MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin, March 31, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The Wisconsin Jesuit university that suspended a tenured professor after his blog post exposed a student’s apparent harassment by a graduate assistant for not supporting homosexual “marriage” has moved closer toward firing the instructor.
Marquette University suspended Political Science Professor John McAdams without pay during Holy Week and said it intends to terminate him if he doesn’t apologize for the 2014 blog post.
The suspension is effective April 1, extending through the fall 2016 semester.
McAdams wrote on his blog March 26 that his return to the faculty in January 2017 is contingent upon his submitting a written statement acknowledging his wrongdoing to President Michael Lovell by April 4, and admitting his blog post “was reckless and incompatible with the mission and values of Marquette University,” as well as expressing “deep regret for the harm suffered” by the former graduate student.
“Marquette is an intolerant, politically correct institution whose ‘Catholic mission’ is nothing but a marketing gimmick.”
“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,” McAdams wrote.
The University first suspended McAdams with pay and threatened to strip him of his tenure and fire him in February of last year, after his November 2014 blog post on a philosophy student being told by an instructor that he was not able to make “homophobic” comments in class.
The instructor had stated in class that everyone agreed with “gay rights” and therefore there was no need to discuss the issue, prompting the student to indicate to her after class that he didn’t support homosexual “marriage” and desired further discussion on it. The instructor said it would be offensive to any homosexual students in the class if his opinion were to be expressed, and ultimately invited the student to drop her class if he didn’t agree with her position.
In addition to being suspended with pay at the time, McAdams was banned from campus.
In an announcement to the Marquette community last Thursday Lovell said he couldn’t comment on specifics since it was a personnel matter, but stated, “I can assure you that my decision has been guided by Marquette University’s values and is solely based on Professor McAdams’ actions, and not political or ideological views expressed in his blog.”
“It is bizarre that Lovell can invoke Marquette’s ‘guiding values’ to contravene the black letter guarantees of academic freedom embodied in University Statutes,” McAdams responded in his blog.
“Is free speech a ‘guiding value’ of Marquette?” he asked. “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.”
He went on to say that when the student had complained about his treatment by the instructor, the University’s Philosophy Department treated him with hostility, and that not only was the instructor not reprimanded, “it was conveyed to her that she had done nothing wrong.”
McAdams said the demand for an apology and his signing a vaguely defined loyalty oath was simply a ploy to create an excuse to fire him.
“But the ploy is absolutely transparent, and won’t mitigate the realization that Marquette is an intolerant, politically correct institution whose ‘Catholic mission’ is nothing but a marketing gimmick,” he wrote, making clear he would not apologize or sign the oath.
McAdams has also exposed other cases of Catholic identity abuse at Marquette in the past.
He had blogged about concerns over the Catholic university’s definition of social justice, saying that it doesn’t include opposition to abortion and homosexual “marriage.”
Marquette University employees were also told at a 2014 training seminar to report their colleagues for harassment if they spoke openly against same-sex “marriage.”
Concerns over Marquette’s Catholic identity have surfaced for different reasons, including the hiring of pro-abortion, pro-homosexual and pro-euthanasia faculty, LGBTQ Masses, faculty clergy dissenting from Church teaching, and faculty censure of the U.S. Bishops for their opposition to the HHS Mandate.