So I’ll be the one who asks it out loud – do you think professors John Michael Bailey and David Protess ever get together for a beer?

You could understand if either might have felt like crawling into a bottle at times over the last few months. Yesterday, word came from the psychology department that Bailey would not be teaching his popular Human Sexuality course next year, for the first time since 1993. Along with Protess and the Investigative Journalism course, that makes two professors-non-grata stripped of their marquee classes in the last few months.

Including the names Bailey and Protess in one article might short-circuit The Daily comment board, so let me make it clear up front that I don’t care to weigh in on the ethics or morality of either professor.

I have my thoughts on what constitutes appropriate material for a college course just like most people, and arguing until everyone turns blue in the face probably won’t change any minds.

But if Bailey and Protess did settle in over a drink to talk shop, I’d expect them to think hard on one question – what exactly did everybody expect? And whatever you think about Bailey and Protess, the question might be a fair one.

The administration of a school like Northwestern has choices. Curricula can push the envelope or play it safe. The academic environment can take a liberal atmosphere or a conservative one. The administration can tell professors to strive toward challenging students ambitiously or toward stressing fundamentals over creativity. One option might be sexier than the other, but neither approach lacks flaws or merits.

What a school can’t do – or shouldn’t do – is talk out of both sides of its mouth.

Bailey and Protess have attracted more than their fair share of controversy for years, and for good reason – the fundamental subject matter of their courses boils down to sex and murder. No one should be surprised that courses in Human Sexuality or Investigative Reporting stretch boundaries and cross lines, and in all likelihood that’s why they were popular. And for a while, they were feathers in the cap of a school that sometimes, at least, fancies itself as cutting-edge.

What changed, at least for our courageous administration, was the headlines – all of a sudden, Northwestern saw its name splashed across the front page of national publications with an air of scandal. Suddenly the behavior that made Protess and Bailey popular and bold, if polarizing and questionably appropriate, became a liability to the school’s all-important reputation. And heads promptly rolled, at least as far as they could when they’re attached to tenured professors.

So if the average student or reader of The Daily knows that these courses were out on an intellectual limb, why didn’t department heads or administrators step in earlier if they were concerned with these supposedly out-of-control educators?

Putting on their best display of moral outrage – and sending the offending professors to the chopping block – might be a way for the administration to calm down panicked alumni or spin a bad PR situation. But it also leaves our faculty twisting in the wind, not knowing whether the University will support them if the academic process takes them into uncomfortable territory, even if it raised no red flags in the past.

The University is an employer, and it has the right to tell its employees how it wants things done. But to take a hands-off approach to the faculty until the newspapers come around sends a message that the teacher is expendable, and the student experience unimportant, when compared to the University’s reputation.

Be a school of intellectual risk-taking and liberalism – or don’t. But don’t abandon University employees for the same sort of ambition that won them awards and praise from the school in the past.

Some of us might not like what either of the two beleaguered professors have come to stand for. But that’s no excuse for a University administration that continues to prove it stands for nothing at all.

Mike Carson is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]. Illustration by Mackenzie McCluer.