IMAGE - ALICEDREGER.COMBioethicist Alice Dreger is resigning from her post at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, claiming that the school’s administration censored work that she and her colleagues published in a faculty-produced journal. “I no longer work at a university that fearlessly defends academic freedom in the face of criticism, controversy, and calls for censorship. Now, I work at a university at which my own dean thinks he has the authority to censor my work,” Dreger wrote in an August 24 resignation letter posted to her blog. “An institution in which the faculty are afraid to offend the dean is not an institution where can in good conscience do my work.”
The alleged censorship occurred last year, when Erin Nelson, dean of the medical school ordered Dreger and other editors of the Feinberg School’s medical humanities and bioethics journal Atrium to remove a risqué article that they’d published online in March. The article, titled “Head Nurses,” recounted an episode of consensual oral sex between the article’s author, Syracuse University humanities professor William Peace, and a nurse in 1978. Dreger guest-edited that piece.
Administrators forced the removal of the article, but Dreger, Peace, and other Northwestern faculty members complained, prompting a return of the piece to the Atrium website in May 2015. But Dreger and others were upset that the university censored the work of the faculty, and were further incensed by the suggestion that all future ...
