Last week, the Student Government Association (SGA) at Saint Louis University
passed a resolution suspending the rights of “non-students at SLU” to use the Oath. This means faculty, professors, administrators, and others who have oft used the manifesto in class, on syllabi, and in special departmental programs no longer can. What results is more of a blanket campus-wide ban, with the only people “allowed” to use the oath being students (most of whom go months without even glancing at it). This whole process seems very non-inclusive to me. The
Oath of Inclusion was passed several years ago when I was still a student on campus. Its goal was to “encourage” students to “promote inclusion” on campus. And yet, many SLU students are claiming that the Oath doesn’t go far enough. Some claimed that it was used to “deceive minority students.” Senator Noelle Janak claimed that she “hears over and over that first year black students feel they are being tricked and lied to,” referring to the Oath. In short, the Oath of Inclusion, isn’t quite inclusive enough for the leftists who wrote it in the first place. But here’s the kicker. An “Oath of Inclusion,” is far from necessary on a campus like Saint Louis University, or most campuses for that matter. The Constitution of the United States already protects our most valuable rights. Those rights aren’t supposed to halt at the schoolhouse doors. Furthermore, the University, caught in the web of intersectionality, has a bad habit of violating the rights of one group of students for the sake of others. For example, when Lt. Col. Allen West
spoke at a YAF-sponsored lecture at St. Louis University last fall, he was frequently lambasted by students, faculty, and the University president himself, for critiquing radical Islam. Assuming Lt. Col. West was referring to all Muslim students (which he of course wasn’t), the university came out with guns blazing, conveniently forgetting that the Oath of Inclusion is supposed to “tolerate” differing ideologies as well. It’s funny how that one gets forgotten when conservative ideals step up to the plate. Here’s the solution as I see it. Saint Louis University is a Jesuit Catholic institution, thereby bound to the principles and values of the Catholic Church. Instead of creating a new document to worship, why don’t they return to their deeply held principles? Instead of writing a new “Oath of Inclusion,” why don’t they just slap Matthew 7:12 (in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you) on each syllabus next semester? What problem of “inclusivity” couldn’t be solved if people merely followed the Golden Rule? How about instead of “Living the Oath,” why don’t they just “Live the Gospel?”
