A few weeks back Christopher West came to University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee to speak about Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. While the speech itself was extremely interesting, many of the Marquette students who attended wondered why a presentation like this has not been put on at our own campus or why there has generally been a lack of speakers visiting this University over the past few semesters.

This has not always been the case. Two years ago student organizations at Marquette had invited so many different speakers that it was impossible to attend them all. Some of the most notable was the production of “Porn Nation,” and two extremely interesting speeches by Reza Aslan and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. But since this period there have been increasingly less and less high profile speakers coming to this University, while UWM has consistently been able to attract exciting, controversial speakers such as Walid Shoebat.

While Marquette University could certainly do a lot more to attract interesting speakers with extremely important messages like Christopher West, much of the fault lies with us – the students. As members of various student organizations we must take the necessary steps to search out and ask different speakers to come to this campus to discuss topics relevant to that particular organization.

But rather than making an effort to search out speakers that would be both interesting and relevant, we have gotten lazy, resorting simply to having  a campus showing of a certain film that we could just as easily watch on our own.
All of us only have a short time here at Marquette, and we need to make the most of this opportunity. We should all be striving to learn as much as we can not only in our classes and from fellow students but from people who have actually had experiences and have acquired knowledge they can impart to us.

These different perspectives will further a free market of ideas that will help students better understand the world and the problems we will all face in the future. We should be making an effort to ask speakers from many different backgrounds who can discuss specific topics relevant to our world today. This will not only allow us to better understand the world we live in but will also allow us to better determine what type of life we will choose to lead.

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