Student Paper Publishes Porn; School Shrugs, Prof Protests
by Jim Brown
March 3, 2004
(AgapePress) - An instructor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff is taking school officials to task for their apathy over an obscene sex column in a student newspaper.Dr. David Hartman, a mechanical engineering professor at NAU, says he was extremely disgusted after reading a column for The Lumberjack that offered a graphic "how-to" guide on performing oral sex. The mechanical engineering professor says student writer Claire Fuller's article in the campus publication was "verbal pornography."
| | 
Dr. David Hartman |
Hartman wrote a complaint letter to the paper's editor and the president of NAU's Board of Regents. He also sent university president John Haeger a list of ten suggested actions he should take to address the matter.The suggestions included replacing the faculty advisors; having the newspaper write a retraction and apology; replacing The Lumberjack's editorial staff; meeting with the publication's staff and advisors; eliminating all financial support, including campus resources, to the paper; and publicly redressing the editor and editorial staff in an appropriate forum.
Nevertheless, Hartman says the only response he received from President Haeger was a short, two-sentence e-mail message that said the administrator was submitting the list to a review board. The professor feels the column and the university's permissive attitude toward it epitomizes the moral decay of America.
"We've become a very liberal society. We're inundated with liberal faculty. I think we've seen publicly that 93 to 95 percent of the faculty across the United States in higher education are of liberal bias, and anything goes," the professor says.
Hartman says the obscene article in The Lumberjack is a "classic example" of how President Bill Clinton's behavior has led to the moral degradation of the high school generation that existed during his second term in office. He believes the "anything goes" philosophy that thrives on so many U.S. college campuses took root largely during the Clinton era.
