The Kansas Legislature is not the right place to settle petty grievances and certainly not if settling those grievances involves legislation that almost certainly violates both the Kansas and U.S. constitutions.

Last week, the House Local Government Committee introduced a bill that would require community colleges and state universities to institute policies that would prohibit their employees from using their job or academic titles when expressing their opinions in letters or columns submitted to newspapers. The policy would apply when the opinion “concerns a person who currently holds an elected public office in this state, a person who is a candidate for any elected public office in this state or any matter pending before any legislative or public body in this state.”

That covers quite a bit of territory.

The legislation apparently was prompted, at least in part, by the work of some state university political science professors who write opinion columns as part of a group called Insight Kansas. The not-always-complimentary columns are published in a number of Kansas newspapers. The main target may be Insight Kansas, but the legislation also would cover all other university professors and personnel, including some who write in the Journal-World.

Supporters of the bill are trying to equate this situation to that of employees of private businesses who are not authorized to speak on behalf of their employer, but that comparison just doesn’t work. University faculty members have specific protections for their right to express even unpopular opinions without fear of punishment. It’s called academic freedom.

If there is a problem here, universities should handle it on their own. Two Insight Kansas writers who teach at Washburn University said they don’t include Washburn’s name in their biographical descriptions because the university had asked them not to, mostly because they wanted to avoid potential conflicts with lawmakers in Topeka. Although the Washburn professors are following their university’s wishes, one of them acknowledged that having a state law prohibiting the use of official titles on opinion columns was “a horse of an entirely different color.”

The measure not only is unconstitutional, it is unenforceable. There certainly are many ways to obtain information on a writer’s academic affiliations. Presumably, even the legislators who support this bill wouldn’t go so far as to try to bar newspapers from publishing that information if it came from some source other than the writer himself/herself.

This legislation makes its sponsors look both petty and paranoid. Are they afraid to hear the opinions of university personnel or have those opinions debated across the state?

Also last week, House members introduced a bill that would require all lobbyists to report how much they are paid in public funds to lobby on behalf of local government entities. Perhaps legislators should keep track of how much time they spend during their taxpayer-funded sessions on frivolous legislative issues like this one.