University of Michigan slammed for honoring Jack Kevorkian

The University of Michigan is under fire for honoring convicted murderer Jack Kevorkian in a list of notable alumni from their medical school. Kevorkian is well-known for committing assisted suicide and euthanasia on over 100 patients.

Key Takeaways:

• Kevorkian graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1952.

• He initially worked as a pathologist, and began advertising his 'services' to help people end their own lives in 1987. He committed his first public assisted suicide in 1990 in Michigan, leading to the revocation of his license to practice medicine.

• Between 1990 and 1998, Kevorkian reportedly participated in the deaths of at least 130 people.

• He was tried four times for assisted suicide, and in 1999, was found guilty of second-degree murder, but spent just eight years in prison. Kevorkian died in 2011.

• The University of Michigan honored Kevorkian in their "Medicine at Michigan" magazine, in a spread honoring 175 of their "best" alumni.

The Details:

"Medicine at Michigan" recently published a feature honoring 175 of its best leaders and doctors, with Kevorkian included in a positive light. Rather than acknowledging that he murdered his patients, Kevorkian was described as an advocate for death, and as someone who "changed the conversation" on assisted suicide. Alongside graduates who actually dedicated their careers to saving lives, Kevorkian was included at #141, and forwarded the myth that assisted suicide is primarily used to prevent a long, painful death from a terminal illness.

His segment was written by Katie Vloet, the editor of the magazine, who headlined it by praising Kevorkian for "changing the conversation" on assisted suicide. Saying that he was "fascinated by death and dying," Vloet said he regularly visited terminally ill patients, and that he was ejected from the University of Michigan's residency program after he tried to perform intentionally-fatal medical experiments on death-row inmates.

Vloet then glamorized the murder of Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old woman with Alzheimer's, whom Kevorkian euthanized in his Volkswagen van.

"Like so many families that would follow, Adkins’ family publicly thanked Kevorkian for helping to end her suffering," she wrote. "Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999. He served eight years of a 10- to-25-year prison sentence before he was released. In 2011, he died at age 83."

Yet Vloet's article then swerved into the honorific, concluding:

Since then, physician-assisted suicide, also called “medical aid in dying,” has become more accepted. It is now legal in 10 states and Washington, D.C., and, according to a 2024 Gallup poll, 71% of Americans believe doctors should be “allowed by law to end the patient’s life by some painless means if the patient and his or her family request it.”

To Vloet, it seems, Kevorkian was just a pioneer.

Zoom In:

The decision to include Kevorkian was slammed by two University of Michigan professors — English Professor Scott Lyons and medical school Professor Dr. Kristin Collier. In a joint essay for The Michigan Daily, the pair argued that Kevorkian is an example of the university's worst, and certainly not its best.

They wrote:

"Kevorkian is best known for his interest in euthanasia; he advocated ending the lives of vulnerable people by illness and disability and became a symbol of the physician-assisted suicide movement. His work resulted in a murder conviction and prison term. 

Michigan Medicine should not celebrate Kevorkian as one of its 'leaders and best.'"

To drive the point home, they said honoring Jack Kevorkian is no different than honoring Ted Kaczynski, better known as the "Unabomber," and also a University of Michigan alum:

"Medicine at Michigan thinks Kevorkian’s reputation merits reappraisal because physician-assisted suicide 'has become more accepted,' but the Unabomber’s anti-technology and pro-political violence views have become more acceptable too. Should we now expect to see Kaczynski similarly hailed?"

Furthermore, the pair worried that by honoring Kevorkian, the University of Michigan Medical School would be tacitly coming out in favor of suicide, which they said would be a "grave moral error."

They concluded:

At its core, medicine has always been grounded in the principle of “do no harm,” which means one does not relieve suffering by eliminating the sufferer. Directly enabling the death of a patient under a doctor’s care is antithetical to any coherent understanding of medicine as a vocation that does no harm. It is distressing that Medicine at Michigan chose to highlight someone whose entire body of work militates against the core foundations of medicine as a healing profession.

The Bottom Line:

There is nothing to honor about a man who took the lives of over 130 ill, elderly, or disabled people. All lives have value and are worth living, but to "Medicine at Michigan," it seems that may no longer be the case.