Professor John Michael Bailey is quite the peculiar character. His Human Sexuality course boasts more than 600 students every winter in spite of the wild, outlandish propositions made through his original research and the firestorms surrounding his research ethics.
Many of Bailey’s opinions and research raise numerous red flags for academics at NU and elsewhere. As he told the Daily in April, “We think parents who don’t value gay people are bad. But that doesn’t mean we don’t let those people abort that gay fetus. Making them have a gay child is a perverse limitation of freedom.”
The biggest problem I have with Bailey is this suggestion that parents should be able to abort gay fetuses if a “gay gene” is found. I’m perturbed to hear that from someone who told the Chronicle of Higher Education in June 2003 that he is “very pro-gay” but that the research he does isn’t.
But let me make one thing clear: this column is not a personal attack against Bailey and his research. Even if I think everything Bailey teaches equates to tomfoolery and students in his class this quarter should make like a Snoop song and “drop it like it’s hot,” he should still be given a podium to perch on and the opportunity to conduct further research.
What I want to emphasize is the fact that students shouldn’t just accept everything their professors teach them as absolute knowledge. We enter academia to question things known and unknown, not to have others’ thoughts drilled into us like a flu shot from a hypodermic needle.
Even though I disagree with most of Bailey’s research, reading his CTECs gave me a new perspective on his course and other courses like his across academia. Many of the evaluations ranted or raved about Bailey “advancing his opinions as fact” or called it a “must-take” class. Some students were even more forthcoming, saying that the pornography viewed in class made the quarter “hot” and that the course is “not for prudes.”
The one CTEC that changed my mind said the class “led to many great debates with my friends. The class will make you think, even if you disagree with everything JMB says.”
That is a very fair assessment and shows that Bailey’s course still retains high intellectual value. Colleges are marketplaces of ideas and forums for students and faculty alike to question knowledge, research the unknown, and constantly risk absurdity.
People enter into higher education out of a natural curiosity for various aspects of the human condition. Personally, I am here to challenge myself academically in unimaginable ways and to get a pretty piece of paper that will make me more competitive in the workforce. In the end, as someone who has not and will not ever take any of Bailey’s courses, hearing and reading about his ideas and the controversies surrounding his research has made me think (if not made me want to barf).
Throughout history, various thinkers, social critics and scientists have faced ex-communication from churches, dismissal from academia and even the death penalty for their attempts to contribute to growing fields of knowledge. We would still think Earth is the center of the solar system had scientists like Galileo and others not persevered in advancing a Sun-centered model.
If you walk out of any class without questioning anything the professor says, it’s not the professor’s fault. It’s not the department’s fault. It surely isn’t the university’s fault. The fault is all yours.
Moral of the story: think for yourself. Professor Bailey sure can, so why can’t you?
Derrick Clifton is a Communication junior. He can be reached at [email protected].
