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Harvard’s medical student activists are still waiting.
Earlier this month, word broke that a representative of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer had been caught photographing a student demonstration against drug companies’ influence over the Harvard medical school.
In response to the revelations, Senator Charles Grassley set a one-week deadline for to Pfizer to provide him with all internal corporate documents relating to “Harvard medical students demonstrating and/or agitating against pharmaceutical influence.”
Grassley’s demand made headlines, and Pfizer promised to comply. That was fifteen days ago, however, and since then Grassley has made no further public statement on the matter.
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.
In a new investigative article on a company that writes students’ papers for cash, the Chronicle of Higher Education outed four of the company’s customers.
The article, which is behind the Chronicle‘s subscription wall, gives the name, college, and field of two undergraduates and two grad students, including a PhD candidate in public policy who, they say, outsourced the literature review section of his dissertation to the paper mill Essay Writers. The article also names that student’s blog, which was last updated in July 2008.
The Chronicle was able to identify the students through personal information they posted to the company’s private website.
From Clay Shirky’s new blogpost Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
There aren’t many writers pithier than Clay.
The New York Times’ new columnist is a 29-year-old conservative named Ross Douthat. Ross was a columnist for the Harvard Crimson and a staffer (eventually editor) for the conservative Harvard Salient as an undergrad in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and Campus Progress has dug up some of his more … pungent writing. Here’s a taste, from an April 2001 Crimson column:
“If I really wanted to offend Harvard Asians, I might sit down and write an article in which I was, well, a tad critical of the Asian community. For instance, I might suggest that there was, let’s say, a slight trend toward ethnic self-segregation, or a slight proclivity for the sciences over the humanities among Asian-Americans. And I might, if I were so inclined (not that anyone would be), get downright nasty and suggest that a large chunk of these self-segregated, math-and-science types are self-absorbed, clannish and downright weird.”
Check out the whole rundown here.
studentactivism.net 
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