Marquette University has apparently dumped Susannah Bartlow, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center director after the center celebrated the completion of a mural featuring convicted Assata Shakur who was convicted of an execution style killing of a New Jersey trooper in 1973. The mural was joint project of the Center and the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
It is astonishing that a mural would be completed without someone making a minimal inquiry as Shakur’s identity as a cop killer and a terrorist. Born JoAnne Deborah Byron, Assata Olugbala Shakur was a member of the former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army with a long criminal record. In May 1973, she was involved in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike and accused of killing New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and wounding Trooper James Harper. She was indicted in relation to six other incidents including murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping. In 1979, she escaped and fled to Cuba. The FBI has classified her as a domestic terrorist and offered a $1 million reward for assistance in her capture. Her history is not hard to find obviously on dozens of websites.
Given that history, it is unbelievable that Bartlow and Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority would select her as the inspiring figure for the university. The controversy was triggered by a blog critique by associate professor of political science John McAdams.
Following the disclosure, the university announced that “Susannah Bartlow is no longer an employee with Marquette University.” The sorority’s international communications chairman Leona Dotson said that “[u]nfortunately Ms. Shakur’s entire history and background was not fully researched. If that process had occurred, she would not have been featured in the mural.”
It is a remarkable turnaround for university. The Center released a tweet on March 24th proclaiming “TADA, our mural is finished! In commemoration of the courageous, Assata Shakur.” I could think of many things to call Shakur many things but “courageous” is not one of them.
According to her bio, Bartlow is a graduate of the University of Buffalo with past association with Dickinson College, State University of New York at Buffalo, UB Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender.
The two quotes selected were:
“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.
Before going back to college, I knew I didn’t want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without history. The two have to go together.”
What sports conference does Marquette belong to? If they are in the Big 12 or the SEC then they could rehire the fired person as a public relations specialist when they compete with those other intellectual schools.
Assata Shakur is a black woman standing up for the oppressed blacks. She is hiding out in Cuba as a “20th century escaped slave.” She was brave enough to stand up to the evil white man who was enslaving her with their bigoted laws. What more credentials does she need than being a fugitive slave who ran away from her slave masters living in the United States?
http://kxan.com/2015/05/21/dps-biker-gangs-stockpiling-explosives-plan-to-target-police/
OT, sorry, but looks like the news coverage of this mostly white motorcycle gang warfare is lacking. More threats to police from bombs to bullets aimed at police.
Now feel free to return to bashing Marquette. I wonder, is there a university that would meet with Pogo’s approval? Or does he advocate that surgeons be picked from the barber profession?
So spending $200K for a BA at Marquette gets you:
1. Into grad school, for about 1/3rd.
2. A 21% chance at a job in a field you studied
Woot!
Marquette 2013 Undergraduate Post-Graduation Outcomes Survey
College of Arts and Sciences (n = 361)
Employed, full-time 32%
Graduate/professional school, full-time 30%
Post-graduation service, full-time 9%
Active military, full-time 4%
Other, not seeking 14%
Seeking 12%
Of students with full-time employment reported that they considered their job to be related to their major.”
Arts and Sciences 67%
Business Administration 95%
Engineering 98%
She should start an online university with Grundy. The best argument against extremism is to expose it, loud and clear. Sooner or later it starts to sound like what it really is. This is the only way to phase out this stuff: oligarchs, idiot Senators, other inappropriate people who run our lives, etc. There existence and influence only exist because they are not outed.
This is a good posting JT.
While Marquette is spending their high tuition dollars on SJWs, college grads aren’t doing so well.
Maybe they should spend less time on creating safe and accepting ‘spaces’ , social justice and other leftist tropes, and focus on getting jobs for the poor schlubs they are fleecing.
1. Tuition at Marquette is $35,930 a year. Books, room and board brings the cost to $50,038 annually. That’s over $200K for an undergrad degree.
Why does Marquette spend tuition dollars on a “Gender and Sexuality Resource Center”?
The article said the university needed to “create spaces of acceptance and love.”
No, it doesn’t.
One can see it has failed in its primary mission as it causes people to speak gibberish about ‘spaces of acceptance and love.’
The Center is a complete waste of resources.
Make-work for SJWs, for campus-sponsored leftism.
“Bartlow was also a women’s and gender studies professor. She joined Marquette to direct the GSRC in fall 2012, the same time it was established on campus.”
What a shock.
She seems to have gone full retard into both feminsm and being a social justice warrior (SJW).
Here’s a course she taught at Dickenson in 2010:
And she moderated this event at the Barnard Center for Research on Women:
She doesn’t teach anything but SJW activism.
Proof that Marquette has gone insane
“It is astonishing that a mural would be completed without someone making a minimal inquiry as Shakur’s identity as a cop killer and a terrorist.”
It really isn’t. To borrow from Patton Oswalt, this is part of the “tea party wing” of the progressive movement. The people behind this have been bred from the same putrid pond as those that can say with a straight face 20% of college women will be raped (making it worse than the general population, and quickly approaching war crime territory), that the 78% pay difference is based solely on sexism, and some concept of institutional racism explains why people generations removed from slavery and actual government sponsored segregation are still kept down by it.
I’m sure they knew full well her history. They just didn’t care. Because killing a cop is just a symbol for overthrowing the power structure that keeps all non-white men down.
99% probability that cop deserved to be executed.
“Does this fit under the proverbial freedom of speech?”
Probably not. The sorority has disavowed the mural.
The director was acting as an agent of the university not making a statement of her own.
I am pretty sure universities have broad discretion over what their employees display in the public spaces of buildings on campus.
The situation probably doesn’t touch on academic freedom either, but that might depend on the exact specifications of the directors job.
Whether this was a firing offense is a different matter that probably depends on the technical details of the employees contract.
If the director chose to commission the work herself and find a location off campus to display it there might be a real debate.
Barry needs to tell Raul, the next time they chat, to send the b#$&h back or no more steps toward normalizing relations. We should’ve traded her for Elian when we had him.
Does this fit under the proverbial freedom of speech?
Just in case anyone was unaware, AKA, the sorority named in the article, is a black sorority. I’m quite sure that between the sorority and the Center, nobody knew about her background or past. It was just a fluke. Right.
Glad to see that the Jesuits still have some backbone. Any repercussions for the sorority, either by the school or the sorority’s main chapter? Remember what happened to that fraternity, whose members were filmed singing racist songs
on a bus? The chapter was disbanded at the university, and rightfully so. Here we have an all black sorority, working in conjunction with the Center, to create a mural in honor of a black woman who murdered a white officer, among other atrocities. Not a peep about any ramifications for the sorority. Guess that was beyond the scope of what Marquette was willing to do. At least it canned the Director, which is more than most universities would’ve done.
Thank God for affirmative action, no law enforcement and no societal discipline.
A felonious individual. An incoherent educational institution.
If this mattered, it would have been stopped.
It hasn’t been stopped, so it doesn’t matter.
Inga – did you not write your alumni association and complain? SJWs strike again.
Reblogged this on Scoop Feed.
A bad decision making the mural of Shakur, that is.
What a truly bad decision. What the heck was she thinking? Or was no thinking involved?
I don’t beleive the we didn’t know excuse. If this individual was being highlighted in a mural you would think the least someone would do was a Google search!