You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Campus Press’ category.
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.
What happens when a bright-eyed South Carolina sophomore stumbles into a Leninist rally in NYC?
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.
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.
Saturday’s edition of the Eugene, Oregon Register Guard had a great, lengthy editorial on the Oregon Daily Emerald student newspaper strike. Here’s a taste:
Members of the Emerald’s news staff are student journalists, but they’re more than that — they’re journalists, period. The Emerald is not a practice field or a plaything. It’s a real newspaper where people gather, edit and report the news under daily deadline stress and intensifying economic pressures.
[…]
The Emerald still must find a way to break even or better financially. In that respect it faces the same challenges as other newspapers, large and small. The Emerald must find a way to survive, but its long-term prospects have been improved. They’ve improved because the newspaper’s editors, reporters and photographers have ensured that survival will be worth fighting for.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments