Student government vacancies follow Lovell across MKE

UWM alumni, MU students speak on disciplinary actions

By Skyler Chun skyler.chun@marquette.edu

Mohammad Samir Siddique was a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2013 when he was elected to be student government president. However, the university’s administration refused to recognize the election that year, and instead, hand-picked their own student government, rewrote the student government constitution and required all elected students to step down.

The top administrator during this time was current Marquette University President Michael Lovell, then chancellor at UWM.

In 2014, a school committee disciplined Siddique, saying that he had falsely represented himself as student body president and ordered him to admit this to more than 1,000 students who had supported his student government group rather than the administration’s.

“Right from the get-go, I said, ‘They can’t do that. This is extralegal interference that the Supreme Court has said they can’t do,’” Taylor Scott, an elected student in 2013, said. “Right off the bat, I wanted to fight. And unfortunately, we didn’t really necessarily have all of the right people or all of the right drive to do that, just because we were exhausted from fighting them.”

The dispute resulted in a series of lawsuits in both the state and federal court, lasting nine years, and ending with a six-figure settlement from the university in June 2022.

Nearly 10 years after the initial student government case at UWM, student leaders at Marquette University held a demonstration at the New Student Convocation to hold the university accountable for how students of color are treated on campus Aug. 25, 2022. The result was another mostly vacant student government in Milwaukee within the same decade.

These demonstrators included student members of the Black Student Union, Marquette University Student Government, National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People at Marquette University and the Latin American Student Organization.

The university postponed the convocation and took disciplinary action against the participating students, sending them through the Student Code of Conduct process. From there, the students were put on probation, which later forced them to step down from their leadership positions.

“It’s worth stressing that while the students’ protest disrupted the convocation, it was university