Tuesday 25 August 2015

Alice Dreger Resigns from Northwestern University Following Pathetic Censoring by Management


Today, I learned that Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, internationally celebrated for her work on the practices and policies around intersex and ambiguous sex conditions, especially in small children, yesterday chose to hand in her letter of resignation, following a pathetically prude and spineless piece of ham-handed censorship of her and a colleagues' work by her own medical school dean,  Eric Nielson last year, and subsequent lack of university provost, Daniel Linzer, to assure her that anything like that would never occur again.

Read it all in Alice's own words, including the letter of resignation itself, at her website and blog, here.

As Alice has just published and already won acclaim for the book, Galileo's Middle Finger, which centers around exactly the issue of censorship and supression of academic publication and scientific ideas, the development has a bizarre twist to it, indeed. Today, apparently, it is not the clerics or the many versions of politburos that academics and scientists have to fear will silence what they have to tell the world, but the leaders of the very institutions supposed to sternly guard against anything in that vein.