It is striking how events conspire together so each year a particular topic emerges as the central battleground of university life.
Two years ago, everything centered around the nickname debate. At the end of it, for a brief while, we were stuck with “Gold.” As student outrage gushed , the leadership of the Marquette University Student Government put out a statement supporting the decision.
While the Board of Trustees quickly came around and reverted to “Golden Eagles,” the tone was set for the next year. Student involvement in university governance became a major topic of discussion. Both candidates for MUSG president pledged to fight for a student representative on the Board of Trustees as a visible sign of increased shared governance.
Last year, students lost a lot of steam in their battle for greater representation in university decision-making. While MUSG’s leadership has admirably made the case to the Board for a greater student voice, we’ve seen no tangible progress. And as more of us who were around for “the Gold” graduate, the issue is less and less at the fore.
So far this year, the student theme is academic freedom.
On the one hand, we have the Vagina Monologues. Denied by the administration last year when a student organization asked permission to perform them, they are now permitted because the performance is sponsored by an academic program with faculty present.
I have argued (see the Feb. 14 issue of the Warrior) that the performance is an abuse of academic freedom, and there are limits to current notions of “academic freedom” at a Catholic campus.
The same week that the administration allowed the Vagina Monologues, it denied permission for a student organization to form under the moniker, “Students for Academic Freedom.” SAF would have done rather innocuous things, like advocate for a Student Bill of Rights or ask that students be able to see reading lists before they sign up for classes.
The administration turned SAF’s application down in the name of, ironically, academic freedom. Take the latter example of public reading lists. If faculty had to disclose the lists for their classes, [conservative] students [like myself] may find questionable material on those lists and inquire further or object to their inclusion.
Or, perhaps we would find that certain professors assign overwhelmingly ideologically biased books.This would put pressure on the faculty to change their book lists, thus wrongly (in their minds) crimping the academic freedom of the faculty.
And this is where it all comes together. The argument being advanced by the administration is, again, that students have nothing to contribute to the governance of the University. We should just pay our tuition, show up in class and otherwise do as we are told.
We should not know how the University is run, we should not speak up about ideological bias among faculty and we should not question decisions made by “the adults.”
This battle over academic freedom is a direct outgrowth over last year’s debate about student involvement in University governance.
Popularity: 6% [?]
