Precedent help save sex researcher's program

THE CONFLICT-PITTING LAWMAKers against a scholarly "sexpert"-may smack of the late 1990s. But for the California academic at the crux of the furor, the best shield may be a court precedent from the decidedly less liberated 1950s. Even as he faces a state audit that threatens his career, James Elias, a sociology professor and sex researcher at California State University, Northridge, is finding that academic freedom is a formidable safeguard.

In August 1998, the small operation Elias runs from his CSUN office, the Center for Sex Research, joined with the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group for makers of pornographic videotapes, to cosponsor the "World Pornography Conference" in Los Angeles. Nearly eight hundred people attended the event, and the center collected registration fees from about three-quarters of them. Fees from such conferences, and not taxpayer funds disbursed through the university, provide the center with its $31,000 annual budget.

Despite this fire wall, scrutiny of Elias, the center, and conference finances began this July, when state Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside) accused the university of staging a "pornography trade show." The joint audit committee of the California state legislature later ordered the Bureau of State Audits (BSA) to investigate the alleged use of state funds by Elias and the center. Auditors visited Elias's offices over the summer.

"It became clear to me very soon," says Elias, "that they weren't just looking at finances." A twenty-eight-year veteran of his department and a onetime adviser to President Johnson's commission on obscenity and pornography, Elias says auditors asked him to assemble all the remaining presentations from the conference so that they could review them. "It has been very time-consuming and distracting," Elias says of their visits, "especially since they wanted to go through all of it."

Auditors disagree, saying their investigation was limited. "We're looking into the propriety of the [pornography] conference," confirms Dale Carlson, a team leader on the Elias audit who has logged fifteen years with the BSA. "No, we're not looking into the content of the conference itself," he says, in clarifying his reference to propriety. "Yes, we are looking into the possible commingling of state and private monies."

Carlson says he is aware of the controversy stemming from investigations in New York state into the 1997 women's studies conference, "Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women's Sexual Freedom," held at the State University of New York at New Paltz. But his manager on the Elias audit, Steve Hendrickson, says they are not expecting their procedure to become similarly politicized: "We do our audits at a distance from the debate. There's a wall between the performance of these audits and the politicians."

Elias is prepared if the current audit stretches into further investigations. "I've yelled 'academic freedom' as often as I can," he says, reiterating a concept that a professor from an earlier era brandished as protection all the way to the Supreme Court. In the 1950s, after giving a lecture at the University of New Hampshire, Paul Sweezy was called before a state legislative panel to answer allegations that he was indoctrinating youth with Communist ideals. Sweezy refused to testify and, following an unfavorable verdict by the state supreme court, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957 struck down the questioning of Sweezy as unconstitutional, with Justice Felix Frankfurter holding that "scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust."

Court precedent, however, has not been Elias's first line of defense. By accounting for university money and its separation from center funds, Elias has helped quiet the legislative outcry over the center. Spokespeople for CSUN, whose comments indicate support for Elias, have also done their part to ratchet down the rhetoric. "University professors study the widest range of topics, from anthropology to zoology, and human sexuality is part of that," CSUN spokesperson Ron Chandler told the Los Angeles Times. Just because faculty members may be "studying or discussing" an issue "doesn't mean they're endorsing or promoting the topic," he concluded.