Free speech is an issue that’s even affecting scholars on campus, not just students.

Alex Morey reports at the FIRE blog.

Bioethicist Alice Dreger Resigns from Northwestern Over Censorship

Bioethicist and author Alice Dreger has resigned from her professorship at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, citing continuing censorship by university administrators.

“An institution in which the faculty are afraid to offend the dean is not an institution where I can in good conscience do my work,” Dreger, a professor of medical education, medical humanities, and bioethics, wrote in a letter of resignation submitted last night to Northwestern Provost Daniel Linzer. “Such an institution is not a ‘university,’ in the truest sense of that word.”

Dreger points specifically to Northwestern’s ongoing censorship of the faculty-produced medical journal Atrium, of which Dreger is an editor. Torch readers will remember that Northwestern made national news when it censored Atrium’s “Bad Girls”-themed Winter 2014 issue. The issue included a professor’s account of a consensual sexual encounter with a nurse in the 1970s that administrators said was inappropriate and bad for Northwestern’s image. The University subsequently formed a committee to actively monitor and direct the journal’s content.

FIRE wrote to Northwestern in May over these threats to academic freedom and freedom of expression. Northwestern has yet to respond.

Dreger said she can no longer do her work, particularly her research on academic freedom, in an environment where her own academic freedom is uncertain.