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Search the Tufts University Medical School site and you won’t find…

… hide nor tuft of Keith Ablow, the faculty member who said that the only responsible thing he as a physician could recommend to Vice President Joe Biden’s family would be extensive tests for dementia and alcoholism.

Long before his post-debate analysis, Ablow had drawn protests from Tufts students and staff; but he remains that curious non-thing, an assistant clinical professor.

Ablow blows up frequently in public places with strange and strictly non-empirical remarks about other people, and, each time he does, Tufts notes that Ablow is non-faculty faculty – gets no money, has done nothing on campus for years.

Tufts calls Ablow’s position “voluntary,” but UD wonders what this means. He gets to just, like, be on the university’s faculty, because he wants to? Can any MD who thinks Soviet-style forensics is a blast voluntarily attach himself to Tufts? Is the position voluntary for Ablow and involuntary for Tufts?

Let’s say, for instance, that Tufts would like to stop enjoying its affiliation with Keith Ablow. Let’s say Tufts doesn’t think it’s right for Ablow to enjoy the respectability an academic affiliation confers. Let’s go overboard and even say that psychiatrists on the psychiatry faculty at Tufts conclude Ablow’s non-empirical procedure runs counter to everything psychiatry as a respectable therapeutic and intellectual endeavor has tried to be. Can’t it do anything about that?

Margaret Soltan, November 4, 2012 10:13AM
Posted in: march of science

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2 Responses to “Search the Tufts University Medical School site and you won’t find…”

  1. Janet Gool Says:

    Margaret:
    Wikipedia, which in my book is every bit as infalliable as the Pope, describes Ablow as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Tufs. My question is: May I also list myself as an assistant professor at Tufts? It would look very nice on my resume.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Janet: I gather it’s purely voluntary. Go ahead.

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