Identity of Speakers
-
Alice Dreger
Faculty/Staff
OtherAlice Dreger is professor in medical education and medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, and she guest edited the “Bad Girls” issue of Atrium, a faculty-produced bioethics journal published by Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Resources
Additional Information
-
Incident Nature:
Other
-
Incident Political Orientation:
Neither -
Incident Responses:
Other
-
Incident Status:
No litigation
- Did not involve Speech Codes
Summary
Alice Dreger is professor in medical education and medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, and she guest edited the “Bad Girls” issue of Atrium, a faculty-produced bioethics journal published by Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. One of the essays in that issue, written by a distinguished humanities professor, offered a somewhat graphic depiction of receiving fellatio from a nurse when he was paralyzed at the age of 18.
According to Dreger, soon after publication in winter 2014, medical school administrators asked Atrium’s editorial team to remove parts of the essay from the web, because the content was considered inflammatory and too damaging to the Northwestern Medicine “brand.” Objecting to the administration’s request, the editorial team not only removed the essay and issue but the entire Atrium archive. More than a year went by before administrators relented to claims that the request to remove the essay violated faculty members’ academic freedom. Nevertheless, Dreger said that medical school officials still proposed an editorial review committee for future Atrium content.
In a letter to Northwestern President Morton Shapiro, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wrote that “Northwestern must recognize when academic freedom becomes subservient to branding concerns and public relations, it ceases to exist at all.”
