Pollack Whistleblower Told to ‘Shut Up’ at Government Conference

Pollack Whistleblower Told to ‘Shut Up’ at Government Conference

By Paul Moreno
January 2002

The woman who first exposed the faulty research of Dr. William Pollack was heckled, told to “shut the f—- up, bitch” and then forced to leave a conference at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Jay Wade, a professor of psychology at Fordham University, admits that he said those words to Dr. Christina Hoff-Sommers, author of The War Against Boys. He agrees that it was “unprofessional.”

Sommers was critiquing a program called “Girl Power,” which claims that when girls are taught to behave like men, they are less likely to smoke, take drugs or get pregnant. When she simply asked for empirical evidence for the program, she was driven from the conference, which was sponsored by the Center for Substance Abuse and Prevention.

Dr. Sommers says there is no good evidence that programs directed only to girls are any more effective than those that are not gender specific. “It was my intention to suggest that the HHS officials first do some careful studies of ‘Girl Power’ before replicating it for boys. But before I could explain these concerns, I was cut off” by the panel chairwoman, who then cancelled the question-and-answer session.

Sommers refused to accept the chairwoman’s invitation to leave, and the audience heckled her until she did so.

The abusive treatment set off a firestorm of controversy. Charles Curie, the head of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, told National Review Online editor Stanley Kurtz and the Washington Times that he was “appalled to learn about the disrespectful manner” of the conference. “No one should ever be censored or silenced as was Dr. Christina Hoff-Sommers,” he wrote, and he personally apologized to her.

Kurtz gives Curie credit for apologizing, but he argues that the incident exposed the “profound intellectual and ideological rot at the agency.”

“Here,” he said, “in the guise of preventing drug addiction, a government agency is doling out literally hundreds of millions of dollars, simply to purvey the highly contested and questionable cultural ideologies of Afrocentrism and androgyny.”

The National Association of Scholars also condemned the conference, and called on Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson to investigate it.