Blog What kind of lesson is Northwestern teaching by nixing the “fucksaw” class?

Northwestern University just can’t catch a PR break anymore. First, beloved Gawker subject and rap wunderkind Chet Haze tweets up a patriotic storm following the Bin Laden announcement, posting a posed photo in front of a huge American flag hanging from a frat house. Then the University severs ties with Medill Innocence Project leader and investigative journalist David Protess amid allegations of leading students to unethical journalistic tactics in gathering evidence, starting a back-and-forth blame game that pissed off students and alumni, nuking the project’s credibility at the school. Now, the administration has taken aim at another embarrassing scandal: the “fucksaw” demonstration in John Michael Bailey’s “Human Sexuality” class. 

The Daily Northwestern had the story on Monday that the University will not offer Human Sexuality during the 2011-2012 school year, with spokesman Al Cubbage saying, “Northwestern is reviewing how such a course best fits into the University’s curriculum.” Bailey has been teaching Human Sexuality at NU since 1994, and this is hardly the first controversy surrounding the professor since then, it’s just the first one with a live sex-toy demonstration that blew up on the Internet. He co-authored an article in 2001 that contained a section discussing the possibility that parents could influence their child’s sexuality, and his 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, caused interview subjects to come forward with complaints that they never gave consent for inclusion in Bailey’s study, which led to him resigning as the chair of the Northwestern psychology department.

However, Bailey isn’t the only professor to teach something that could be construed as controversial, or the only professor who’s been in hot water. Lane Fenrich, another Northwestern professor in the History Department, regularly teaches a class entitled U.S. Gay And Lesbian History, and the electrical engineering department employs a Holocaust denier who got tenure back in the 70s. The problem with Protess and Bailey doesn’t seem to be that they teach controversial subjects, only that the stories about their classes garnered prominent media attention that shed a negative light on the university.

It seems important to note that Northwestern is a private university, the only private university in the Big Ten. It doesn’t get taxpayer dollars and doesn’t pay taxes to Evanston for its land, so what is there to gain from bowing to outside pressure? Northwestern is first and foremost an academic institution, but what lessons are learned when an investigative journalist who exonerates wrongfully convicted people and a psychology professor pushing the boundaries of sexual knowledge are punished and pushed away instead of defended?

Students responded to the class canceling the way college students do: creating a petition, writing open letters as newspaper columns, and generally letting the issue subside as the weather gets better. But this speaks to a larger point about Northwestern in the past year: From all the way back in the fall, when Gawker published a letter the Dean Of Students sent to the off-campus housing listserv regarding partying that was too rowdy for Evanston, to the kerfuffle over Evanston’s brothel law, and all the Chet Haze/Protess/Bailey stories in between, NU students, faculty, and administration have been under a great deal of scrutiny for their behavior. This isn’t new for high-ranking institutions, as the IvyGate blog has been the gossip watchdog of the Ivy League since 2006, but Northwestern isn’t used to this. Now the university has removed one professor and canceled the cornerstone class of another, showing that perhaps it might be a little trigger-happy on dealing with a little unwanted publicity. Maybe someone from Medill should tell the administration that old saying about press.