Catholic University Punishes Professor Who Stood Up for Catholic Values
Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is supposed to be a Catholic, Jesuit university, is taking steps to fire a professor who blogged his disagreement���back in 2014���with a colleague, a philosophy professor, who is alleged to have accused one of her students of homophobia when the student expressed disagreement with a position of hers.
Professor John McAdams has been the subject of an investigation by school officials since November 2014, when he wrote on his Marquette Warrior blog about the other professor, Cheryl Abbate, saying that she was ���just using a tactic typical among liberals now. Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ���offensive��� and need to be shut up.���
Marquette finally announced this week that McAdams is suspended without pay through the fall of 2016, and will lose his job entirely unless he confesses his ���guilt��� and apologizes within two weeks. In response, McAdams has said, in part: ���These demands are reminiscent of the Inquisition, in which victims who ���confessed��� they had been consorting with Satan and spreading heresy would be spared execution. Is free speech a ���guiding value��� of Marquette? Apparently not. Is protecting students who want to argue for Catholic teaching about marriage from bullying a ���guiding value��� of Marquette? Apparently, it���s not either. The Philosophy Department treated the student with hostility when he complained. Marquette had no problem with that. Not only was Abbate not even admonished that she had erred, it was conveyed to her that she had done nothing wrong.���
McAdams is clearly not taking any of this lying down, as he���s indicated that he has lawyers at the ready to take on Marquette. It will, of course, be of great interest to all those concerned about the loss of genuine free speech on college campuses to see how this eventually plays out.
By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large
