Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[D]r. Oz is not coming to Vermont next week — but his voice is.
A campus organization at Northern Vermont University “will air a live talk” by Oz on Tuesday at the Stearns Cinema on the university’s Johnson campus (that’s what used to be Johnson State College), said a university press release.
Oz’s talk will be heard elsewhere, presumably at every one of the 644 campuses where there is a chapter of the National Society for Leadership and Success (NSLS), the sponsoring organization, which calls itself “the nation’s largest leadership honor society.”
The way it works, according to Sylvia Plumb, Northern Vermont’s director of marketing and communications, is that “as part of the (NSLS) membership requirements, the students who are members … must attend three live-speaker broadcasts hosted by the national organization.”
But admission is not confined to NSLS members. Plumb said the broadcasts are “available to the campus community.”
So the event will be sponsored by a university-certified club — one of only four “academic organizations and honor societies” on the Johnson campus — and it will take place at a campus theater. It has, then, the imprimatur of the University of Northern Vermont, an institution supposedly devoted to intellectual integrity and scientific rigor.
Dr. Oz, according to a host of physicians and other scientists, is not. In 2014, said a recent article in Forbes, “1,300 doctors signed an open letter calling him ‘a quack and a fake and a charlatan’ whose ‘advice endangers patients.’” According to an article in the New Yorker magazine on Feb. 4, 2013, (“The Operator” by Michael Specter) Oz “has been criticized by scientists for relying on flimsy or incomplete data, distorting the results, and wielding his vast influence in ways that threaten the health of anyone who watches” his highly-rated television program.
A complete list of Oz’s alleged scientific offenses might take volumes. A short list should suffice:
• Researchers at the British Medical Journal reported that of 479 medical recommendations Oz gave on his TV program, “evidence only supported 46 percent, … contradicted 15 percent and wasn’t available for 39 percent;”
• Oz promoted green coffee bean extract as a weight loss “miracle,” though no peer reviewed study has shown that the substance helps lose weight;
• On one program Oz called raspberry ketones “the number-one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat.” Lou Schuler, writing in Men’s Health in 2014, reported that tests show that the substance does help weight loss “in rodents … but only in extremely high doses (and) there is no research showing a benefit to humans.”
None of this means that Oz, by all accounts a skilled surgeon, should not make speeches. But it does raise questions about an educational institution’s commitment to intellectual honesty. Everyone has the right to speak. Access to a prestigious forum has to be earned, and perhaps universities should be finicky about who gets access to theirs.
Asked whether the university had any concerns about the Oz broadcast, Plumb said, “we trust in our students to listen critically to any speakers we bring to campus. … Part of the college experience is to learn how to listen critically to a variety of opinions and beliefs and to evaluate what they hear.”
In this case, there is also a question about just what the National Society for Leadership and Success is doing at Northern Vermont, where it has been recognized since 2016.
The NSLS calls itself an “honors society,” but it is not recognized as such by the Association of College Honor Societies. That may be because NSLS does not appear to be a nonprofit. At any rate, it is not listed in Guidestar, the information service that lists almost all nonprofits in the country.
David Dirks, NSLS’s director of marketing and communications, did not return a phone call seeking confirmation. But if NSLS is not a nonprofit, it must be a for-profit firm. Its chief source of revenue would seem to be the $85 fee charged to every student member, or at least such is the indication from a couple of complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau. It also sells T-shirts and sweatshirts.
The society claims more than 900,000 student members. Do the arithmetic and that’s about $80 million, though the annual revenue might be lower because students may have to pay the $85 fee just once in their college years.
At any rate, there seems to be enough revenue to pay the 54 people named as staff on the NSLS website, and probably speakers such as Dr. Oz. Other speakers scheduled in coming weeks are chef-author Carla Hall and psychology professor Adam Grant. TV stars Trevor Noah, Anderson Cooper and Al Roker have also spoken at NSLS events.
The university does not certify any other for-profit firm as a campus organization. There is nothing wrong with for-profit firms. Whether they should be recognized as “honor societies” by a state university is debatable.
But Plumb said the NSLS is a good fit for Northern Vermont.
“We are a small institution and at times, for-profit entities can help us offer a broader range of experiences to our students,” she said. ”Our affiliation with the NSLS allows us to give our students experiences we might not otherwise be able to give them.”
Plumb said she understood Oz was not going to talk about medicine; he was going to talk about leadership.
A subject much-discussed, much-studied, and much-taught, if ill-defined. In a Feb. 29, 2016, article in the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman recounted how Joseph Rost, a professor of leadership studies at the University of San Diego, found that writers on leadership had defined it in more than 200 ways, and concluded that the word “has come to mean all things to all people.”
So the final question here is whether too many people pay too much money to study leadership, which perhaps cannot be studied.
To its credit, Northern Vermont University offers no courses in it.