice. There
is no way this statistic could be a random outcome of fair, unbiased processes.
This must be the result of an extremely hostile environment. To conservatives,
what you refer to as a normal disciplinary process looks like censorship. Given
the background of institutional bias shown in the statistics, the burden of
proof is on Marquette to show that this is not just a handy excuse to terminate
a conservative as part of a pervasive pattern of political discrimination. I
don't see anything in what you have said that would convince a federal judge
this is not discrimination, if Republicans were a protected class. If a private
workplace had racial minority representation of 10% of employees when the
population was 50% minority, would it seem unbiased and fair to you? The
background removes Marquette’s credibility.
If
tenure doesn't protect Professor McAdams from this kind of manure flowing down
hill, then it's useless. All of those tenured folks who can't teach and
haven't done research in years should be laid off. In the meantime, it's
clear that Marquette supports freedom of speech only if they totally agree with
what's being said. Liberation theology does not seem to be very
liberating.
Marquette’s
defense of an instructor telling a student that certain subjects may not be
questioned with regard to the course content is disingenuous at best. Academic
freedom is supposed to allow inquiry into subjects unfettered by preconceived
notions. The instructor's comments to her student showed an almost total lack
of academic freedom. The fact that the Professor who commented on it is
straight and white may have something to do with the fact that he's being
tarred and feathered and then run out of Marquette on a rail. Campus justice, an oxymoron worse than
military intelligence, is based almost entirely on identity and politics.
Professors, check your privilege. It's possible for identities to come in and
out of fashion. Your identity might be eclipsed by some other identities that
become more equal than others.