Kohler Resigns Amid ADA Debacle
Citing numerous failures of governance, the VP of Publications calls it quits
Christian Kohler is one of the more upstanding publishers one could hope to meet, so when he tendered his resignation for the American Diabetes Association (ADA) last Friday, it wasn’t especially surprising, but it was deflating.
Another good publisher has left the stage, forced out by bad governance.
This all started in June, when the ADA expelled the Editor-in-Chief of their flagship journal (Diabetes Care) and others from their Annual Meeting for distributing an editorial critical of the Trump Administration’s science cuts and policies. Condemnation continued as the ADA fumbled communications repeatedly in the following weeks. In July, the ADA blocked editors at Diabetes Care from publishing an opinion piece and first-person accounts of the events at the meeting. This led to a boycott in September, the mysterious ouster of the ADA’s chief science and medical officer in October, and now Kohler’s resignation. His letter is reproduced below in full, and the PDF is attached.
The ADA has failed in basic governance functions for months now, shooting itself in the foot so often there can’t be much left to stand on.
This is all terrible, and shame on the ADA for everything that’s going on there.
