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, 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.

June 17, 2015 ・ From Inside Higher Ed