Murphy’s. Caffrey’s. Haggerty’s. Yes, even the Harp and Shamrock. Besides being area drinking establishments frequented by Marquette students, these bars share another more sinister characteristic.

An exclusive months-long investigation by The Warrior suggests that all these businesses have names with Irish roots and collude to keep out competitors with more culturally inclusive atmospheres. Although most students remain oblivious to this implicit privileging of Irishness over other ethnicities, some have begun to question the status quo and their role in perpetuating Irish cultural domination, although they would speak to The Warrior only on the condition of anonymity.

For these dissidents, their heightened consciousness seems to stem from the festivities associated with St. Patrick’s Day. This day arguably commemorates the patron saint of Ireland who battled snakes as he spread Christianity throughout the Emerald Isle in the fifth century, but it has become a much-beloved occasion for parades, parties, and especially drinking. As one student put it, though, “When I was on campus celebrating St. Patty’s Day because I had nowhere else to go for spring break, I suddenly felt convicted of the insidious nature of this holiday. Here I was in an Irish-sounding bar surrounded by people wearing green, pretending to blend in, to ‘be Irish’ as it were. But I’m not. I’m mostly Bulgarian with some Liechtensteiner blood. I felt the ancestors shaking their heads in disgust.”

This assumption of universal Irishness, implicit in the bar names and St. Patrick’s Day, harms those who come from other backgrounds. In describing the psychological effects of this, a student of Czech ancestry observed, “It’s not that I need to have my Czechness affirmed every Thursday night or anything like that, or need a bar called Svoboda’s, but the total absence of my heritage within Marquette’s drinking culture hurts. I will always remember the scorn and almost disgust expressed by a bartender at one in the morning one time when I suggested major celebrations for St. Wenceslas Day [September 28, patron saint of the Czechs].” Given the number of national heritages represented at Marquette, it does seem striking that only Irishness is so privileged.

Of course, the obvious counterargument stresses the proud Irish Catholic heritage of many, perhaps even most, Marquette students and views the Irish struggle for freedom from Britain and the Irish-American battle for equal treatment in America as inspiring examples for us all. Perhaps, according the pro-Irish faction, we’re all Irish now.

Yet those who favor diversity with their drink refuse to buy into Marquette’s universal Irishness. “Just because we applied to Notre Dame as our first choice school and wear green to avoid getting physically assaulted on March 17 does not make us Irish,” complained one frequent patron of Marquette’s Irish bars, a graduate student with some Japanese and Texan heritage. Those who come from cultures without their own patron saints or religious traditions which reject specific saints describe an even starker reality. “Even if the bars opened their doors to modernity and inclusion by celebrating every patron saint’s day, I would still be left out because I am an atheist,” one student said while furtively glancing around.

These underground activists against the Irishness of our world seem unsure of their next step in what promises to be a long and painful battle for the soul of the Marquette community. Yet they remain determined to resist the Irish dominance underlying the area’s night life. As the first student quoted above remarked, “I don’t know how to rectify this injustice, but mark my words. It’s going down on October 19, St. John of Rila’s Day [commemorating patron saint of Bulgaria]. Bulgarians of Marquette, unite!”

Oddly enough, neither he nor any other student interviewed for this piece proposed a boycott of the campus bar scene, and they were eager to distance themselves from any suggestion of this and put down those groups which abstain from alcohol. This exclusion of certain groups from the inclusion campaign itself perhaps shows just how difficult Marquette’s long walk to freedom will be. As the graduate student put it, “Do I look Amish, Mormon, or Muslim to you?” No, indeed, he did not.

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Marquette’s Office of International Education (OIE) announced Monday that they will no longer accept credit for university service learning programs in Africa, South America or any other under resourced continent unless trip participants post at least ten Facebook albums documenting multiple emotional experiences between themselves and orphan children native to the country in which the service is taking place.

“If there’s not a smiling orphan in that photo, we can’t give a student credit,” said Mandy Grubbe, associate vice executive director in the Office of International Education. “Sure, students can fill out paperwork, and write reflections and all that, but unless they come back with at least 125 Facebook pictures, with no less than 75 percent of them showing the student hugging, kissing, cuddling or playing with an ecstatic, underprivileged orphan, we really can’t authenticate their service.”

The new policy has resulted in rush of profile pictures featuring Marquette students and the unidentified orphans they met during their service. Marquette officials says orphans of any exotic ethnicity is acceptable, but most photos hail from service learning programs in South Africa, Belize, Chile, Kenya or Ghana.

“At first the task of spontaneously lifting up children and making them smile long enough to get a photo was pretty daunting,” Stephanie Rove, a junior in the College of Communication said. “But then we figured out that if we give them enough candy and soccer balls, they’ll gladly do as many photo shoots as we want.”
Rove said before embarking on her service, she was nervous she wouldn’t be able to meet Marquette’s photo quota, but forming “snapshot” groups with other participants has been helpful.

“It’s been great to try our paparazzi-like tactics out on each other before we try them on the foreign orphans,” she said. “I mean, what a load off, now I know how to set up experiences to get the best framing and lighting to get all the photos I need and look super cool on Facebook.”

OIE has not instituted any formal requirements regarding specific orphan-service learner bonding activity in the photos, but Grubbe said students are encouraged to rotate at least five of their most touching images, as their profile pictures for the six months following their trip.

“Sometimes the photos are intimate, capturing a special moment between one student and their orphan of choice, or sometimes they show several students interacting with literally hundreds of eager, parentless children,” she said. “Either way, we need as much documentation as possible in order to verify that the Jesuit mission has indeed been advanced. And, of course, we have to keep the photos on our Web site updated.”

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MILWAUKEE, 2237 AD- University archaeologists made a break through in a decades old dig Thursday, discovering a centuries old settlement of a Marquette society long gone. The site, which university archaeologist say will bring them unprecedented information into the way life was in the year 2010, was filled with documents, banners, photographs multimedia materials and evidence of ridiculous amounts of programming to promote “The Centennial Celebration of Women at Marquette.”

“I don’t know what the hell university officials were thinking that year,” said university Provost George Stanley. “Recognizing women as some sort of distinct type of human, calling out their “differences” and slapping them on a pedestal to celebrate one type of human group’s beginnings at Marquette, at the expense of the other human group is wildly uneducated and patriarchal, but man, it sure looks like they had a party.”

Students were equally disgusted and shocked by the ostentatious display of gender discrimination at the school, especially those in majors deemed “under-gendered” by celebrants in 2010.

“It’s like they rounded up every “female” on campus that year and forced them on to a panel to discuss their backgrounds and hopes and dreams,” said JunieYork, a senior in the College of Engineering. “I mean its kind of sad how ignorant they were back then, making such a big deal out of ‘women’ in math, science engineering and technology professions.”

Sally Toby, a junior in the College of Health Sciences echoed York and said evidence of the horribly demeaning celebration is heartbreaking.

“The oppression humans like me must have faced, with others calling out their gender differences right and left…I’m so glad we’ve finally come to a point where any sort of gender distinction is totally irrelevant.”

University spokesperson Yolanda Steinmo released a statement on the appalling discovery yesterday, “In a current age where gender and identity have been largely reconstructed to not recognize any gender differences between what was formerly referred to as “male” and “female” the fact that the university was so willing to shamelessly refer to that group of humans as somehow different in any physical, social or mental way illustrates the vast intellectual progress society has experienced over the last century.”

The Centennial Celebration discovery includes over 5000 artifacts from a variety of events on campus that year hosted by university officials. Further documentation of the morally depraved festivities includes videos, newspaper articles, pod casts, slide shows, photos and millions of inter-university memos and contracts.

“At one point it looked like administration officials were working on hiring a skywriter to write ‘Centennial
Celebration of Women at Marquette—We sure love our Ladies,’ in air space over the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country” said Lawrence Bolly. “I mean, it’s really kind of sick.”

“All I can say is, I’m so happy to be as progressive and enlightened as I am today,” said Toby. “Marquette sure has come a long way.”

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Everyone seems pretty neutral with campus food issue, Sodexho

“Yeah, it’s alright,” said some. While others claimed, “it could be a lot better with all the money I’m spending.”

Russia eliminates two time zones

In a brash move that that has human rights activists scrambling, Russia has eliminated two time zones. Russian ambassadors have declared, of the two time zones, “they knew too much.”

Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” fails to impress at annual U.S. Theological Conference

In a rare display of complete condemnation, the United States Theological Conference was unanimously unimpressed with Train’s extrapolations on the soul. Hey, Soul Sister, an attempt by well-known theologian Train to reconcile a decades long Protestant and Catholic debate on the merits of good work, was unveiled early on during the conference. In a statement released by the Conference, “The only thing that seems to be in line with traditional church doctrine is the constant referencing to Mister Mister, who’s hit song Kyrie Kyrie (1982) has been a Lenten mainstay of the church for decades.”

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In conjunction with their new, and wildly successful, “Native Tree Project,” Students for an Environmentally Active Campus will be sponsoring a second installment of their “Native” programming series.

Never meant to be part of a broader program, S.E.A.C.’s Native Tree Project sought to document and label all of the trees on Marquette’s campus that are native to the campus community. However, given the wildly successful nature of the program, S.E.A.C. has decided to continue dedicating itself to pointing out all things native to Marquette’s campus.

“The native cement project is designed to point out the value of good native cement to members of the Marquette University community,” said S.E.A.C. Green-Czar Brittany Williams. “With the ever growing trend to go green, we feel it is important to preserve what little is left of our precious cement reserves on MU’s campus.” According to research found by S.E.A.C., having bountiful and stable cement resources is a vital part of an environmentally conscious campus.

“Some people mis-interpret ‘going green’ as having grass growing out of the cracks in the sidewalks, but we know that it means filling them in with sustainable and earth-friendly options like cement,” commented S.E.A.C. member Rusty Carlson.

According to S.E.A.C., the cement project will document the various different types of cement located in and around campus, and place them into different categories based on weight, water run-off ability, dexterity, and most importantly, color. “When most people see cement, they just see grey rock, but when we see cement, we see a dream.”

Members of S.E.A.C. are extremely pleased with the direction the project is taking, and are hoping to do further “native” projects in the future. Williams is excited about the future of the initiative: “The Native Cement Project is just the second of many steps we are taking towards documenting every single atom of Marquette’s campus and placing it on a map. Eventually, we would like to just buy one of those printing label makers to adhesively label everything on campus.”

**DISCLAIMER – This article is apart of The Warrior’s April Fool’s Edition

**DISCLAIMER – This article is apart of The Warrior’s April Fool’s Edition