On Monday I had breakfast with Neil Shulman and Adam Kissel of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Adam was extremely helpful last year related to the topic of academic freedom, and we have been having discussions with him about the topic of freedom of speech within the field of healthcare. [...]

Yes, it’s true. After announcing that my university had sent me a letter by courier telling me to take the name of my university off of my blog, there was mounting publicity about the situation, including stories by BNET Pharma, Schwitzer Health News, and Inside Higher Education, followed by other posts including a story last week in the Academic Exchange and this hilarious spoof on the use of names on the Carlat Psychiatry Blog. That was followed by some inquiries from a national newspaper

Ok, if I had just left the first part of the title of this post in, you wouldn’t have read it, right? I mean, noone likes “intellectualism”, it sounds so, well, intellectual. We think professors are boring, and never take risks. We say things are “academic”, meaning that they don’t really matter. “It’s academic”. Being too smart or too well read is actually seen as a liability. Our heroes in America at least are not those who write a great research report, but people who bust down doors. Without asking first.