Penn State Student Affairs: The 'Worrisome' Veteran

[darrels joy]

Penn State University's Office of Student Affairs, in partnership with President Graham Spanier, produced this vignette on "worrisome student behaviors" featuring a stereotypical "aggressive" veteran who threatens his professors.

Faculty and administrators again prove they care more about poisonous "progressivism" than intellectual pluralism.

This video was originally online @ http://studentaffairs.psu.edu/caps/ws...

Penn State removed the video from the website on Fri., Feb. 27, but left the others online -- all but declaring their awareness of its inappropriateness.

YouTube - Penn State Student Affairs: The...

[revwardoc]

Wow! I thought that the violent, drug-crazed veteran image ended with the the Vietnam War. Apparently I'm wrong. Way to go PSU, just keep perpetuating those stereotypes. And if you ever have any sort of protest-gone-bad on your campus, call out the football team, not the National Guard.

[Keith_Hixson]

Liberalism at its best.

Keith

[1CAVCCO15MED]

Where was it? Oh yeah: http://roadkillrefugee.wordpress.com...-fit-to-serve/

[1CAVCCO15MED]

But the Republicans would never do such a thing: The Arizona Republic would write that the McCain–Bush primary contest in South Carolina "has entered national political lore as a low-water mark in presidential campaigns", while The New York Times called it "a painful symbol of the brutality of American politics".[125][135][136] A variety of interest groups that McCain had challenged in the past ran negative ads.[125][137] Bush borrowed McCain's earlier language of reform,[138] and declined to dissociate himself from a veterans activist who accused McCain (in Bush's presence) of having "abandoned the veterans" on POW/MIA and Agent Orange issues.[125][139]


John McCain's Gallup Poll favorable/unfavorable ratings, 1999–2008[140]Incensed,[139] McCain ran ads accusing Bush of lying and comparing the governor to Bill Clinton, which Bush said was "about as low a blow as you can give in a Republican primary".[125] An anonymous smear campaign began against McCain, delivered by push polls, faxes, e-mails, flyers, and audience plants.[125][141] The smears claimed that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains' dark-skinned daughter was adopted from Bangladesh), that his wife Cindy was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was a "Manchurian Candidate" who was either a traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam captivity.

[darrels joy]

The Veteran, the Slave Trader and the Propagandist
A few follow-ups to items from last week:

On Friday we noted the story of "The Veteran," a fictitious character in a Penn State University training video that the university pulled from its Web site in response to objections about invidious stereotyping. It turns out that a

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user has preserved not only the dramatization of The Veteran's confrontation with an instructor but also the commentary on it by a panel of three Penn State counseling staffers.

The commentary begins just over five minutes into the video, and one of the three panelists--the guy in the middle, with hair, identified on the PSU Web site as Dennis Heitzmann, a licensed psychologist and director of the university's counseling office--makes a couple of comments that betray his own anti-veteran bias. At 6:46, he says:

It's not always taken well, a suggestion that somebody needs help or counseling, particularly in a situation like the one we just observed. The timing of a suggestion that counseling might be needed is--it's critical, and I think we all need to be aware that certain circumstances do not lend themselves to that attempt to refer. And this would be one of them. If at some point in subsequent discussion, the individual begins to acknowledge some concerns he has about readjusting to collegiate life after, uh, being in a war zone, you know, at that point, when the self-disclosure occurs, it's a much better opportunity to suggest a counseling referral once that personalized disclosure has occurred. So I would have delayed that commentary and that recommendation to some subsequent point.

Heitzmann assumes that The Veteran is having trouble "readjusting to collegiate life after, uh, being in a war zone," a claim that the video never makes explicitly--thereby showing that the video's bias against veterans is his own.