… and using eternal vigilance against people on its faculty who criticize the drug industry and faculty conflict of interest related to it.

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed reports on the latest scandal out of this most pharmaloving campus:

Emory University has been accused repeatedly over the last year of looking the other way while one of its prominent physicians built extremely close ties to the pharmaceutical industry and — critics charge — failed to adequately report those ties as required by university and federal regulations.

But what if you are an Emory professor who happens to differ with the pharmaceutical industry? Then, it appears, Emory watches you closely — and if you are a blogger, the university can tell you that you must remove the Emory name from your Web site. That’s why a recent post on the J. Douglas Bremner’s blog Before You Take That Pill is called “I Am Removing the Name of My University From This Blog.” Bremner is professor of psychiatry and radiology at Emory and as his blog title suggests (as does his book with the same name), he is an avid critic of the pharmaceutical industry.

In the post, he notes that he was recently ordered to remove the Emory name both by the interim chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and by the medical school’s executive associate dean for faculty affairs. In the letters, which he provided to Inside Higher Ed, they tell Bremner to remove Emory’s name, logo and letterhead from his blog because none of them can be used for “non-Emory business.” He was also told to report on when he had removed Emory from his blog.

The letters cite complaints that the university received about a blog post Bremner made in January in which he criticized the eviction of a man with bipolar disorder who was being forced out of his apartment for smoking. Bremner made his point in the form of a mock letter “To Whom It May Concern” giving his blessing for the man to continue to smoke. According to Bremner’s Emory superiors, complaints they received suggested that he was making “clinical recommendations for a patient you do not know and have never examined,” and these postings made them feel the need to tell him to stop using the Emory name.

… Bremner’s fans have noted with alarm his need to remove Emory’s name from the blog and they have been e-mailing about the situation, noting, for example, that Emory isn’t bothered by Charles Nemeroff, the professor at the center of the conflict of interest dispute, appearing with his Emory identification at events not related to the university (and sponsored by a pharmaceutical company) — but clamps down on a blogger who criticizes the industry.

… [The head of the AAUP] said that it was wrong and a violation of academic freedom for Emory to tell a faculty blogger not to use the university’s name in his identification or elsewhere on his blog.

“What they absolutely cannot do is say that he cannot identify himself as an Emory faculty member,” he said…

Ready, aim, FIRE?