Nobel Prize Board Members Step Out of the Academy

Board Members of the Nobel Prize Awards for Literature resigned today although according to the Swedish Academy rules is not possible for members to formally resign, because seats are for the lifetime.

Authors Peter Englund, Klas Ostergren, and Kjell Espmark declared on Friday morning, they would no longer participate in the body that selects the winner of the Swedish Academy in protest over the allegations of sexual misconduct by a man married to another member.

At a time of global concern over the treatment of women spearheaded by the #MeToo movement, state prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation into the incidents, but later dropped parts of it without charges being laid.

At the time of the lawlessness over the mistreated women led by the #MeToo movement state prosecutors in Sweden launched a preliminary investigation for allegations of sexual misconduct of a man who had been helped financially by the Swedish Academy to run a cultural club in Stockholm. The accused man denied all allegations and also the prosecutor closed the case without any charges.

The Swedish Academy is still making an internal investigation, results which are soon going to the public. But, one of its members, the author Englund, believes that the measures taken by the Academy showed “too much regard for the individual and too little for the statutes.” He also declared, “Decisions have been taken that I neither believe in nor can defend, and I have therefore decided to no longer participate in the work of the Swedish Academy.”

“The Academy was failing to live up to its own code”, the author Klas Ostergren wrote in his letter to the Swedish newspaper.

However, the Nobel Price Academy had decided to look into whether it could be made possible for members to formally resign.

Svenska Dagbladet feels very sad to see her colleagues exit from the border of the academy. “But I understand their reasoning,” she said.

Urban Lendahl a genetics professor, in February 2016, resigned as a member of the Nobel Prize Board in Physiology or Medicine over an investigation into controversial surgeon Paolo Macchiarini.

Lendahl resigned out of respect for the integrity of the Nobel Prize work since two of the three patients Macchiarini operated on in Stockholm died, and a third has been hospitalized for more than three years.