Ep. 9 Alice Dreger on Academic Freedom

Every year, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
puts out a list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech. And
this year, surprisingly, half of the schools on the list earned
their spot because they threatened faculty’s right to speak out
in some way.


One institution on that list was Northwestern University.


Last year, Northwestern made headlines for its extraordinary
attacks on academic freedom on two separate occasions. Once for
its 72-day Title IX investigation into Professor Laura Kipnis’
public writings and comments about sexual politics on campus. And
on another occasion, for its censorship of a faculty-produced
bioethics journal that it feared would damage its medical
school’s “brand.”


This episode of “So to Speak” is about academic freedom, and our
guest is Alice Dreger.


Dreger is an historian of medicine and science, a sex researcher,
a mainstream writer, and what she calls “an (im)patient
advocate.” She also formerly held the position of full professor
in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University’s
Feinberg School of Medicine, and she was a guest editor for the
bioethics journal that Northwestern sought to censor.


In this episode, we speak with Dreger about the importance of
academic freedom at Northwestern and beyond, why the
corporatization of the modern university threatens free speech on
campus, and why we must use the word “formerly” when describing
her tenure at Northwestern.


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