Letters

From the July 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Mark Villa
Phoenix, AZ
[e-mail]

Thought Reform

Alan Charles Kors' article, "Thought Reform 101," (March) is irresponsible scholarship in its reporting and commentary. Professor Kors radically distorts the presentation delivered by Hinda Adele Barlaz and Denise C. Bynes of Adelphi University at the Fourth Annual National Conference on People of Color in Predominantly White Institutions.

Professor Kors was not in the audience for our presentation. For his article on college orientation programs, he relied solely on Thor Halvorssen "for the materials and interviews from the Nebraska conference." It should be noted that Mr. Halvorssen did not interview either one of us. In addition, Mr. Halvorssen was not in the audience when the presentation began. In fact, he did not enter the room until we were approximately halfway into our presentation, at which point he appeared to have begun taping our comments.

Professor Kors' focus was on college orientation programs, a topic that we did not address in our presentation. Our only comments on college orientation programs came in response to a question by Mr. Halvorssen. In order to make our statements fit his own derisive agenda, Professor Kors misrepresented the primary focus of our presentation.

In fact, the title of our presentation was "The Phantom Menace or Why College Campus Racism and Intolerance Will Outlive Us All." Concerned about the prevalence of racist and intolerant behavior on college campuses, we wanted to share what we had learned as co-chairs of Adelphi University's Prejudice Reduction Committee. The main theme of our presentation was campus-wide diversity programs, not college orientation programs. The committee's work was a proactive attempt to solve immediate problems on our campus, not to indoctrinate anyone.

Erroneously, Professor Kors states that the Prejudice Reduction Committee is still in existence at Adelphi University, when throughout our presentation we emphasized that the committee no longer existed and that we were working on a proposal to resurrect a modified version of this committee in the foreseeable future.

Professor Kors' errors also include a long and wholly inaccurate discussion of the document, Conflict Resolution Styles Questionnaire, that we used in our campus facilitators training program at Adelphi--and not, as he reports, as a document for students. All of the ethnic characterizations that Professor Kors attributes to this "handout" are from another document we distributed in our session.

Professor Kors is inaccurate when he writes that the "training" by the U.S. Department of Justice's Community Relations Service was "so effective" that "it was very hard to get any of the other white members of the committee to go for the training." On the contrary, Ms. Barlaz stated that it was the training provided by the National Conference on Christians and Jews that had alienated some of the white members of the committee.

These major reportorial errors are compounded by a host of smaller ones: comments yanked from their original context and then applied to new and unintended ones; attribution of some remarks to Ms. Bynes that were in fact made by Ms. Barlaz; incorrect assumptions about the purposes and uses of the documents we distributed at the conference; and many more.

"Thought Reform 101" is an irresponsibly written and deeply dishonest article. We hope that REASON will reconsider using Professor Kors again.

Hinda Adele Barlaz
Denise C. Bynes
Garden City, NY
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

Alan Charles Kors replies: Perhaps embarrassment at Adelphi University has led Ms. Bynes and Ms. Barlaz to claim locally that they had not been indiscreet and had not said what in fact they said. Perhaps having made such claims, they were strongly encouraged by their superiors to write to REASON. That is the only explanation I can imagine for assertions categorically belied by the evidence literally in my hands.

They claim that Mr. Halvorssen, whose role I openly acknowledged, taped only half of their speech. The tape itself (and its professional transcription) says otherwise; at most, he missed taping a moment or two of their self-introductions. They claim that Mr. Halvorssen did not interview them; I am listening to that open interview as I write, and I have its professional transcription before me. They claim that Mr. Halvorssen's question during Q&A was tangential to their concerns; I am listening to their explicit statement to the audience about the great importance and pertinence of Mr. Halvorssen's question, which they then chose to answer at very great length, relating it precisely to the main themes of their talk. Ms. Bynes and Ms. Barlaz may attempt to remake human reality during their diversity training, but they simply cannot remake physical evidence.

Similarly, I possess the handouts that they chose to share with the attendees. I appreciate the clarification that they make about the provenance of any of those documents. (The only source listed on them by Ms. Bynes and Ms. Barlaz is the Department of Justice, and that sheet was part of and stapled together with the materials concerning racial and ethnic characteristics.) I am relieved to learn that the very worst racial profiling in these documents came from the National Council of Christians and Jews, not from the diversity training mavens at the DOJ.

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