Alaskans who are being told they must give up even more of their Permanent Fund dividends for state spending will be interested in the latest edition of The Northern Light student newspaper at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
It’s the Sex Edition, and it features sex poll results that inform readers about how much sex students are having at the university and just how kinky they like it. Your Permanent Fund dividend may go to paying for the production of this newspaper at a time when print newspapers are not exactly a growth industry and when there are fewer journalism jobs for graduates.
Among topics in the poll conducted by the staff is BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadism and masochism as a sexual practice).
Answers include “Submissive, dominant, Rigger (rope tying), Brat (physical force), Vanilla (no BDSM), Rope bunny (being tied up with rope), Switch (dominant or submissive role switching), Experimentalist.
In promoting the edition on Facebook, the newspaper wrote, “A closer look at how UAA gets their freak on | UAA had a lot to say about their sexual preferences — so much to the extent that we couldn’t include it all in the print. The Northern Light is here to share the rest of the results collected by the poll, starting with UAA’s favorite porn stars.”
Many students who are under the age of 18 attend the university, and are exposed to this on campus, sanctioned by the Journalism and Communication Department.
Numerous other posts on the newspaper’s Facebook page focus on sex topics, such as:
The Sex Edition comes at an awkward time for the university, which is facing possible budget cuts during the current 2026 state spending plan now being debated in the Legislature.
The total University of Alaska budget for 2026 includes $589 million from unrestricted sources, including $366 million for the state’s general fund.
The Legislature is grappling with a budget deficit of an estimated $500 million this year, and cuts will have to come from somewhere. The Northern Light may have made the university a target for deeper cuts.
While the student newspaper is funded in part by student fees, the underlying programs are funded by the public.
As a comparison, here’s the front page of the most recent edition of the University of Arizona’s The Daily Wildcat:
The student news paper is funded by student fees not the State. More misinformation from you. Coming from someone who worked 30+ years at UAA.
fun·gi·ble: of a product or commodity replaceable by another identical item; mutually interchangeable.
The students who published this edition probably did it as a publicity stunt to get more attention. In their small minds, more attention means more money.
But not when its a free paper. As the article points out – and as most Americans know, print media is on its last legs. The students cannot really cry their “free speech” is being taken away after it’s been printed.
Maybe someone in some department thought this might bring a lawsuit that can challenge the First Amendment?
I’m not sure what the game is especially when Dan Savage has been “educating” college students for over 20 years in other free papers all over the nation.