BY MONICA BLACK, BEN LEE, AND MARY MCALPIN

Schedule for 2019 Sex Week, March 31-April 5.

Ever since students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, began organizing an annual event called Sex Week, state lawmakers have been trying to kill it. According to the students who organize it, the aim of Sex Week, which ran from March 31 to April 5 this year, is to “foster a comprehensive and intellectual discussion on sex, sexuality, and relationships.” According to legislators, Sex Week is an immoral attack on Tennessee values and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

State legislators have used a range of tactics to try to shut Sex Week down. Two weeks before the start of the first Sex Week in 2013, they insisted that UTK’s administration pull all funding for the event. When Sex Week pressed on with the support of private donations, they passed resolutions condemning the administrators who had allowed it to go forward. Lawmakers have since moved to end institutional funding for campus speakers altogether. Currently, student organizations are limited to using activity fees gathered from students who actively “opt in” to pay them—a direct response to Sex Week that resulted in a cut in funding for all student organizations. Some legislators have even gone so far as to vilify Sex Week’s student organizers publicly, declaring them “evil” and “disgusting.”

Sex Week organizers and UTK students as a whole have shown tremendous fortitude in the face of these attacks, which have not been limited to lawmakers, but have also included Fox News personalities, op-ed writers, and a prominent evangelist.

This year, legislative pressure moved to a new level, when the state comptroller released a 269-page report detailing the use of student fees for Sex Week. In response, newly-appointed UT-System Interim President (and erstwhile gubernatorial candidate) Randy Boyd and Interim Chancellor Wayne Davis joined legislators in condemning Sex Week, which they said has caused “frustration and embarrassment for lawmakers, alumni, many Tennessee citizens, and for us as administrators at UT.” Ominously, Boyd and Davis also announced their intention to dissolve the Student Programming Allocation Committee. If they have their way, as seems increasingly likely, UT administrators alone, rather than a committee of students, staff, and faculty, will decide what campus programming to fund. Boyd and Davis deny that, in so doing, they have endangered the free expression of ideas at the university.

UT’s Board of Trustees has also aligned its position with that of legislators. In a statement, Board Chair John Compton, a former president of PepsiCo, spoke of the Tennessee General Assembly’s “displeasure” about Sex Week, and endorsed Boyd’s actions “to resolve” what Compton called an “unfortunate distraction.” Like the system and university administration, Compton and the Board have abrogated their responsibility to advocate for UT system universities, their students, and our shared educational mission.

The UTK chapter of AAUP takes another view. We have responded with a statement challenging the university and system administration’s acts, both on free speech grounds and as a violation of shared governance. How will legislators and UT administrators reconcile their recent decisions with the Campus Free Speech Protection Act? Only two years ago, the legislature was lauded for passing this act, which requires Tennessee’s public institutions of higher learning to “be committed to maintaining a campus as a marketplace of ideas for all students and all faculty in which the free exchange of ideas is not to be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the institution’s community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed.”

Either state legislators now regret their earlier stand for freedom of expression or—as seems more likely—they never intended it to apply to those whose speech they did not want to hear in the first place. Either way, the University of Tennessee system administration, the Board of Trustees, and Knoxville campus administrators have allowed themselves to be cowed by legislative meddling to the detriment of our educational mission. Meanwhile, UTK students continue to organize Sex Week, insisting that they have the right to speak openly about human sexuality, and to invite speakers to campus who might help them do so.

Guest bloggers Monica Black, Ben Lee, and Mary McAlpin are faculty members at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Lee, an associate professor of English, is the UTK AAUP chapter president; Black, an associate professor of history, and McAlpin, a professor of French, are members of the chapter’s executive committee.