Professor John McAdams of Marquette University appeared on Breitbart News Daily Friday morning to discuss his defense of traditional marriage, and how politically-correct enforcers are threatening his position at the university.
Sirius XM host Stephen K. Bannon pointed out that Marquette is a Jesuit university, and wondered how a position in defense of traditional marriage could make trouble for a professor at such an institution.
“I didn’t actually even defend traditional marriage,” McAdams said. “Simply the right of a student to defend traditional marriage without being bullied and demeaned. That was the whole point about my blog post.” In that post, McAdams described the case of a student who was told to drop a class by an angry leftist professor, who exclaimed that defending marriage between men and women was intolerably “homophobic, racist, and sexist.”
“As for so-called Catholic universities, first you have to understand that Jesuits are thin on the ground these days,” McAdams continued. “The president of Marquette’s not a Jesuit, the provost isn’t, the dean of arts and sciences isn’t… there are so few Jesuits that so-called Jesuit institutions pretty much aren’t run by Jesuits.”
He added that the Jesuit order itself was no longer a “bastion of Catholic orthodoxy.” This left universities like Marquette to suffer at the whims of “whatever fads prevail in academia generally.”
“For example, if it’s pandering to the gay lobby, they’ll pander to the gay lobby, and they’ve done so a lot,” said McAdams. “If it’s pandering to racial minorities – blacks, American Indians, Hispanics – they’ll do that, too. And, like all universities, there’s kind of a confluence of ideology and bureaucratic interest – that is to say, the administrators who run the university have an interest in hiring bureaucrats that work in their offices, so they’re always very happy to hire another assistant provost for things Hispanic, or associate provost to set up a bias reporting system, which Marquette has now.”
The once-great institution of Marquette has been hit especially hard by political correctness, but McAdams warned there was a general trend of “nonsense in academia” sweeping through institutions of higher learning across the country, citing the example of Emory University students claiming they “felt so hurt and were so unsafe” because someone “put pro-Donald Trump messages on the sidewalk.”
As for his own case, McAdams reported that Marquette University said they would suspend him without pay for the remainder of the calendar year. He would be allowed to return in January, “if I abase myself and apologize” for his blog post.
He also said he would be required to “promise to adhere to Marquette’s guiding values and mission statement… which of course, in my view, I’ve done.”
Unfortunately, McAdams noted the bureaucrats at Marquette seem to interpret their mission statement not as a high-minded commitment to academic inquiry and free expression, but simply as, “you don’t make trouble for the institution.”
Professor McAdams declared he would not make the apology demanded by P.C. enforcers. “I’m not going to sign any ‘loyalty oath’ to Marquette’s mission – since I’m, in fact, probably a stronger proponent of Marquette’s claimed mission than the people running the university,” he chuckled. “But I’m against loyalty oaths. Interestingly, a lot of older liberals remember loyalty oaths in the 1950s, where professors were required to swear they were loyal to America and had no sympathy for Communism… liberals hated that. And now what you have is a liberal administration at Marquette demanding a loyalty oath from me.”
He declared his determination to fight the university, cheerfully noting that his lawyers are working pro bono, so “Marquette can’t run me away by having me build up huge legal bills.”
“I think it’s pretty clear, the odds are there’s going to be a huge lawsuit,” he predicted.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST.
You can listen to the full interview with Professor John McAdams below: