Comment: silly ideas.(The Talk of the Town)(academic freedom in Missouri)

Academic-freedom cases frequently are fuzzy. Sometimes they involve professors who use offensive language in the sincere hope of annoying people. Sometimes they involve activities that are not included in the job description -- things said and done off campus or for non-academic audiences. More often, probably, than outsiders realize, the professor who claims that his or her right of free speech has been violated is just a career irritant whose colleagues have finally had enough. These are all situations in which the normally delightful push and pull of academic bickering has become sufficiently violent and disruptive for the academic-freedom police to be called in. But a case in which a legislative body cuts funding for a public university because of an article that one of its professors published in a scholarly journal, which is what happened recently in Missouri, is not a fuzzy case. That is about as clear-cut a violation of the principle of academic freedom as you can get.

The professor is Harris Mirkin, who teaches in the political-science department at the University of Missouri's Kansas City campus. The article at issue is "The Pattern of Sexual Politics: Feminism, Homosexuality, and Pedophilia," published in the Journal of Homosexuality, in 1999. The legislative body is the Missouri House of Representatives, which voted, 102 to 29, to cut a hundred thousand dollars from the university's appropriation -- an amount roughly equivalent to Professor Mirkin's compensation -- after a story about his work appeared in the Kansas City Star. The State Senate approved the cut; the governor, according to a report in the Times, has not yet taken a position on the matter. No one is actually going to fire or suspend Professor Mirkin; as an employee of a public university, he is protected by the First Amendment. So the hundred-thousand-dollar hit that his article occasioned will most likely be felt in unrelated areas, such as reduced student services and smaller consignments of Xerox paper.

Professor Mirkin published a silly article. It purports to show that the current situation of pedophiles is analogous to the situation of homosexuals before the gay-rights movement and of women before the women's movement. Pedophilia, he argues, is regarded by almost everyone who is not a pedophile as unnatural, depraved, criminal; but many heterosexuals once thought that homosexuality was a disease and an offense against God and nature, and many men once thought that sexually active women were monsters. In each of the earlier cases, the dominant group maintained that there was a "natural" type of sexual behavior. And, in each case, once it was demonstrated that what people believe to be "natural" is just a "social construction," devised by the dominant group to preserve its own status, then the "deviant" group was on its way to acceptance. Mirkin suggested that pedophiles might be at this stage. When people realize that in earlier times sex between men and boys was thought to be unexceptionable, they will see that the present taboo is a convention, and not based on anything real. "Like homosexuality," Mirkin writes, "the ...