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6

August 5 2010

IN

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Helen Thomas & WSU
I read with interest the letter
by Betsy Kellman of the Anti-
Defamation League-Michigan
Region ("Helen Thomas' Diversity:'
July 22, page 6) about Wayne State
University's response to the remarks
of its alumna, Helen Thomas. While
I fully support ADL's mission, I ques-
tion her letter in several important
respects.
First, contrary to Ms. Kellman's
claim that WSU missed an oppor-
tunity to, in her words, "make a
bold statement and praise Ms.
Thomas as a fine journalist and
someone who broke barriers for
women, but who made an egregious
mistake," that is precisely what the
university did.
On June 9, just days after Ms.
Thomas' remarks about Israel and
the Jews were made public, WSU
issued a formal statement that
included the following:
"Wayne State seeks to preserve
the integrity of this important
award while making it clear that
the university strongly condemns
the wholly inappropriate comments
recently expressed by Thomas.
However, Wayne State also believes
that this serious lapse of judgment,
for which she has apologized, should
not diminish her many years of
exemplary service to her profession
and the pioneering spirit she dem-
onstrated in closing the gender gap
in journalism?'
Secondly, WSU's response was not
motivated by "political expediency."
It was clearly an expression of the
university's unqualified condem-
nation of Thomas' remarks, made
at age 90, about Israel, while also
recognizing her professional accom-
plishments over the course of an
otherwise distinguished seven-
decade career in journalism.
Ms. Kellman is quite right in
her criticism of the editorial writ-
ten by Osama Siblani, in the Arab
American News, where he claimed
that the Jews in Israel have no ties
to their historical homeland. But
WSU played no role in his making
that statement, which any student
of history knows is utterly false. As
Ms. Kellman correctly notes, Mr.
Siblani's editorial appeared several
months after he and two other local
media people were recognized by
the university's Department of
Communication/Journalism Area for

promoting diverse voices in media.
But that recognition was made by
a single department in a university
that offers more than 400 academic
programs and surely could not be
construed as an overall univer-
sity endorsement of whatever this
reporter might thereafter say on any
subject.
Wayne State's ties to the Jewish
community are deep and of long
standing. More members of Metro-
politan Detroit's Jewish community
are graduates of WSU than any other
university — a fact that we at Wayne
State proudly proclaim. The uni-
versity recently opened the Marvin
I. Danto Engineering Development
Center, which joins a long list of
campus buildings bearing the names
of Jewish benefactors, another badge
of pride.
Our Cohn-Haddow Center for
Judaic Studies brings national and
international attention to our strong
programs in Jewish studies as does
the Wayne State University Press,
which for decades has published
many titles on Jewish topics.
And within the past year, the uni-
versity dispatched a high-level mis-
sion of deans and senior administra-
tors to Israel, where they had intense
and productive meetings with
many Israeli universities, which are
likely to produce important ongo-
ing relationships in many different
scientific, health, environmental and
other disciplines.
As a result of this initial series of
meetings, several representatives of
Israeli high-tech companies have
already visited TechTown, WSU's
Midtown research and technology
park, to establish important com-
mercial and academic links. Another
such mission for later this year is in
the planning stages. It is obvious that
Wayne State greatly values its strong
connections to the Jewish commu-
nity and to the State of Israel.
WSU abhors Helen Thomas' corn-
ments and has stated so publicly. Mr.
Siblani's remarks are demonstrably
false. They may prove an embar-
rassment to him and the newspa-
per he publishes, but surely not to
WSU, which played no role in those
remarks and has never endorsed
them in any way.

Eugene Driker, member

Board of Governors

Wayne State University

Detroit