By ERIC RICH
This story ran in the Courant May 22, 1999

MIDDLETOWN - At least a dozen tenured professors at Wesleyan University are bristling at President Douglas J. Bennet's review of a controversial course in which students were asked to make pornography.

Professors from two departments have signed letters calling Bennet's inquiry an attack on academic freedom. It undermines, they say, an established process of peer review that traditionally determines whether a course is appropriate.

``To review a course simply because it's been questioned in the media is a really disturbing precedent,'' said Elizabeth Traube, an anthropology professor. ``Everybody I know is disturbed about it.''

Final projects for the course, ``Pornography: Writing of Prostitutes,'' included pornographic fiction, a sadomasochistic performance piece and a video that shows only a male student's eyes as he masturbates. The university first offered the course last year.

A chorus of critics off campus, led by Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger, have decried the course as an abuse of academic freedom and a symbol of a morally corrupt liberalism.

But on campus, faculty in the American studies and anthropology departments are defending Professor Hope Weissman's right to teach as she and her department see fit.

Eight tenured professors of American studies warned Bennet that the review could have ``a chilling effect'' on the willingness to take scholarly and artistic risks.

In a letter to Bennet, the professors wrote that principles of academic freedom require them to ``display tolerance for a variety of things in our colleagues' classrooms that we might individually find inappropriate, in order to protect our own freedom to teach what others might consider ideologically or politically suspect.''

Still, other professors are privately rolling their eyes at the unusual pornography assignment, and are backing Bennet's inquiry. None have publicly criticized their colleague.

Marc Eisner, a professor of government, described both the review and professors' objections to it as overly defensive.

``I do think it would be unfortunate if people just kind of reflexively cried out for academic freedom,'' he said. ``That's unfortunately what we do a bit too often. We tend to adopt a defensive posture immediately.''

Bennet, who has turned down repeated requests for interviews in the last two weeks, called for the confidential review May 11. He said at the time he hoped to have it completed within a week.

A Wesleyan spokesman said Friday that it is still not done, but would offer no explanation. ``All I can tell you is that it's not complete,'' said the spokesman, William Holder.

He would not say whether faculty are cooperating, whether there have been other letters of protest or whether the review has any precedent. Nor would he say how the course was approved and whether the faculty who approved it knew of the final project.

Talk of the course has buzzed on an alumni Internet message board. Walter Ebmeyer, who graduated in 1956, called the course outrageous, the review appropriate, and faculty response to it silly.