To the editor:

Despite what value relativists contend, a determination of whether Kansas University professor Dennis Dailey’s class provides a meaningful discourse of human sexuality or has the intellectual weight of a bachelor party can be reasonably assessed by a careful audit of its content.

Students rallying around Dailey are just as likely to be displaying hard-boiled irreverence against social norms than any genuine support of the man. A headcount would not be an objective measure. Nor should the reflexive demand and clamorous chauvinism for academic freedom by Dailey’s peers wither the loins of Sen. Susan Wagle’s colleagues or cause them to distance themselves from her.

The established “porn studies” at the University of Arizona, UMass, and MIT, to name a few, provide Kansans with a relevant caveat. Dailey’s course material shouldn’t be reviewed with the predisposed belief that it prefigures such perversion. However, Wagle is not entirely out of line with her request for what is likely to be an anxiety-amping look at not the penumbral regions of human sexuality but what is considered intellectual content.

It is naive to believe that decency, unaided, can be expected to prevail in the marketplace of ideas. Kansans must come to the realization that there is a greater danger in being seen as an apathetic mass than a prudish one. Chancellor Hemenway would do well to call for accountability in ALL of KU’s academic departments, as the university’s access to unbridled state funding is not as comfortably secure as the tenured professorship.

Andreas Grogan,

Lawrence