In an email to faculty and staff on Oct. 15, DePaul President Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, C.M. said he does not “share the position of some that Dr. Gerald Koocher, dean of the College of Science and Health, should be sanctioned by DePaul University for his work with the (American Psychological Association).”
While effectively and unfortunately shutting the door on possible action being taken at the university level, it seems like a fitting end for a university that bungled this matter from the beginning.
For those who have not been following the matter closely, the controversy began in July with the release of the 543-page Hoffman Report, a damning indictment of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) failures during the Bush Administration.
In essence, the report found that the APA colluded with the government to create loose ethical guidelines for psychologists in national security situations, which contributed to torture taking place in places like Guantanamo Bay. In addition, the organization took a stance of deliberately avoiding probing into suspected torture cases involving psychologists.
During the period in question (2005 to 2007), Koocher was an APA board member, serving as president-elect and then president of the organization. He was appointed to serve as a board liaison to the task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS), the committee charged with creating ethical guidelines.
Despite only being a board liaison, Koocher took an active role in the discussion on both the first day of the task force’s sessions as well as on the group’s email listserv. According to the report, Koocher aggressively dismissed and belittled those whose opinions disagreed with his own, effectively acting as an enforcer over which ideas were discussed.
In addition, Koocher played an active role as APA president in refusing to investigate allegations of psychologists playing a role in torture. While the report acknowledged that the classified nature of such actions would have made it difficult, they noted that Koocher and APA officials did not even try to inquire in spite of news reports and rumors swirling around.
Certainly, as Holtschneider writes in his letter, most of the blame lies on an APA staff that in many cases left the board, including Koocher, in the dark.
“Unfortunately, senior staff employed at the APA concealed important information from the task force and the trustees, including conflicts of interest, delayed ethics investigations, and collusion of the senior staff with the military and intelligence agency personnel in charge of interrogation programs,” Holtschneider said.
And of course, this all happened a decade ago.
However, the university’s slow response to the serious nature of the allegations made in the report indicates an administration that is tone deaf to the concerns that have been raised by faculty, staff, students, alumni, and other members of the DePaul community.
In response to the first media inquiries on Koocher following the report’s release, a university spokeswoman said, “While DePaul has no firsthand knowledge of the matter, Dr. Koocher’s published statements are thoughtful and worth reading in their entirety.”
While hoping this would be an adequate response to the matter, it did not sit well with many in the academic community both within and outside DePaul.
“The record is ample in the Hoffman Report. And for the school to say we don’t have firsthand information is an intellectually irresponsible position,” said Steven Miles, the chair of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. “The information is available; the question is whether the school is going to avail itself to look at the information,” which “was obtained by a skilled prosecutor and … compulsively compiled and compulsively footnoted.”
And in a follow up story, The DePaulia confirmed that the university search committee that vetted Koocher before his hiring in 2013 had in its possession a document outlining many of the assertions later confirmed in the Hoffman Report. So, the university may not have been in the room with Koocher when the events described in the report played out, but they certainly knew of the controversy before he was hired.
The next public comments from the university on the situation would come from Provost Marten denBoer, who defended Koocher and repeated the defense Koocher himself presented in an interview with The DePaulia.
“I do think that people should be very careful to look at what was known and what was not known at the time,” denBoer said. “It’s very easy to in hindsight to look back and say, ‘well, this should have happened and that should have happened.’ The dean himself says that had he known then what he knows now, he would have done things differently.”
[box]Timeline: Controversy surrounding Dean Gerald Koocher and DePaul[/box]
A week and a half later, Vice President for Public Relations and Communications Cynthia Lawson towed the party line when asked about the controversy at a Student Government Association meeting, comparing the situation to a game of football or basketball.
“Hindsight is always great. How many of you watch football? How many of you watch basketball? Do you ever, after you watch it, the reruns, say, ‘They should have. They could have, had they done this,’” Lawson said. “But you make the decisions based on the information that you have at the time. And so if you don’t have the information, you make decisions based upon the information that you’ve got. Have you ever made a decision where you found out later, if you had additional information, you might have decided to do something different? And I think that’s what Dean Koocher would tell you.”
Yet the controversy would not go away. The serious concerns expressed during a closed-door session of Faculty Council in September led to Koocher hosting a faculty-only town hall meeting to answer further questions. Hosted by Koocher, questions were submitted in advance, which led to the environment being tightly controlled.
Due to that, a second faculty and staff-only town hall with the provost was held last week. And, of course, a coalition of students, faculty, alumni and human rights groups calling themselves Vincentians Against Torture formed a few weeks ago calling for Koocher’s ouster.
No matter one’s views on what Koocher did or did not do, this situation has become a public relations nightmare for the university — one of its own making. While the administration stood by their guy, many faculty, students, alumni and psychology professionals have called for his ouster.
“Regardless of what happened, it’s a public relations nightmare,” said Noam Ostrander, chair of the department of social work in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS). “And when I talk to my colleagues in CSH, they’re nervous, they’re afraid, I don’t think they feel like they have the liberty to have much of a voice.”
“Faculty feel uncomfortable working with him, saying no to him and disagreeing with him,” said a professor in CSH who spoke to The DePaulia last month on the condition of anonymity. “It’s a really bad environment.”
While the university started to change its tune by eliciting faculty concerns, it did not engage the student body in any meaningful way, it took far too long to acknowledge the discontent among large segments of the population and its unquestioning defense of Koocher’s account of events show an administration not prepared or willing to address the serious allegations of the Hoffman Report.
And while it is clear that Holtschneider put a lot of thought into his remarks, some of the conclusions he came to and some of the issues left out in his argument are troubling. For instance, Holtschneider said he cannot “find a path to honor the requests that DePaul assemble a body to conduct its own independent hearing and investigation of the matter.”
This is rationalized as the university does “not have the authority to call witnesses or command evidence outside the university community, and therefore would be forced to rely on information we already have.”
Certainly, there would be limitations. But ironically enough, this is the same argument Koocher used to justify deliberately avoiding looking into cases of psychologists accused of assisting torturers at Guantanamo Bay. Much like Koocher in his role at APA, the university is effectively looking the other way when faced with serious ethical questions of one of its own.
And not even mentioned in any of the university’s responses is the issue of third-party benefice, “articulated by psychologists ranging from Jim Mitchell to Koocher, which posited that harm to one individual (a detainee) must be weighed against the benefits to third parties (the public) that would result if, for instance, information from the detainee stopped a terrorist attack.”
While perhaps an acceptable position for the government, it is morally reprehensible for an organization based in humanistic values to hold such a view.
The point in discussing these matters, despite the length in time that has passed, is that the allegations made in the Hoffman Report against Koocher are serious and warrant further investigation.
As PENS task force member Jean Maria Arrigo, the target of Koocher’s aggressive exchanges after her dissent, put it, the issue for DePaul is “how a person in an institutional position who has used those institutional positions covertly in ways that do not serve that institution and its members.”
Koocher’s alleged conduct as described in the Hoffman Report does not reflect a person with the values or judgment necessary for someone in a powerful leadership role.
“The president left out (in his letter) that Dr. Koocher actively and viciously silenced dissenting voices,” O’Brien said. “He spoke about how upper level members of the APA did that. That was Dr. Koocher. He cannot use his name. But that was Dr. Koocher’s role.”
Of course, Koocher deserves the chance to defend himself, but it cannot be and should not be on his terms as it has been for the past few months.
At last week’s town hall meeting with the provost, several faculty members proposed the creation of an “independent body by the Provost, Faculty and Staff Council, and the Student Government Association to assess whether Koocher’s various roles in the APA are consistent with DePaul’s mission and values and the stated goal of the new College of Science and Health to educate students with a strong Vincentian commitment to social justice and civic engagement.”
According to the proposal, “absent a serious inquiry conducted by an independent body representing all university stakeholders, DePaul risks being widely perceived as engaging in a ‘cover-up’ of a national scandal involving a DePaul official accused of serious ethical breaches that appear to be at odds with the university’s stated mission and CSH educational goal.”
Holtschneider’s concerns regarding an investigation are understood. However, dropping the issue completely is not a solution, it is a cop out. There are legitimate questions that must be answered and that pertain to DePaul. By opening an investigation, we may get some answers and hopefully some closure.