Those who complain about Janet Braswell (who I guess partly redeemed herself today, with the article she coauthored about the Trent Lott Center) should see what caliber of reporter covers the local university at some other newspapers.

My colleagues at Liberty and Power, David Beito and Charles Nuckolls, are both profesosrs at the University of Alabama, where the administration has been engaging in reprisals against the Alabama Scholars Association and the U of A AAUP chapter. (Administrators there have discovered a novel interpretation of the law that forbids both organizations from using internal mail at the university, unless they pay second-class postage.) The ASA and the AAUP have received sympathetic coverage in the Mobile newspaper and now the Birmingham newspaper, but the Tuscaloosa News remains a lost cause.

Here are two parodies, by Charles Nuckolls, of the kind of news writing about the university that the local paper inflicts on its readers:

http://www.alabamascholars.org/page97.html

Robert Campbell