A graduate of the Yale University School of Medicine publicly vowed on Monday to cut off future donations to the school based on disputed reports that it plans to train U.S. military personnel on new interrogation techniques using local immigrants as research subjects.
Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, called the Yale school’s reported plans “blatantly unethical” in a letter written to the school’s dean, Robert J. Alpern, and shared with news outlets.
“The research exploits the vulnerability of a disadvantaged population, using them as pawns in an effort to achieve military—but not any medical or health—objectives,” Dr. Siegel, a 1990 Yale Medical School alumnus, wrote.
Charles A. Morgan, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale, hopes to direct the proposed program at the center of the controversy, a new Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience at the medical school. He said Dr. Siegel and others who have criticized his work are misrepresenting what he and his colleagues hope to accomplish.
He said the proposed center, which is still awaiting U.S. Department of Defense funds, would not train interrogators. “We will hopefully train soldiers who are used to being at war in the more gentle art of sitting down and talking to people in a manner that is positive, nonintimidating, and useful at building positive rapport,” Dr. Morgan wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle on Monday.
While the techniques he has developed can help detect differences between truthful and deceptive eyewitness accounts, “they were developed to help psychologists acquire memories from people without creating false memory or contaminating memories,” he wrote.
Dr. Morgan said that immigrants who have been paid to participate in his previous research projects have appreciated being part of projects that reduce stigma and bias. He added that interviewers benefit from conversing with people from cultures other than their own.
Two Yale students disagreed in a guest column published last week in the Yale Daily News. “It might be countered that Yale already collaborates with the military through ROTC,” Nathalie Batraville, a graduate student in French, and Alex Lew, a sophomore, wrote.
But while ROTC “encourages students to use their broad academic experience and critical-thinking skills in a military setting, engaging the military in conversation with the liberal arts,” they wrote, the new center “simply allocates Yale’s resources to do something the military can do on its own: teach soldiers to interrogate.”
Students are circulating a petition on Twitter to protest the plan.
Dr. Morgan said the course the center plans to offer is the same as what he and his colleagues would teach medical students, psychiatry residents, journalists, “or anyone else who wanted to learn how to plan and do interviews with people to understand them.”
