Marquette University: The Journey from Joe McCarthy to Angela Davis

Is it possible to shame whoever is supposed to be in charge at Marquette University – The President, the Board of Trustees, a distinguished, influential Jesuit somewhere in residence, someone, anyone who might know even a little history from the last hundred years or so and understand what Communists do to Christians when they get power?  Not even remotely. The real operatives, the social justice “priests” at this pretend Catholic university apparently have deeply inhaled the same fetid vapors of the cultural Marxism that saturate every molecule of air at the most secular, anti-Christian universities such as Berkeley, or closer to home, the one in Madison.  From the MU website:

The Marquette Forum will host Dr. Angela Davis for a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, March 29 ….  Davis is a scholar, activist and sought-after speaker who has presented at dozens of universities….  This event is part of the Marquette Forum, a yearlong series of conversations inspired by visions of inclusion and a better world emerging from black freedom struggles.

Here is Orwell-inspired, DiversitySpeak perfected – anodyne, flawlessly crafted so as not to arouse suspicion that the foxes now guard the hen house, that the radicals at MU run the show and stage their phony PC-scripted lectures and discussions. No one can object to healthy “conversations”, especially ones “inspired by visions of inclusion.” Who could be opposed to “a better world” or cheering on the “freedom struggles” of anyone? This announcement in both content and style smacks of Soviet era agitprop, the technique of which is to show how morally immaculate you are by wrapping all the right words around yourself – “peace,” “justice,” “freedom,” “democracy.” Communist East Germany (euphemistically, The German Democratic Republic), it might be recalled, was so just, democratic, free and prosperous, that the Stalinists in charge needed to build a wall to keep its citizens from leaving and shot them whenever they tried.

Angela Davis (Credit Image: Nick Wiebe/Wikimedia)

What is omitted in the vapid, banal happy talk about the “scholar, activist and sought-after speaker” is that at 73 years of age, the life-long Marxist, Angela Davis, is not just some intellectually formidable village atheist imported to rattle the sheltered, complacent young Christians on campus.  Neither is she a 1960s-era, hallowed civil rights celebrity who happened to have mellowed out of a distant radical past and embraced American traditions and joined the Rotary Club. Her life’s mission continues to unfold with an unwavering, militant commitment to the destruction of what this 136 year-old Jesuit university is (supposed to be) all about. From Marquette University’s website:

Marquette University Guiding Values
Endorsed Dec. 8, 2014
In accordance with the Catholic, Jesuit mission and vision of Marquette University, we hold that all people and things are created to praise, reverence and serve God in our community and throughout the world, and thus every aspect of the university’s lifeblood and work holds this principle and foundation as its beginning and end. Therefore, we will enact the following values and behaviors in our lives and our work to serve the greater glory of God…

One does not have to be a Jesuit-educated theologian or a philosopher to grasp that nowhere in any country that might have had the misfortune to be governed by this former Black Panther, FBI fugitive and Communist Party USA candidate for Vice President 1980 would any follower of MU’s Catholic, Jesuit mission – praising, revering and serving God – not find his life to be pure misery, assuming that he was not liquidated. Those at MU who extended the “distinguished lecture” invitation to Davis should review the video clip of her remarks in her pilgrimage in 1979 to Moscow where she accepted the Lenin Peace Prize, in her words,  “the esteemed peace prize bearing the glorious name of Vladimir Illich Lenin here on the soil where he led the great October Revolution.”  Sounds very reverential, doesn’t it? And, for a man whose violent hatred for religion could not be matched by anyone.

Davis was also feted in 1972 by the East German Stalinist, Erich Honecker, collecting honorary degrees, effusing praise and admiration for the GDR and denouncing her native land for its repression and racism.

Most of those MU students who had hoped to be “inspired” by Davis’s “visions of inclusion” were likely unaware that after the “great October Revolution,” the “glorious” Lenin’s vision for the millions of Christians in the Russia he was about to turn into a “workers’ paradise” was somewhat less than inclusive.  In a 1922 letter to his ruling Politboro, Lenin outlined his approach to religious diversity in the young regime that was struggling to gain control over those who were somewhat less than enthusiastic about their prospects – show trials, followed by executions, public ones just to make sure everyone got the message. “The result,” he wrote, “of the trial is to be the execution, by public shooting, of a large number of the Chuya Black Hundreds as well as the shooting of as many as possible from Moscow and other important religious centers…  The more we shoot, the better it will be for us.” [Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 125-26, emphasis added] Lenin, and then this disciple, Stalin went on to obliterate Russian Christianity with an unprecedented savagery, as well as to persecute Islam.  The pattern was repeated by Communist dictatorships across the world, as in China, Cuba and the Soviet block in Eastern and Central Europe.

That an institution like Marquette University would host and honor a militant atheist like Angela Davis, an implacable enemy of its sacred teachings, its religious faith and aspirations, someone who has made a life-long, worshipful embrace of Lenin’s October Revolution and the failed Communist regimes throughout the last century that repressed, tortured and murdered millions of Christians all over the world, is just one more piece of the depressing evidence that resistance to the cultural Marxism that pervades even our once conservative, religious institutions has utterly collapsed.

One of the curious and largely unnoticed ironies of this debacle is that Marquette University, so eager and enthusiastic to welcome an aging Communist radical peddling all the standard Marxist tropes, is that it is the alma mater of perhaps the most famous anti-Communist of all, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a 1935 graduate of its school of law.

It is a safe bet that very few of the current students at Marquette University Law School (MULS) are even aware that Joe McCarthy is an alumnus (LL.B., 1935) of the law school. This unawareness, however, is excusable. The halls, offices, and classrooms of most law schools are teeming with portraits, plaques, and busts of prominent alumni. It is not uncommon for law schools to name buildings, classrooms, courtrooms, professorships, and scholarships after prominent graduates. At MULS, however, Joe McCarthy-undoubtedly the law school’s most famous alumnus and a man Lyndon B. Johnson said “will never be forgotten”-is persona non grata. [From, Jeffry S. Kinsler, Marquette Law Review, #2, 2001]

Indeed, even more than ever, Senator McCarthy remains a persona non grata at MU.  However, the irony, of course, is that this most anti- of anti-communists is an embarrassment to the cognitive-dissonant Jesuit Catholics at MU who at the same time roll out the red carpet for a speaker whose long, illustrious CV describes someone who might well be called the perfect American Bolshevik, a life-long apologist for communist butchers (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro) across the globe. Those who refuse to recognize their enemies, especially ones who are so open, consistent and brazen as Angela Davis, are a hopeless, pathetic lot.

Joseph McCarthy

The pattern of philo-communism and PC-enforced, leftist identity politics is not, of course, unique to MU. It is a pervasive feature of higher education. Recently, Young America’s Foundation’s spokeswoman Emily Jashinsky told staff at the National Review “that there has been a “disturbing pattern of suppressing conservativism” on Jesuit campuses, citing DePaul University and Gonzaga University as the most recent instances of conservative speakers receiving significant backlash from university faculty.

For a parent seeking a Catholic university education for his child – some advice.  Skip Marquette University. Save the money and send the kid to a state university.  There is no difference.