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We noted last week that University of Montana law prof Kristen Juras had called for censorship of the U of M student newspaper, saying that its sex advice column “affects my reputation as a member of the faculty.”
She was almost right. The sex advice column wasn’t having any effect on her reputation. Dozens of campus papers have such columns, and nobody holds tax law professors responsible for the content of a school’s student newspaper anyway. If she’d just tut-tutted to herself, her reputation would have been just fine.
But she didn’t, and it isn’t.
Juras’ name now appears in eight of the top ten Google hits for ” ‘University of Montana’ sex.” Most of the top hits for her name are references to this ugly story.
So Professor Juras needs help. And Patrick from Popehat (presently number four in a Google search on “Kristen Juras”) is willing to step in:
I’m gravely concerned about Professor Juras’s ignorance of First Amendment precedent such as Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503, 89 S. Ct. 733, 21 L. Ed. 2d 731 (1969), which holds that speech by students in public schools may be infringed only on a showing that it will disrupt the orderly running of the school, or is indecent. (Professor Juras does not make such a contention concerning Ms. Davis’s columns.) I’m concerned that, to the extent that what Professor Juras really seeks is to have the University censor one student, she is asking for constitutionally prohibited viewpoint discrimination under the guise of sometimes permitted content discrimination.
Moreover, and this is what really concerns me, as far as Professor Juras’s reputation is concerned, I believe that any time someone writes, “I respect free speech, but…” and then goes on to ask for censorship, that person looks like an ass, a fool, and a hypocrite.
And so, in order to protect Kristen Juras’s reputation, I am asking to be appointed as an independent monitor at the University of Montana School of Law, with authority over the writings and speech of assistant professors who teach property, business, and tax, and a requirement that all such writings and speech be cleared with me, beforehand, to the extent that they touch on political or legal topics outside the subjects of property, business transactions, and tax. (Because God, I don’t want to have to read that stuff.)
Since Kristen Juras, evidently, is unwilling to protect her own reputation, which is now that of a fool, someone else will have to do it. For her own damned good.
He’s a giver, that Patrick.
Kristen Juras, an assistant professor of law at the University of Montana, doesn’t approve of a sex column that runs in the school’s student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin.
The column, Juras says, is “embarrassingly unprofessional,” and “affects my reputation as a member of the faculty.” She wants the student government’s publications board to create written content guidelines that would ban such material. If they don’t, she intends to take her case to the university’s board of trustees — and, if necessary, the state legislature.
Juras, whose son attends UM, has also sent a letter to the university’s president and the dean of its journalism school asking them to meet with the Kaimin editorial board and ask them to drop the column.
Kaimin editor Bill Oram has no intention of backing down. “We welcome the fight,” he says. “We feel we have a right and a duty to publish potentially controversial material.”
“The Bess Sex Column” has appeared weekly since late January. Its five installments to date can be found here.
March 17 Update: Follow-up post here.
Quick updates on a bunch of stories we’ve been following…
- The University of North Carolina has become the twenty-first US campus to dump Russell Athletic in response to labor violations.
- A three-part analysis of the Power Shift 2009 conference: Background, Tactics, and The Future.
- A hundred NYU grad students held a “work-in” at Bobst Library yesterday afternoon.
- The economic crisis is leading students to transfer to cheaper colleges.
- Hillary Clinton has announced a million-dollar scholarship program for Palestinian students.
- President Obama will be providing major new details of his education plan at a speech this morning.
The Volokh Conspiracy has a post up on the survey of faculty political beliefs that we linked to yesterday, arguing that it understates professors’ leftward tilt.
First, it says, research suggests that the 28% of survey respondents who consider themselves “middle of the road” are probably more liberal than the average American moderate. Second, it notes that the only left-wing options offered were “liberal” or “far left,” and wonders if the inclusion of a “radical” option would have brought the left-of-liberal numbers up.
My own sense is that surveys like this are more useful for examining change over time rather than for their precise numbers, but it’s always good to take a hard look at their assumptions and skews anyway.
A new study of more than twenty thousand full-time faculty at American four-year colleges and universities reveals a professoriate that tilts left, but not at the expense of ideological diversity.
In the study, 55.8% of faculty surveyed described themselves as “liberal” or “far left,” as opposed to 44.3% who called themselves “middle of the road,” “conservative,” or “far right.”
These results are almost identical to those collected the last time this survey was conducted, three years ago. Other findings changed dramatically, however:
- 66.1% said they had a professional responsibility to “help students develop personal values,” an increase of 15.3 points since the previous study.
- 70.2% said the same of helping students to “develop moral character,” a 13.1 point gain.
- 75.2% said they work to “enhance students’ knowledge of and appreciation for other racial/ethnic groups,” a 17.6 point rise.
- 55.5% said they consider it “very important” or “essential” to foster “a commitment to community service” in their students, a 19.1 increase.
studentactivism.net 
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