Are American University students so unbelievably hard up that even a breastfeeding professor will titillate them?

That’s the unavoidable sense you get after reading AU anthropology professor Adrienne Pine‘s story about her dispute with the campus paper over whether to run a story about her breastfeeding in class.

Without childcare options on the first day of her class this year, Price took her sick baby to her lecture, breastfeeding her at one point. Soon after, Price received an email from a reporter working for AU’s student paper, The Eagle, asking Price for comment for a story about her breastfeeding.

What follows are a series of somewhat mawkish but generally inoffensive college paper-style reporting tactics. Pine and Eagle staffers disputed whether a professor breastfeeding in class is worth an article, with Eagle editor-in-chief Zach Cohen writing in an email to Pine that the paper had a duty to resolve the story.

“Rumors about the incident are already spreading through the student body, and we owe them an explanation of what really happened,” Cohen wrote. Given Pine’s reluctance to become the Controversial Breastfeeding Professor, they agreed that she could be anonymous.

Cohen declined to comment to City Desk. So far, the paper hasn’t run a story on breastfeeding—which, really, doesn’t need that much explaining.

Breastfeeding picture by Shutterstock