Aug

Charlie Echoes the Weigel Critique

From the King of the Wisconsin blogosphere, Charlie Sykes’ SykesWrites:

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 17, 2005, 7:41 a.m.
MEASURING MARQUETTE

Marquette University is touting the fact that it raised $357 million in the last 7 years.

But in this fascinating column about Marquette, George Weigel asks What really makes a university great?

Marquette‚Äôs athletic teams had long been known as the “Warriors.” When the politically correct protested, the heirs of Jacques Marquette (the legendary 17th century Jesuit missionary honored in the Capitol‚Äôs Statuary Hall) caved, renaming the school‚Äôs teams the “Golden Eagles.” That made a significant contingent of Marquette fans unhappy. They continued to cheer for their “Warriors;” the vice-chairman of the board even offered a million dollar gift if the old name were restored. University president Father Robert Wild, SJ, then announced a lengthy “dialogue” to straighten things out; predictably, the “dialogue” produced an anodyne nickname ‚Äî the Marquette Gold (as in the Harvard Crimson and the Stanford Cardinal).

I‚Äôm told that there were minor riots on campus. The local media were having a field day, and Father Wild finally announced yet another “process:” there would be a national plebiscite among interested parties, who would vote on a nickname from a list of ten names (chosen, of course, by a committee selected for its “diversity”).

In the midst of all this, Father Wild, evidently trying to get the conversation refocused, said this about his school: “Just last week we received the largest single donation in university history with a gift of $28 million that will transform our College of Communication. For the third consecutive year, we celebrate the fact that students are applying to Marquette in record numbers. Marquette has risen in national academic rankings. The campus has undergone a physical transformation, and Marquette has enjoyed the most successful fund-raising period in its history, raising more than $300 million during the current comprehensive campaign. These are the true measures of a great university.”

They are?

That would come as news to St. Ignatius Loyola, who thought that the real test of higher education was what happened to the students ‚Äî intellectually, socially, morally, and spiritually ‚Äî under Jesuit tutelage. A university that measures its “greatness” by application numbers and endowment rather than by the character of its graduates is a school with a decidedly secular notion of greatness.

Read the whole thing.

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