CMU suspends CMU’s Young Democratic Socialists student club in apparent effort to stifle left-wing views on campus

Colorado Mesa University’s (CMU’s) branch of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) posted the above announcement of a protest against Trump’s overly-aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions on Instagram one week ago. Soon after, on March 22, CMU’s YDSA Club posted the notice below saying that CMU had suspended their club in an effort to restrict their activism:

 

The YDSA club has vowed to continue their protest, to keep expressing their views and to keep organizing despite Marshall’s efforts to silence them.

John Marshall’s background is as a political operative and avowed right winger, not an academic, and it’s showing

Locals were alarmed back in April of 2021 when it was announced that CMU President John Marshall was under consideration to be appointed to the top spot at the University.

Marshall lacked any background in academics. He was a Republican political operative originally hired at CMU in 2007 as one of Tim Foster’s many political patronage appointments. Foster gave Marshall a $100,000/year job as a Development Director. Marshall’s only qualification to work at CMU was that he was the former manager of Republican Bob Beauprez’s losing 2006 gubernatorial campaign. Normally, to be considered to be hired as a university president, candidates must have a doctoral degree, have plenty academic experience and must have successfully published articles in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. Marshall did not fulfill any of these requirements, mirroring similarities with the Trump administration, which has not required any of its nominees to head  important government agencies to have the requisite background or experience needed to effectively run those agencies.

Marshall also has offensive baggage many people can not forget or forgive.

Marshall-watchers note he has consistently dismissed and downplayed incidents of homophobia through the years. He also publicly insulted the state’s progressive voters.

In 2006, Marshall dismissed concerns about the over-the-top, deeply homophobic comments former Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland made on the state-wide TV show “Colorado State of Mind” during Beauprez’s gubernatorial campaign. Rowland, who was running as Beauprez’s proposed Lieutenant Governor, made highly offensive comments equating homosexuality to bestiality which drew national condemnation and were a huge embarrassment to the entire state. Rowland’s comments ended up tanking Beauprez’s campaign.

Marshall’s coarse public response to Rowland’s statements on Colorado State of Mind shocked people and revealed his own biases:

An article in the August 21, 2006 issue of the Denver Post said:

“The response [to Rowland’s TV comments] from John Marshall, the Beauprez-Rowland campaign manager, was ‘They’re bed-wetting, pampered liberals,’ and ‘No one cares what they say about anything.’”

And there’s more:

When CMU football player Shane Williams was accused of slamming a lesbian woman to the street outside a bar in 2012, cracking her skull, Marshall told concerned CMU staff members that there was nothing he could do about Williams continuing at CMU because “we needed ‘due process.’” (Williams also was in possession of a fake ID and was charged with being a minor in possession of alcohol.) Even crazier than dismissing out of hand even the possibility of ejecting a violently homophobic student from the school, in the aftermath of this incident Marshall actually pressured CMU staff NOT to hold an anti-violence workshop.

And when it was reported to Marshall that a student at a CMU basketball game had yelled, “Nice sideburns, faggot!” at an opposing player, Marshall dismissed it, saying it was “just sports.”

These anecdotes, which were related by the anonymous people who directly witnessed them, are just a few reasons why so many people in the local community felt John Marshall was not just a bad pick but a bad look to be CMU president.

Marshall defended a talk on campus last year by an avowed racist, and is now trying to squelch opposing viewpoints

Last year in March of 2025, Marshall gladly platformed and defended a talk on campus by avowed racist, white supremacist and fascist speaker Jared Taylor. The Mesa County Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (MC-DSA) opposed the event, and decried Marshall’s support of it.

CMU student Isabel De La Canal and Co-Chair of MC-DSA said at the time that CMU’s choice to allow Jared Taylor to speak on campus was hypocritical:

“Every school day, I walk up and down the steps of Houston Hall, reading CMU’s messages preaching love, dignity, and courage— most strikingly, ‘use power for good.’ This is the same university that grants white supremacists platforms to spew their hatred. A university is an institution of learning. CMU claims that it wants to model ‘the world we want to create.’ Is this truly the world we want to create? To plaster these words on its walls while allowing white supremacy within them is not just hypocrisy, it is something far worse.”

This gives us all the background we need to understand why CMU President John Marshall is willing to promote far right wing and even white supremacist views on campus while working to crush the expression of opposing viewpoints.