As a California State University Northridge associate professor, Kenneth Ng spends his days teaching students the principles of economics: markets, monetary policy, interest rates.

But in his free time, Ng focuses on a very different kind of market: sex tourism in Thailand.

For the past year, Ng has been running a website that offers insights into the Thai bar scene, such as where to meet beautiful women and how to negotiate fees for their services.

Ng, who has worked at Cal State Northridge, for nearly half of his 50 years, never actively advertised his moonlighting gig to his students or academic colleagues.

But he was outed by a group of foreign businessmen who were outraged by what they considered a disrespectful Internet posting. They contacted his employer and colleagues, hoping Ng would be pressured into taking down his site.

University officials say they will not intervene or discipline Ng as long as his extracurricular activities do not involve public resources.

And Ng, himself, is defiant in his refusal.

“I’m not going to let anyone make me take it down,” Ng said in a recent interview. “That’s just a personality thing.”

Main focus is sex

At BigBabyKenny.com, users can access a wide range of tourist advice about Thailand, including restaurant reviews and stories about riding motorcycles around Bangkok.

But its main focus is sex tourism, or what Ng calls “the Thailand Girl Scene.” Ng and other bloggers offer their take on where to find the prettiest and most eager “bar girls,” and how to negotiate a fee.

While postings do warn men to stay away from underage girls, they also make references to paying adult women for sex.

“The whole system sounds a bit unsavory to Western sensibilities but the system is ubiquitous in Bangkok among foreigners and native Thais and a form of the same system is prevalent in most Asian countries — communist China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Vietnam,” Ng wrote in a recent post.

Ng also shares this observation: “The Thailand Girls Scene is all about expanded opportunities. It allows you to do things that just cannot be done in ‘The World’ or lowers the cost so much that a guy with a normal income can do things which he could never afford in ‘The World.’ ”

But it was a post he wrote on another website, run by owners of the Big Mango Bar in Bangkok, that triggered the organized campaign against him. In it, he instructed men to look for women near a particular Buddhist shrine.

“The naysayers will say its creepy to be hanging around the Muariti Shrine, hitting on the emotionally vulnerable girls desperately praying and paying Buddha for a better love life but I beg to differ,” Ng wrote. “Buddha works in mysterious ways.”

The Big Mango Bar owners said they found his post disrespectful.

But Ng said in an interview that the shrine is located near a shopping mall and didn’t appear to him to be especially sacred. He also said he launched BigBabyKenny.com because he said he was censored by the Big Mango Bar owners.

The Daily News attempted to contact the owners of Big Mango Bar via e-mail, but they declined comment.

However, an associate who responded on their behalf said Ng and the bar owners had been friends until his posting on their website.

“The owners couldn’t believe what he was posting,” the person wrote. It was quite disheartening.”

Parody of site launched

In addition to contacting officials at CSUN, the owners of Big Mango Bar posted a comment about Ng on RateMyProfessor.com in December: “Hey kids, if you should end up in Thailand be sure to ask Professor Ng which places are best for picking up underage girls for sex.”

They also launched a parody of Ng’s site called BigDummyKenny.com.

Ng said he notified university officials about his site and was told it was acceptable as long as neither CSUN nor Ng were named and no university equipment was used.

“There was an initial contact with the university last June. At that time, it alleged things and specified Mr. Ng’s name,” said CSUN Assistant Provost Jerry Leudders. “But at the time, there was no sense that there was a connection to (Ng).”

Ng was hired as a temporary lecturer in 1986, and became a permanent professor two years later. He was granted tenure in 1992.

CSUN officials say they have received no complaints from students or other faculty members regarding BigBabyKenny.com, which Ng said is maintained by an outside host.

“Nothing has come in that has led to any reason to look into it,” said Penelope Jennings, associate vice president for faculty affairs.

“If he’s engaged in activity that doesn’t violate the university computer resource rule, it’s not processed. There would have to be a number of substantiated complaints.”

Revives academic debate

Ng’s website revives a long-running academic debate about the standards professors should maintain outside of university life.

Questions of what constitutes freedom of speech and censorship when a professor is acting as a “citizen” remain “very tricky and complicated,” said Greg Scholtz, a specialist in academic freedom issues for the American Association of University Professors.

“The AAUP, since its inception in 1915, has had to deal with faculty members who got in trouble for things they said outside the classroom or outside of the university as citizens,” Scholtz said.

Scholtz said each university has its own set of standards and policies. In general, however, the AAUP refers to a set of ethics drawn up in 1940 that says professors should be free from discipline for their speech as private citizens.

At the same time, they should recognize their “special obligations” to the community because of their esteemed positions.

The site may not violate any CSUN rules, but it does leave Ng open to criticism, said Joan Bertin, an attorney and the executive director for the National Coalition Against Censorship.

She said in a quick scan of the site she did not see anything that appeared to be illegal such as underage pornography.

Seen as unsettling

“There’s an unsavory element but one could characterize this site (as) all things about Thailand,” Bertin said. “Thailand as a sexual mecca is not exactly a secret. If he’s a sex tourist, he’s going to get a lot of heat, but it’s not a censorship issue.”

But leaders within Los Angeles’ Thai community see it differently.

“I find it highly unsettling that one member among our professional and educated class continues to view women as sex objects,” said Chanchanit Martorell, the executive director of the Thai Community Development Center, an organization that fights human trafficking, among other issues.

The site helps feed “the insatiable appetite of the sex tourism industry in Thailand and leaves in its path victims of the worst human rights abuses, namely Thai women and girls who did not choose to engage in sex work but may have been trafficked and coerced into a depraved, tortured and hellish existence,” she said.

Ng said he went to Thailand several years ago on vacation and became intrigued by the culture, the politics and the class structure that he said forces some women to work in bars or become “professional mistresses.”

He said his website presents a reality of the life of some women in Thailand.

“This is a university, everybody here is an adult,” he said. “The university is not here to shield people from the world, but to expose people to the real world.”