Ten years ago, on Aug. 24, 2015, Alice Dreger submitted her resignation as a tenured professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Dreger was protesting the censorship of an academic journal at Northwestern called Atrium, for which she had served as guest editor of the 2014 issue with the theme “Bad Girls.” That edition included a controversial essay by disability rights advocate William Peace, who wrote about receiving oral sex from a nurse in the 1970s. Northwestern officials removed Atrium’s online issues for 14 months, restoring access to it only after Dreger announced she was going public about the censorship.
Dreger wasn’t even the first professor to quit in protest over the censorship of Atrium. Kristi Kirschner, a clinical professor of medical humanities and bioethics, resigned in December 2014 because of the repression.
But Northwestern demanded a new editorial board (including a public relations official) to oversee the journal in the future, which Dreger called a “censorship committee.” The faculty editors of Atrium refused to accept administrative control over its content, and it has never published another issue.
Dreger recently wrote about her “disappointment (and that tablespoon of regret) at having accidentally caused the end of Atrium. For the magazine was such a gem.” But, of course, she didn’t cause the end of the journal—Northwestern administrators did by making unacceptable demands for control. The blame for censorship always must belong to the censor for suppressing controversy, and not the censored for causing controversy.
Dreger’s resignation, and the censorship that prompted it, received much less attention than it deserved. This year is also the 10th anniversary of another case at Northwestern that was far more publicized: The Title IX investigation of Laura Kipnis over her essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” that examined the case of a Northwestern professor accused of sexually assaulting a graduate student. Two students filed a complaint of retaliation against Kipnis over her writing, and the university cleared her after a lengthy investigation. While Kipnis obviously should never have been investigated for expressing her opinions on a case of campus sexual misconduct, she never suffered any official penalty or censorship.
By contrast, the censorship of Atrium actually did lead to the demise of a respected academic journal (and the loss of the two professors who protested it). But while the Kipnis case fit a very popular narrative of politically correct leftists demanding suppression, the Atrium case exposed the reality on campus: Conservative censorship was more repressive but much less publicized than the trendy complaints about the PC police.
Another example of this at Northwestern occurred in 2016, when political science professor Jackie Stevens was suspended and banned from campus after she complained that an administrator had yelled at her and slammed a door. Without any evidence and in violation of its due process policies, Northwestern officials contended that Stevens posed an immediate violent threat to the campus and forced her to undergo a psychological evaluation (which found no danger) before lifting the suspension and banishment. Stevens had been a harsh critic of the administration and was a leader of the successful faculty effort to prevent a retired general without a Ph.D. from being appointed head of an international studies program.
Looking back at the Dreger resignation a decade ago, it’s hard to feel optimistic, because censorship on campus is even worse today. In the past year, Northwestern University’s actions have been some of the most repressive in the entire history of the institution. In February, Northwestern’s administration adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has condemned because it “will chill campus speech.”
One little-known example of Northwestern’s censorship is shockingly reminiscent of what happened to Atrium, except that it’s much worse. In February, Northwestern officials took down the entire website of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” GSRC director Matt Abtahi didn’t go public about the censorship, but wrote an April 14 email to his staff to explain the removal of the website: “This last month working with the lawyers and senior leadership at NU has been particularly gutting.”
He added, “The use of civil rights law and discrimination policy to advance these kinds of changes is alarming.” When Northwestern officials learned about the email, they immediately suspended Abtahi on April 18 and then fired him on April 29 and banned him from campus. Northwestern finally restored the GSRC website in May but censored all of the LGBTQ+ content. The censorship today is far worse than what happened to Atrium, which was finally restored online without censorship and no one was fired for questioning the repression.
But even more appalling has been Northwestern’s violation of the rights of journalism professor Steven Thrasher. After Thrasher defended a student encampment in spring 2024 to prevent police from arresting protesters, Northwestern’s administration retaliated several months later in the wake of Northwestern president Michael Schill’s testimony before members of Congress who called Thrasher a “goon” and demanded his firing.
Northwestern used its police powers to order Thrasher’s arrest, although the charges were immediately dismissed. In the fall of 2024, Northwestern suspended Thrasher from teaching for two quarters in violation of campus rules and claimed that he had violated professional norms by questioning the concept of “objectivity” in journalism. After a faculty committee cleared Thrasher of any wrongdoing, Northwestern was forced to reinstate him.
However, Thrasher was up for tenure in 2025, and Northwestern denied him tenure. When Thrasher publicly criticized that decision and blamed it on retaliation for his criticism of Israel, Northwestern’s administration promptly banned Thrasher from teaching in the spring quarter and the entire 2025–26 academic year, declaring, “Your public lobbying, mischaracterizations and efforts to encourage pressure from groups complicate and compromise the process of tenure review, decision making, and appeal. Therefore, we are concerned about your presence with students in our community.”
Obviously, criticizing the administration can never be grounds for banning a professor from the classroom for years without due process. Because tenure decisions are secretive, we don’t know if illegitimate, nonacademic judgments affected Thrasher’s case. But we do know that Northwestern’s excuses for twice suspending Thrasher are entirely illegitimate and violate basic norms of academic freedom.
(Full disclosure: I’m a member of the Illinois AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and we wrote two letters to Northwestern, condemning its initial suspension of Thrasher and its second suspension of Thrasher that denied him the right to teach during his terminal year after being denied tenure.)
Despite the extraordinary repression at Northwestern, where merely speaking out against the administration’s censorship can get you immediately banished, faculty and students are resisting efforts to silence dissent. On April 21, 2025, the entire faculty assembly at Northwestern voted 338 to 83 to support a resolution sponsored by the Northwestern AAUP (led by Jackie Stevens) that called upon the university to defend academic freedom, protect free speech and follow due process. But so far Northwestern refuses to back down from its embrace of censorship.
As Dreger wrote 10 years ago, “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. Such an institution is not a ‘university,’ in the truest sense of that word.”
Sadly, Dreger’s warning is going unheeded by Northwestern (and many other “universities”) that are part of a growing wave of repression on campus.
John K. Wilson was a 2019–20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Routledge, 2008), and his forthcoming book The Attack on Academia. He can be reached at [email protected], or letters to the editor can be sent to [email protected].
