George Weigel: What makes a university ‘great’?

From the Denver Catholic Register:

Milwaukee’s Marquette University has been in a bit of a flap.

Marquette’s 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’s Statuary Hall) caved, renaming the school’s 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, S.J., then announced a lengthy “dialogue” to straighten things out; predictably, the “dialogue” produced an anodyne nickname — the Marquette Gold (as in the Harvard Crimson and the Stanford Cardinal).

I’m 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”).

It gets better....(or worse)...