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Disillusionment among doctors is common. It is not uncommon for even highly successful doctors to say they wish they had gone into another field or that they would not encourage their children to go into medicine. In this chapter, I explore why this might be so. For many, medicine has become just another job dominated by technical skill and technology. I suggest that educating for professionalism as the remedy for this disillusionment is almost certain to fail as the issues are as much sociological as personal and professional. Perhaps disillusionment is a clue to a much more complex reality for modern medicine.

This study asks how American institutions of higher education defended the principles of academic freedom (or intellectual autonomy) during the 1950s, even as they became increasingly dependent on the federal government's financial support, their eligibility for which required an oath of political loyalty under the terms of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Universities whose students or professors resisted the oath faced a dilemma of institutional governance as well as intellectual integrity during the early years of the Cold War.

The study draws on documentary and archival sources, including the Congressional Record, the AAUP Bulletin, student pamphlets, newspapers and other publications of the US federal government, and on secondary sources.

The author finds that the US federal government began to invest heavily in higher education during the 1950s, but financial support was often accompanied by political oversight. Higher education institutions and their professors struggled to reconcile a sense of responsibility for national service with a desire for academic freedom. The findings show how the federal government treated institutions of higher education and dealt with the issue of academic freedom during the Cold War.

This study draws on a large pool of primary sources and previous research to offer new insights into an enduring ideological tension between academic freedom, public service and financial patronage.

No topic in medical education has received more attention and generated more discussion in recent years than that of “professionalism”. In many ways, this should come as no surprise in light of the dramatic technical and scientific advances in medicine, the changing, and often confounding, roles of physicians in complex health care systems, and the growing expectation throughout society that physicians should provide more effective, patient-centered care. Any of these factors alone is sufficient to create anxiety and confusion about basic duties and responsibilities of physicians to patients, the medical profession and to society. In this complex, demanding, commercialized and yet, values-laden, world of health care it is an understatement to say that there are fundamental challenges to what it means to be a medical professional in today's society.

This chapter applauds the growing move toward social science collaboration with colleagues in other fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Drawing on several decades of experience in working with biophysical scientists and engineers, as well as on prior literature, I offer three main observations. First, STEM colleagues will often expect social scientists to play the role of public relations specialists, helping to “educate” the public, or to convince people that our STEM colleagues already have the right answers. Second, part of our job is a different kind of “science education” – educating STEM colleagues about basic principles of democratic governance. Third, we have an opportunity and an obligation to ask not just what social science can contribute to STEM, but also, what working with STEM colleagues can contribute to the social sciences. There appear to be particularly important opportunities for gaining insights into some of the less visible or obvious dynamics of power and privilege.

The acceleration of Opioid deaths over the last decade has made it a serious national public health crisis. Alabama has not been immune to this epidemic, with dramatically increased age-adjusted drug overdose death rates. These increases have occurred in a state with limited resources for Opioid health prevention, treatment, and recovery services. This chapter introduces the term “o-CHIL” in order to better understand the multi-factorial layers of intertwining health injustices (in the plural) experienced in Alabama’s communities and their embedded public libraries. It highlights the complexities in Opioid consumer health information literacies, the culturally situated dimensions of the Opioid crisis in Alabama, and the uniquely relevant consumer health literacies in its public libraries. Findings are based on an empirical assessment of representative information support services identified in February 2020 on the websites of the 230 public libraries listed as members of the Alabama Public Library Service. The exploratory study applies website content analysis to identify seven examples of information offerings and to class offerings into three categories: (1) information sources (collections, resources); (2) information policy and planning (assigned Opioid-related role, strategic representation); and (3) connections (internal, external, news and events). The discussion potentially provides new directions, approaches, and opportunities to build collaborations of sharing within Alabama’s network of public libraries and beyond for them to better serve their local and regional communities impacted by the Opioid crisis.

After establishing that the requirement that those criminals who stand for execution be mentally competent can be given a recognizably retributivist rationale, I suggest that not only it is difficult to show that executing the incompetent is more cruel than executing the competent, but that opposing the execution of the incompetent fits ill with the recent abolitionist efforts on procedural concerns. I then propose two avenues by which abolitionists could incorporate such opposition into their efforts.