Re: 4/13/00 - Jovin's open letter falsely condemns Van de Velde
Jovin's open letter falsely condemns Van de Velde
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Published 4/13/00
To the Editor:
I knew and respected Suzanne Jovin as an intelligent and articulate classmate and, like so many others in the Yale community, was greatly saddened by her untimely death in December of 1998. I deeply sympathize with her parents and can only imagine the pain and frustration they continue to feel in connection with this whole dreadful business. However, I feel compelled to take issue with what they describe (in "An Open Letter," YDN 3/30/00) as "bizarre, unethical and unprofessional teaching practices in the political science course PLSC 182a, during the fall term of 1998." Having been a member of said class, I offer my personal observation that the teaching practices of its instructor, Dr. James Van de Velde, were "bizarre" only insofar as being engaging, insightful and thought-provoking. I have rarely seen a professor put so much time and extra effort into the preparation and teaching of an undergraduate course. As to "unprofessional" and "unethical," spending five minutes with Dr. Van de Velde would lay to rest any questions about his professionalism, and, after a term in his class, I can state without reservation that I have never encountered anyone with a stronger sense of personal or public ethics.
Do we have a concrete example of this alleged "unprofessionalism?" "The lecturer teaching this course pledged the students to secrecy in a clandestine project devoted to collecting information about the design and deployment of weapons of mass destruction." This is true. It's one of the oldest and most respected practices in strategic simulation, called "red-teaming" -- playing the enemy's side to figure out how he operates. If Dr. Van de Velde is a sinister figure for proposing this, so is the RAND Corporation and the Naval War College. The very focus of the class was on understanding emerging threats to national security and finding ways to combat them. Perhaps those of us in the field should take basket-weaving classes instead, because learning how real terrorists might operate is just too scary to be known to us university students, who might be making policy one day. Let's not have serious intellectual inquiry into anything remotely controversial or touchy, eh? People might talk.
Dr. Van de Velde's real crime, I think, was in standing out, in daring to do more than what he had to to pull a paycheck, in being dynamic, original and occasionally -- refreshingly -- unorthodox. People who differ from the norm in any conspicuous way at all are always easy targets, the first to have fingers pointed at them when expediency demands a scapegoat. Consequently, a fine teacher's career and reputation have been perhaps irreparably damaged via unsubstantiated allegations and rumors, without there being a shred of genuine evidence revealed to the public to implicate him in Suzanne's murder. I don't fear a single killer at large anywhere near as much as I fear for the future of a country whose fundamental principles have apparently so eroded that someone may be found functionally guilty -- if not in a court of law, then in the ultimately higher jurisdictions of public opinion, work and life -- until proving his own innocence.
G. J. Marsh '00
April 3, 2000
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