[Vision2020] "Head" Nurses at Northwestern Medical School

[Nicholas Gier]

 Sexorship at Northwestern?
  June 17, 2015 1 Colleen Flaherty
<https://www.insidehighered.com/users/colleen-flaherty> *Inside Higher
Education *

It was there and then it wasn’t: a controversial issue of a Northwestern
University bioethics journal about sex and disability featuring one
scholar’s account of receiving oral sex from a nurse as part of his
rehabilitative process. Did Northwestern demand the removal of the journal
essay from the university’s website and threaten to review all forthcoming
issues prior to publication? That’s what faculty members claims happened
last year. Northwestern, meanwhile, acknowledges that the archive issue of
the journal was taken down, but isn’t saying why, or why it was later
restored.

The controversy began more than a year ago, upon publication the winter
2014 issue of *Atrium*
<http://cts.vresp.com/c/?FIRE/571880e4da/4c4708dc75/9b51cfe083>, a
faculty-produced bioethics journal published by Northwestern’s Feinberg
School of Medicine. The issue, called “Bad Girls,” featured several
scholars’ takes on disability and sexuality. One of the essays, by William
J. Peace, then the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in
the Humanities at Syracuse University, offered a frank and somewhat graphic
description of getting fellatio from a nurse after he became paralyzed at
the age of 18, in 1978.

“Head Nurses,” as the essay
<http://cts.vresp.com/c/?FIRE/571880e4da/4c4708dc75/5c150bc126> is called,
says that the young, pretty “bad girl” nurses in Peace’s ward were known by
male patients to be part of two distinct groups. The “dick police” were
those who helped disabled men use catheters -- a somewhat “humiliating”
experience -- and otherwise had “no redeeming value,” Peace wrote. The
“head nurses” helped the men reclaim their sexual identities.

Peace described his first visit from a “head nurse” -- whom he claims to
have remained friends with all his life -- like this:

“It was late at night and I had pissed all over myself and the bed. I hit
the call button, upset. I thought I had had a handle on bladder management
at that point. The nurse that came to help was one with whom I was very
close. She changed my sheets and came back as I was washing myself. I was
playing with myself without much luck. She explained I had to be a bit more
vigorous and try non-traditional approaches. Then she rubbed my leg and
pulled the skin on my inner groin, and sure enough I grew hard. I started
to cry in relief. She wiped away my tears and then went down on me. She
brought me to orgasm, and I was taken aback when I realized no ejaculate
had emerged. She explained to me that this is common for paralyzed men and
that it involves a retrograde ejaculation. She assured me it would not
affect my fertility or my sex life in a major way. My son is living proof
she was correct.”

Alice D. Dreger, professor in medical education and medical humanities and
bioethics at Northwestern, guest edited the “Bad Girls” issue. She says
that soon after publication, 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 new
Northwestern Medicine “brand.” Northwestern Memorial HealthCare recently
acquired the Feinberg faculty practice and merged with Cadence Health to
operate under the Northwestern Medicine brand, she said in an interview,
and medical school officials were particularly sensitive about the
hospital’s image.

Peace said his initial reaction to the censorship demand was “confusion.”

“I suspected a small number of people might strenuously object,” he said
via email. “I was prepared to engage potential criticisms -- this is after
all a critical part of academic life.” But never in Peace’s “wildest
imagination” did he think his work would be “censored and deemed
pornographic by some,” he said. “What I unknowingly did was prompt a
knee-jerk reaction that highlights that disability and sex remain taboo. I
was merely writing about a part of medical history circa 1978.”

On his blog, Bad Cripple <http://badcripple.blogspot.com/>, Peace wrote
that he “refused to set aside my sexuality and candidly acknowledged my
sexual desire and pleasure. In so doing, I not only asserted my humanity,
but undermined the myth that people with disabilities, especially paralyzed
men, are asexual or unable to satisfy their sexual needs.”

The essay was “a forthright step in a decades-long effort to reject the
negative assumptions about disability and sexuality,” he said.

Objecting to the administration’s request, the editorial team not only
removed the essay and issue but the entire *Atrium *archive, Dreger
said. More than a year went by before administrators relented to claims
that the request to remove the essay violated faculty members’ academic
freedom. But Dreger said medical school officials still proposed an
editorial review committee for future *Atrium* content.

Kristi Kirschner, now an adjunct professor of disability and human
development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said she resigned her
faculty position Northwestern in December 2014 due in part to the incident.
Formerly a clinical professor in medical humanities and bioethics at
Feinberg, she also wrote an article in the “Bad Girls” issue of *Atrium*.

Kirschner said she’d read Peace’s essay prior to publication and found it
“provocative” but worthy of publication. She said it touched on themes
similar to those of the 2012 film “The Sessions” about sexual surrogacy,
and so hoped it would help further the discussion about “how the medical
profession, and rehabilitation in particular, deals with sexuality and
disability.” Moreover, she said, *Atrium *had become “emblematic” of the
medical humanities and bioethics program’s non-traditional and
multidisciplinary approach, in that it was “absolutely unique, edgy,
scholarly, artistic and reflective of the issues of the time.”

Of the censorship, she said via email, “These events had a chilling effect,
antithetical to the idea of the university. Universities thrive when there
is academic freedom and vigorous debate. Hospitals and clinical care thrive
when systems operate as well-oiled machines. One is about disruption and
creativity, the other about conforming. The branding movement will
undoubtedly favor the latter, in service of fund-raising and reputational
scores.”

​Dreger said the university only caved on its censorship demand after she
threatened to publicize the incident. The essay is back up on the web. But
the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) still became
involved in the case, sending a letter to Northwestern President Morton
Schapiro asking him to reaffirm his commitment to academic freedom and
abandon all plans to censor future issues of *Atrium*.

“Northwestern must recognize that when academic freedom becomes subservient
to branding concerns and public relations, it ceases to exist at all,” FIRE
said in its letter. “*Atrium*’s treatment raises the concern that it is
being held to an indefensible, content-based double standard. We note that
numerous other [medical school] academic programs and institutes publish a
variety of newsletters, blogs and journals -- all seemingly without
administrative interference.”

FIRE hasn’t yet heard back from Northwestern.

Katie Watson, assistant professor of medical humanities and bioethics and
permanent editor of the *Atrium*, did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.

Alan Cubbage, a Northwestern spokesman, said in an emailed statement that
the university is “strongly committed to the principles of free expression
and academic freedom. The journal, *Atrium*, is published by Northwestern
University Feinberg School of Medicine. The article at issue was printed as
edited by its faculty editor, mailed to subscribers and posted on the web.
The website archive of the issue was later taken down and at that time, the
faculty editor of the journal took down other issues of *Atrium*. All of
the issues are now back online.”

He added, “The magazine now has an editorial board of faculty members and
others, as is customary for academic journals. Subsequent to the
publication of the article, Dr. Peace, the author of the article, was
invited to Feinberg School of Medicine to speak.”

Cubbage did not respond to requests for clarification about why the issues
had initially been removed from the web.

The case has remained relatively quiet thus far, save a recent op-ed
in the *Huffington
Post *by Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor
of Law at the University of Chicago. He called Northwestern’s action one of
“blatant censorship.”

“Presumably, the university's concern was that the inclusion of such an
‘offensive’ article in *Atrium* might put off some of the university's
donors and the hospital's patrons, either because of its acknowledgment of
oral sex or because it might be construed as demeaning to women,” Stone
wrote
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/academic-freedom-under-si_b_7481620.html>.
“Neither concern is a justification for censorship. The journal, the issue
and the essay were all squarely within the bounds of academic freedom, and
Northwestern University should have stood proudly in support of that
principle.”

Dreger, who has written about academic freedom issues in the sciences, said
she thought the *Atrium *affair was part of a larger “collapse of academic
freedom” across academe. And the repercussions are grave, she said, since
there are fewer and fewer places left in society where “truth telling”
happens.

Kirschner doesn’t see the problem as unique to Northwestern, either, she
said. “There is an inherent tension within academic medical centers between
the missions of the hospital and the university, but recently the
commercial interests of the hospital are dominant. The tipping point at
Northwestern was the 2013 purchase of the university faculty practice by
Northwestern Memorial Healthcare. Northwestern’s medical school is no
longer the institution I was proud to be a part of for a quarter century.”

-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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