October 26, 2007

Student Hounds a Faculty Member Running for Congress

An assistant professor of political science at Central Michigan University thought he had enough problems running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, a challenge that pits him against an eight-term Republican incumbent in a district the Democratic leadership considers vulnerable.

But the faculty member, Gary Peters, has a new annoyance — a student who has followed him on the campaign trail, hounding him with a video camera and demanding that he relinquish his post at the university.

The student, Dennis Lennox, a junior majoring in political science, has called for Mr. Peters’s ouster, regularly updating a blog called The Peters Report, in which he uploads ambush videos of the professor and administrators, and constantly evokes the phrase “Petersgate.” Mr. Lennox is a past president of the campus chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student organization.

Mr. Peters, who is running against Rep. Joseph Knollenberg in 2008, told the Associated Press this week that his academic post was part time and privately financed. Federal election law does not bar faculty members from running for Congress. —JJ Hermes

Comments

1. Shades of things to come. Young RepublicaNazis following you around because you don’t support The Great Leader. Give him a badge and he’ll arrest you, give him a gun and he’ll kill you.

   — marci    Oct 26, 04:13 PM    #

2. Please, like this is specific to Young Republicans? “Don’t tase me, ‘bro!” Besides, the liberal bloggers are worse than the conservative ones.

   — Sol Frank    Oct 26, 04:49 PM    #

3. Where are the campus security folks? Sounds like harrassment, pure and simple.

   Sol Frank, I’ve worked at four major universities – north, south, east, midwest – in my experience, the right wing of the political spectrum stirs up a lot more disturbances and manifests much less tolerance of differing views than does the left.

   Oh, and noting that – does not mean I’m a liberal. I’m just keeping score.

   — So taze him    Oct 26, 05:02 PM    #

4. Young Americans for Freedom? Doesn’t sound like Lennox is into freedom, or if he is, he has a warped understanding of the word.

   Wonder what other kinds of videos he takes. Anyone want to ask him?

   — kgotthardt    Oct 26, 06:06 PM    #

5. For ‘sol frank’, a sure accusation seems to always come from a sure right winger. I agree with ‘so taze him’ that the right wing stir up more disturbances than the left. They also usually act emotively rather than reasonably, thus illustrated by the article above where following somebody incessently (stalking?) is an emotive action.

   — Blog-a-way    Oct 26, 06:13 PM    #

6. A faculty member who holds an endowed chair in political science should not run for a position in Congress? How absurd! It seems perfect to me in terms of experiences to be shared in the classroom and other educational venues. Lennox gets a failing grade.

   — Rod Kirk    Oct 26, 06:29 PM    #

7. You mean “Young Americans for Facism,” don’t you?

   — John    Oct 26, 11:14 PM    #

8. For coverage of this topic, Outsidelansing.com, my state news site, is following it.

   To Rod, there is more to the story than merely a poli sci professor running for office.

   The polisci prof was given the job weeks after he left the powerful State Lottery Commission post because he couldn’t run and do that job full-time (and admitted there were ethical issues working for the State and running for Congress). So he gets a one day a week job at a PUBLIC UNIVERSITY to pay the bills, and the selection process has been questioned by Lennox s well. Whether he has a case or not, the questions are reasonable and bear on public issues.

   The University then banned all video cameras on campus without prior permission after the Lennox story about the Dean swatting the camera hit. Now they are using the student code to crush Lennox for “passing out fliers in a building” where Peters was hosting a public event with two other national Congressmen as part of his job (the Griffin Chair is supposed to host two public forums a semester as part of the endowment terms, and despite the “private funding,” once given to the university the school could choose anyone as the chair, the money is fungible, and therefore the money is public money (universities are supposed to raise private money to help do things – that doesn’t make their hiring decisions private).

   — Chetly Zarko    Oct 27, 05:08 AM    #

9. I’m a hard case MoveOn.org liberal type who also keeps score (it’s tied, going into extra innings by my accounting). Disruption, within the bounds of reasonable political discourse, is not necessarily bad.

   As a liberal, my 1st Amendment sensors tingle at phrases like “banned all video cameras.” If Lennox is videoing and publishing public presentations, that’s not harassment in my book. If he’s publishing videos taken in other settings, maybe it is. If he’s handing out flyers at a public presentation, that sounds like protected political speech to me. If he’s disrupting a public meeting in the process, that’s not and is probably a violation of most student conduct codes.

   Sounds like this situation might need a little nuanced thinking (although we all know how far that got John Kerry).

   — Dr. Jim    Oct 27, 01:08 PM    #

10. If Gary Peters is doing wrong, then kick him out, and quit giving the conservatives ammo to use against all of us.

    As much as we might like to shoot … er … tase the messenger in this case, we also don’t want to stand under the same banner as a corrupt candidate.

    — C.S.Nunis    Oct 29, 03:55 PM    #

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