Marquette Blogs

We’ve run across several Marquette student blogs recently. All of the following have been overshadowed by the top undergraduate student blogs on campus, GOP3.COM (on the conservative side) and Campus Tavern (on the liberal side). But all of the following have some political content, and might be worth checking out.

On the Liberal Side:

The Misadventures... -- the blogger here describes himself as:

Hello all, I am a philosophy and politics student at Marquette University. To most here, I will be a leftist. But, as I have seen how making large and overreaching political statements early in life can pigeonhole one in many bad ways, I refrain from defining myself too clearly... For those interested in nuanced politics, I am most clearly a communitarian, probably a romantic Rousseauian (or a Rousseauian-romantic), I draw some from contemporary (e.g. 20th century) Marxists, a lot from modernists, and I am interested in classical or ‘true’ democracy. Most notably, I dislike liberalism and liberal politics, and am especially opposed to the weak ideas of individual space, individual freedom, and civil liberties/rights that come from such a tradition...

But as this post on abortion shows, the blogger is indeed a leftist.

Grey Street. Blogger Dave Streier spends considerable time fussing about the Bush Administration, but also expresses respect for The Warrior because that conservative student paper published a letter of his.

Greg St. Arnold, who has a short foray at blogging a year ago with The Smoking Room is back with Life is Good, subtitled “Musings of a mindless young man in East Africa.” St. Arnold, while writing a bit about africa, also continues to care enough about Wisconsin politics to write about Russ Feingold.

St. Arnold (along with three other guys) is also a blogger at Temporary Dispersion where the writing tends toward undergraduate pseudo-artsy (translation: incoherent).

Logan of We Live Our Lives Among Giants is also a poster on Temporary Dispersion. At the moment, his blog shows no politics at all, but rather a quite interesting travelogue as he moves across Europe, being in Sarajevo at the time of his most recent post.

On Sorting through Absurdity blogger Vincent calls himself “L’Étranger” and describes himself as “A bisexual, Roman Catholic scholar, I am an amateur philosopher and student of education at Marquette University.” As that description might imply, he’s more interested in gay issues than the average straight blogger, but it happens he’s also fairly moderate.

On the Conservative Side:

The blogger at The Life of Ray isn’t in fact a Marquette student. He seems to have just finished up at M.S.O.E., but he’s a big Marquette basketball fan (that’s close enough, isn’t it?). A big Scott Walker supporter, he accepted the need for Republicans to unite to defeat Doyle.

Previously Mentioned on the Conservative Side

MU Cerebellum has been around for about three months, and while it’s energetically conservative, the women who blog here (Id, Ego and Superego) don’t post very often.

Much the same could be said of Melissa and Katie of This, That and All the Crap in Between, although they do have one hilarious photo of Cindy Sheehan with Hugo Chavez.

Like all student enterprises, student blogs come and go. Will any of these rise to the level of actually being important on campus? The odds are strongly against it.

But somewhere in the Marquette student body are people who, either by starting their own blogs or by getting onboard at one of the two top ones, can do what the top student blogs have done this past year: break stories, get noticed, affect the direction of the debate and just generally be a force on campus.