Jack Hafferkamp was an instructor for the past seven years at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He’s not anymore, and the reason-though none was offered officially-appears to some to have something to do with his extracurricular activities.
Outside of his teaching duties, Hafferkamp-who was once a writer for the Chicago Daily News and long ago did free-lance writing for the Tribune-has long had a second interest, like many Northwestern staffers who spend their off hours at everything from free-lance economic forecasting to serving on corporate boards of directors, advising schools, leading mountain climbs and, in many cases, working for little magazines with a scholarly bent.
Since 1988, Hafferkamp has been co-publisher, along with his life-partner Marianna Beck, of Libido: The Journal of Sex and Sensibility, a trim quarterly offering with academic-looking covers that fit on library shelves about halfway between publications of the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Zoological Society of London.
In Libido, along with black-and-white photos and many ads for, as they put it, “pleasure-related” goods, services and videos, Hafferkamp and Beck examine such topics as “Picasso’s Erotic Gravures,” “Jewish Sexuality, Such As It Is” and “Is Sex Funny or What?” whose author, Larry Tritten, proposed a TV show called “I Dream of Genet,” a tribute to the late French sensualist and playwright Jean Genet.
Circulation is about 9,000, making Libido marginally profitable, but there’s little money for salaries. Until now, Hafferkamp has survived by teaching. Beck is a free-lance writer. Over the years, to cut costs, both have taken various positions, in varying amounts of dress, in Libido’s photo spreads.
“We’re cheap models,” Hafferkamp said, speaking by phone from San Francisco where he and Beck are taking three weeks of graduate-level classes at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, one of the nation’s few academic institutions to have a hot tub in the student lounge.
Hafferkamp’s first intimation that he was in hot water at Northwestern came last winter, he said, after he appeared as part of the latest edition in HBO’s “Real Sex” TV series.
An eight-minute segment, shot over three days in Chicago, included still photographs of Hafferkamp and Beck, disrobed and fondling, against a background of sound bites, taped elsewhere, the last of which had Hafferkamp saying, ” . . . and I teach graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism.”
Northwestern is not pleased
Students in Hafferkamp’s graduate-level course, which featured workshops and simulations of reporting situations for students with no journalism training, thought his HBO outing was “pretty cool,” Hafferkamp said.
But with his superiors, it went over like a bad transition.
“A month after it aired, the dean, Michael Janeway, called me in and said, `Tell me about this,’ ” Hafferkamp said. “He hadn’t seen it. But he’d heard. So I did. He said, `Well, never do that again.’ I said, `Never do what again?’ He said, `I don’t care what you do in your private life, but never mention Northwestern and Libido together again.’ I said, `If you’re suggesting in some way I should be ashamed, I’m not.’ He said: `I don’t care. Just never do it again,’ and he waved his finger at me.”
After that, Hafferkamp, who had been employed on a series of one-year contracts, began to get what he described as “rumblings” that he might not be asked back in the fall. The next step, he said, came in February when a reporter from TGIF, an arts and entertainment insert to the Daily Northwestern student newspaper, asked if she could interview him about his work with Libido.
“I said I’d agree to it only if HBO wasn’t mentioned,” Hafferkamp said. “I said, `I’m not looking for trouble, not looking to be fired.’ I sent a note to (Janeway), saying there was going to be a story, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.” But, he added ruefully, “when it appeared, HBO was prominently mentioned and there were about 8 million photos.”
“THE EROTIC-MINDED PROFESSOR,” read the headline, spread across two pages. “A magazine run by a Medill lecturer and his partner argues that the most important sex organ is the brain,” read smaller type. Pictures showed Hafferkamp and Beck snuggling and kissing.
Not asked back
In early June, Hafferkamp got a letter from Janeway.
“I’m sorry to report that we won’t be calling on you for teaching in the coming academic year,” the dean wrote, alluding to moves the university was making to phase out short-term contract employees in favor of full-time staffers. The letter thanked Hafferkamp “for your contributions to the school over time.”
Others agreed that, as a teacher, Hafferkamp had done good work. Glenn Gaslin, the editor of TGIF, a student of Hafferkamp’s and a recent intern with the Tribune, found him intense and inspiring. Journalism instructor James Ylisela Jr. told the Chicago Reader that Hafferkamp “has really become more of an asset to the school because of his knowledge of how to put out a small publication.” But as colleague George Harmon put it, “it’s the dean’s call.” As for Janeway, he wasn’t talking about it. According to an aide, he was “on vacation for a month and totally unreachable.”
“They should come forth with some explanation,” said Hafferkamp’s attorney, Burton Joseph, referring to a legal maxim that “if there is no problem before an incident, and a problem after, there is an assumption that the incident caused the problem.”
There was, Joseph said in an interview, “no question about Jack Hafferkamp’s ability as a teacher. His publication was fully protected by the 1st Amendment. He shouldn’t be punished for exercising his right of free expression.”
