Prof.Paul Cullen (M.D.), Associate Professor at the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster and Chairman of the Association Doctors for Life is to be stripped of his professorship. This is the demand of the Münster General Students’ Committee (AStA) together with a group of “critical physicians” (sic!) in a statement published on 19 January.
The reason for the uproar is not deficiencies in the teaching of the professor, who lectures in clinical chemistry, but the insinuation of “unscientific, anti-feminist and anti-Semitic” statements in relation to the abortion issue and the medical-scientific handling of the coronavirus.
Cullen has issued an open letter commenting on the two groups’ allegations:
For those of you who don’t know me from the lecture, let me mention that as a specialist in laboratory medicine, I lecture on my specialty of diabetes and dyslipidemia. These issues are dangerous for the patients involved, but certainly not for a young student preparing to help these patients.
[…]
The complainants want to preemptively protect you from statements that were never a topic of discussion in the lecture hall by demanding that I be stripped of my associate professorship. I strongly oppose this.
Support for Prof. Cullen is also now being organized in the student body. A statement for free speech and cultural diversity at WWU was published as a petition. In it, the students supporting the professor share his criticism of the allegations and argue for free science that embraces diversity of opinion and dissent: “Cheap pre-judgments or even media smear campaigns would be the last thing that would be conducive to that.”
Prof. Cullen’s open letter to the student body of the University of Münster can be read in its entirety in the petition text.