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KenDckey -> RE: first amendment gone awray (8/25/2015 6:21:36 PM)
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quote:
A Northwestern University professor has resigned her position at the Feinberg School of Medicine after, she said, her complaints of academic censorship were ignored.
Alice Dreger, who worked part time as a clinical medical humanities and bioethics professor, initially complained in 2014 that the school dean removed a risque article from a website for the bioethics journal Atrium because of fear it would harm the school's image.
The university eventually allowed the essay, called "Head Nurses," to go back onto the website in May after Dreger said she threatened to take her complaints about school censorship public. But she objected to a newly established "oversight committee" required to review and approve articles before they appear.
"In recent weeks, I have appealed to you to acknowledge the censorship and to assure me it will not happen again," she wrote in Monday's resignation letter to Provost Daniel Linzer.
She was disappointed with the provost's response, which she quoted in the letter as stating:
"The ongoing publication of any journal depends on a number of factors that are quite distinct from academic freedom. The approval and support of the Medical School or the University for publication of a journal that bears the institution's name would depend on the publication making a significant contribution to our educational and scholarly mission."
University spokesman Alan Cubbage said Monday that he could not comment on Dreger's resignation because it is a personnel matter. "We wish her well," he said.
Linzer could not be immediately reached.
The journal Atrium stopped publication after faculty objected to the new oversight committee, which Cubbage has described as "an editorial board of faculty members and others, as is customary for academic journals."
Atrium, published near annually since 2005, had always been considered "edgy," featuring topics that explore where medicine overlaps with other disciplines, such as religion, literature and the law, Dreger said.
Dreger had served as visiting editor for an edition called "Bad Girls" that featured the "Head Nurses" essay and included articles by other scholars on disability and sexuality. "Head Nurses" was a first-person account written by Syracuse University visiting humanities professor William Peace, who described a sexual experience with a nurse after he was hospitalized in 1978 with paralysis. He wrote that the nurse had acted compassionately to help him during rehabilitation in "a lost part of medical history."
Dreger recently published a book, "Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science," which she describes as focused on researchers who "get in trouble for putting forth challenging ideas about sex."
Earlier this year, Northwestern officials responded to an unrelated controversy involving academic freedom after two students filed complaints under the Title IX gender equality law because of an essay written by communications professor Laura Kipnis.
The university found no evidence of wrongdoing by Kipnis, who had criticized the university's ban on faculty-student sexual relations in an essay published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Dreger wrote in her resignation letter: "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."
worked for me but here it is. sorry.
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