Last week, Kansas state senator Susan Wagle appeared on the O'Reilly Factor to protest the University of Kansas human sexuality course that has been taught for twenty years by social welfare professor Dennis Dailey. The week before that, Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelius vetoed Wagle's brainchild, an amendment to the state budget that would cut off funding to all academic departments using sexually explicit material in the classroom. At the same time, Wagle filed a formal complaint against Dailey, alleging that his behavior in the classroom is harassing and inappropriate; the complaint spurred KU admins to open an investigation of the popular, award-winning professor.

But Wagle isn't finished yet. She's got a new, improved budget amendment in mind, one that would require universities to submit to the Kansas Board of Regents their policies on the use of sexually explicit material in the classroom (such "material" as it is defined is very broad indeed: it would include videos, discussion of pedophilia, and sexual harassment). In practice, the amendment would also effectively require schools to write the policies they are required to submit.

Wagle presented the amendment Friday, along with a thirteen page handout of allegations against Dailey--these included the claim that he had told students he found children sexually arousing, and that he saw nothing wrong with incest and pedophilia. The handout prompted heated debate in the Senate. One state senator accused Wagle of conducting a "character assassination" that demeaned the senate and KU; he pointed out that the allegations remain anonymous and that all sides of the issue have yet to be heard. Others were convinced by Wagle's own conviction, and accepted the allegations as truth despite the lack of corroboration: "How in the world can anyone defend some of the worst trash I've ever heard of?" said state Senator Karin Brownlee. Brownlee added that Dailey "promoted pedophilia." Her sentiments were mirrored by state Senator Nancy Harrington, who saw the debate not as one of principle, but of patriarchy: "Those who are outraged here today are men," she stated.

Dailey denies the allegations, saying that they "are untrue, malicious, and extremely hurtful to me and my family, especially my two adult daughters."

The amendment was adopted by the Senate, which is now slated to negotiate its amendments with the House. The Kansas Board of Regents has issued a statement saying that its present policies are adequate for adjudicating questions of course content.

Meanwhile, Wagle is arranging with KU administrators to view the videos that have inspired her campaign against Dailey. One would think that viewing the videos would be a prerequisite for drafting legislation and making formal allegations against Dailey for showing them. But in Wagle's world, it seems that verifying your claims takes a back seat to moral grandstanding.

Well, it's the heartland, after all. And, states' rights being what they are, if Kansas wants to beef up its prudish, anti-intellectual reputation, that's its business. If its legislature wants to demonstrate to the world that it doesn't understand the difference between oversight and control of educational institutions, that also is its prerogative.

Those of us based in more degenerate states await the spectacle of the representatives of the people in Kansas spending time and tax money scrutinizing photos of topless tribeswomen in Anthropology textbooks.

Erin thinks it's likely that schools don't already have written policies for dealing with sexually explicit material in the classroom. If that's the case, then there is essentially no oversight. If what Dailey is doing really is beyond what a reasonable person would find acceptable, then where is the control?

The problem with insisting on written policies here is that you're heading right down the same path that's brought us speech codes at the university and a whole administrative and legal class devoted to fashioning and refashioning this guideline and that guideline for this and that possibility. Either you trust your institutions, your professors, your students, and your administrators, to work out complex problems that come up with reasonable autonomy and good will, or you do not -- and you end up with simple-minded people imposing solutions.

This particular situation is a particular situation - it is not signalling a fundamental university degeneracy or lunacy that calls for government intervention. As the governor of Kansas reasonably reminds us, university procedures are already in place for dealing with controversial course content. Pull grandstanding politicians and government-dictated codes into this process and you guarantee what the French would call the "banalisation" of the university.

A lack of very explicit written policies for things like controversial material in the classroom does not mean lack of oversight. Highly elaborated written policies invite the disasters (in particular legal messes) that they promise to avoid. These are situations that call for general, flexible policies sensitively understood by trustees, professors, and administrators. They call for civilized conversations with professors who are targets of complaints. As our catastrophically over-litigated country demonstrates, the more you rely on legal language, the more you invite cynical legal intervention and the less you foster productive discussion among people of good will who fundamentally trust and respect one another.

"These are situations that call for general, flexible policies sensitively understood..." but not written down.

All this mutual trust and respect business looks like a recipe for disaster to me.

It's not outside the realm of possibilities that a professor like Dailey could gradually go off the deep end. Once a student has made a complaint, what is the mechanism for investigating and dealing with this kind of thing? Is there one?

Either you trust your institutions, your professors, your students, and your administrators, to work out complex problems that come up with reasonable autonomy and good will, or you do not -- and you end up with simple-minded people imposing solutions.

— Well put. I, for one, do not trust professors, students, or administrators (they did, after all, give us speech codes...for students...), and what I see forming is an insulated community of people without good will who think they are much less simple-minded than they actually are, corroding the very goals and values that they ostensibly further.

Despite all the hoopla, from Erin's description, the system proposed by Wagle doesn't seem that intrusive: let the Regents look at it. Not: let the legislature look at it. Ideally, the Regents would be aware of curriculum issues. Though even at my college (population 400), the faculty curriculum committee did all the work and I don't think the board of the college actually said much with respect to the curriculum, even if they were empowered to do so.

The question, then, is only whether the policies should be written down and who gets to write the policy. The worst case scenario is a policy written by the legislature that becomes (practically) difficult to change when a change is needed.

Actually, Berkeley, I don't think an inflexible written policy is the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario might be one where mutual trust and respect and unwritten, play-it-by-ear processes set up an ideal environment for outrageous abuse. I think Cardinal Law could tell you something about that.

I think the simple-mindedness comes in when a College Professor (!!!) is assumed to be incapable of doing anything that truly needs to be put a stop to, or when what used to be called the Old Boys' Network is assumed to be taking proper care of things.

The problem is that the student went on tv and made some extremely serious charges which go far beyond whether or not he was showing "pornographic" materials.

Incidentally, the model obscenity statute specificallly exempts educational institutions from being prosecuted for doing that; given thgat the Kansas legislature, like most legislatures, is full of lawyers, I'm sure they've noticed that.

The real issue here arises from the charges of his conduct in the classroom the student made--making obscene gestures to students who left the classroom, for example. Those charges are pretty cut and dried. Either she's wrong, or she's right. If she's right, this guy is in big trouble.

Actually, it seems to me the legislature is doing a pretty good job of dealing with a very frustrating situation--they know the university isn't doing squat to regulate faculty behavior at any level whatsoever, so they're contemplating giving in and trying to force them to do so, not by intervening in the internal process, but by making ominous noises of the sort that typically have university administrators go into a craze rabbit mode.

Have you guys ever heard of Prof. John Money of Johns Hopkins? He started off reasonably enough and now is a major embarrassment to that school.

Rachel: No, I haven't heard of Professor Money, but plenty of professors embarrass their universities no end. A small number of professors go to jail because their activities go beyond embarrassing all the way to criminal; some professors are relieved of teaching duties; some are fired; some are enticed into early retirement, and so forth. Some are retained even though they are embarrassments. Just to take a couple of Blooms for examples: A lot of people considered and consider Allan Bloom and Harold Bloom very embarrassing people who did and do notoriously weird and, to some people, offensive things in their classrooms. There's a reason intellectuals as a class are ridiculed as weirdo eggheads -- many of them are indeed extremely weird and off-putting. The question is whether a culture is mature enough to grasp the difference between valuable oddballs (take Einstein if you want an example from science) who may act in embarrassing ways and destructive jerks.

"The question is whether a culture is mature enough to grasp the difference between valuable oddballs ... and destructive jerks."

That is a valid question. The thing is, Kansas is not New York (for instance) and there's no reason why it should be. What if the culture in New York would consider Dailey's class to be harmless and the culture in Kansas would reject it in horror? The fact that the university where Dailey teaches is supported by the taxpayers of Kansas ought to count for something. Presumably the legislators in this case are trying to be sensitive to what their constituents want. There are, after all, private institutions in Kansas, and public and private schools elsewhere in the country.

And then there's the culture of academia, whose job it is to police this sort of thing. How mature is that culture?

Laura, you're quite right that what's a horror for Kansas may be a hoot for New York. That's why my opening post talked about states' rights.

But let's take it a little slower. As Erin points out, we don't have much verified information yet; and never forget Dorothy Rabinowitz in all of this. She's the reporter who explored the allegations a decade or so ago during the child sexual abuse scare. Remember that? Every week we used to read of another horror-filled child care center, full of nightmarish predators, and a lot of staff members were jailed. Virtually every one of those cases turns out to have been false, and virtually all of those who were jailed have been freed, though of course their lives have been ruined.

It's a little hard for me to think of anything that might be said in a university sex education course that would make the average American, veteran recipient through his beloved tv of a wide variety of sexually explicit and sometimes disturbing images and words, recoil in horror.

It's a little hard for me to think of anything that might be said in a university sex education course that would make the average American, veteran recipient through his beloved tv of a wide variety of sexually explicit and sometimes disturbing images and words, recoil in horror.

— Not everybody watches Sopranos and Sluts and the City — in other words, this itself is a pretty provincial suggestion. I don't even have HBO, and the non-pay stations still do have (some) standards for what they'll allow to be said and shown (a standard excluding the genitalia of children... last time I watched). I'm sure there may even exist people out in the wilderness who pay for satellite TV for the purpose of viewing EWTN or similar content.

I've read Dorothy Rabinowitz's column in WSJ online and I share her outrage and distress at the miscarriage of justice in those cases. On the other hand - and I really, really don't mean to pick on the Catholic church - but there apparently were terrible abuses of children that went on for years and years because the church was assumed to be capable of policing itself, and because no one imagined that a priest could be capable of molesting a child. It's possible that the charges are a bunch of nonsense, and it's also possible that if you, yourself, purcell, attended this man's lectures, you would call for shutting him down.

If in fact Dailey tells his classes that he finds children sexually arousing and he sees nothing wrong with pedophilia - well, is that really the kind of thing that one sees people in a position of authority express on prime time network television? (I don't watch TV so I don't know.)

I don't think the suggestion that most Americans watch absolutely tons of tv, some of it Little House on the Prairie reruns, and some of it Sex and the City, is provincial or non-provincial. I don't think the concept pertains, since it's not really a suggestion about Americans but an obvious reality about them that the overwhelming majority of American people watch tv and videos of all kinds much of the time, at home and away from home. American children watch on average forty hours of largely unsupervised tv a week. Some of us aren't like that, true, but we are a negligible minority.

Another obvious reality: the pornography market in America is staggeringly huge - tens of millions of Americans are consumers and it generates amazing revenues (Frank Rich, in the NYTimes a few years ago, had a good article about this). I don't know where the preponderance of these people are based, or how educated they are. I suspect you'd find out that they're all over the map, in every sense of the term. This is another reality. It's not about the provinces or the cities - it's just the way it is.

What matters is whether you think the government should be doing something about this, the way the Kansas legislature is doing something about a course it perceives to be pornographic.

I'm sorry, Laura, our messages crossed, so please allow me to be a bit of a hog and post twice in a row (my previous post was directed to Justin Katz). I think you're on far firmer ground in going after the Catholic church in this matter - absolutely. The American church amply demonstrated a total inability to police itself. But a university is an altogether different sort of thing from the Catholic church. This professor has been teaching this course way out in the public eye for decades. Either he's only lately become a dirty old man, or there was never anything offensive enough in the course to arouse indignation for decades, or students are getting a whole lot more tetchy about these matters, or it's a lousy course and students are figuring that out... I mean, there are a lot of possibilities. But note that this man has been out there teaching this stuff for decades.

And yes, I agree with you - it's totally possible that if I attended this course I'd find it disgusting and want it shut down. But I wouldn't go the legislature for that - that would be destructive of the university, and I love universities and want to make them better, not worse.

"Either he's only lately become a dirty old man ..."

I'm sorry to say that I know for a fact that this scenario is possible. (Not Dailey, of course, someone else.) I wish I didn't.

You know, the vast majority of students who sign up for a class, who go into it and find that it is just too disgusting and they can't stand it, are just going to drop out. It's a lot easier, it's less embarrassing, you don't have to worry about repercussions, and it doesn't take up your time from your other studies. It's impossible to know how many other students may have been as upset as those who have come forward, and chose to keep their mouths shut.