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
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.