The Record
Volume 118 Issue 7
record.horacemann.org
Horace Mann’s Weekly Newspaper Since 1903
October 23rd, 2020
ALUMNI COUNCIL WILL NOT REVOKE BARR’S AWARD
COUNCIL RELEASES REPORT Hanna Hornfeld and Emma Colacino Staff Writers After months of deliberation, the Alumni Council announced this morning that it will not revoke Attorney General William Barr ‘67’s Alumni Association’s Award for Distinguished Achievement. The Council voted on October 13 to release a detailed Report with its final decision and reasoning to the public. They concluded that the facts surrounding Barr’s involvement in the removal of protesters at Lafayette Square were not clear enough to warrant a revocation. The Council focused solely on the events of Lafayette Square because those were the events noted in the petition as the reason for the request to reevaluate the award, Co-Chair of Subcommittee Alexandra Levin ‘00 said. The Report was written by 13 members of the Council’s voting body who volunteered in June to join a special Subcommittee to review the issue and write a recommendation to the Council. Head of Alumni Council Samantha Brand ‘01, Co-Chair of the Subcommittee Joseph Pinion ‘01, and Levin declined to reveal the final vote. The members of the Committee remained anonymous for privacy and so that they had space to form opinions without distraction, Levin said. However, they all belong to the Council, whose members are listed on its website. The Council is an independent body from the school. The administration was not involved in the decision of the council or in the creation of the report. Members of the community have criticized the Committee for the amount of time it has taken to reach a final decision. “They have been conspicuously slow walking our petition since its inception,” Kiara Royer ‘20 and Jessica Rosberger ‘20 wrote in an open letter on September 9. “Their inaction has made us question the authenticity and even the purpose of the Alumni Council.” The process took a long time because the Committee took the charge seriously and did not want to make an uninformed decision, Pinion said. The Committee considered waiting until after the Presidential Election to release its decision, but ultimately decided it would be best to share the report as soon as it was finalized, Pinion said. “To wait would be playing politics with a process that we strove so hard and fervently to avoid politics in, in the first place,” Pinion said. In their open letter, Royer and Rosberger also wrote that the Council was not as transparent about its process as it should have been. Levin understands the desire for frequent updates on a matter that so many people feel strongly about, but completing the work took a significant amount of time and there often were no real updates to share as the work was in progress, she said. The Committee issued public statements when there was something material to share, she said. To be as fair as possible, the Committee had to come up with a reevaluation process that could be replicated in the future. “You can’t have one set of standards for one honoree but not for everybody else,” Levin said. Their reevaluation process involved the consideration of community feedback, precedent for award revocation at other institutions, the facts of the event at Lafayette Square, and award criteria, according to the Report. The Committee met once a week nearly every week during the summer. To ensure
they were hearing as many voices as possible, the Committee reviewed comments on the petition, social media comments, and emails and phone calls to the school Alumni Office and to the Committee, according to the Report. “We felt we owed it to the community to address the issues the petition raised,” Brand said. “We wanted to examine in a deliberate process the community feedback.” In July, the Committee met with Royer and Rosberger. “We wanted to understand the true motivations behind them forming the petition, what their thoughts were, and what they were interested in,” Pinion said. The Committee cross-checked signatures with names of current and former students, parents, and faculty members to ensure that they were receiving and responding to comments and feedback that were from members of the community, Levin said. This step was necessary because although other signatories may feel strongly about the administration, they do not necessarily represent the school community, she said. The Committee received passionate correspondence from people on either side of the debate in the form of emails and social media posts, which the Council reviewed, Levin said. When considering the possible revocation of Barr’s award, the Committee had to debate whether or not the Council should revoke an award in the first place, as the issue of revocation has never come up in the award’s history, Pinion said. “We had to go through whether it was in the best interest of the community to even be in the business of revoking awards or not.” The Committee concluded that in order to revoke the award, they would need to be certain of all of the facts of the situation, to have taken into consideration the views of all community members, and to have used a deliberate, just, and replicable process, according to the Report. “We evaluated everything that we could get our hands on, regarding what actually happened and why, and we came to the best conclusion given the facts that we had at our disposal,” Levin said. After conducting its research, the Committee decided that it did not have enough indisputable evidence to determine Barr’s exact involvement in the incident, according to the Report. “[Barr’s] accounts are somewhat at odds with what people might feel like his motivations were or what he actually did — all of that is still very unclear.” During their deliberation process, the Committee realized that many members of the community felt that Award recipients should uphold the school’s Core Values. A major argument in support of revocation was that Barr’s actions had transgressed political actions to a point where he had overstepped a moral boundary that conflicted with the values of the school, Pinion said. The Committee chose to look at Barr’s situation based on the criteria for which he received the award: objective distinguished achievement. “While, historically, many have referred to the Award casually as the ‘Distinguished Alumnus/a Award,’ the focus of the deliberation has always been on achievement recorded at the time of nomination,” they wrote in the Report. Moving forward, the Council will deliberately think about whether an award nominee’s actions line up with the Core Values and will work harder to reach out to alumni in order to get more people involved in the process of nominating potential honorees, Brand said. “The school is constantly evolving and the award should do the same,” she said.
Courtesy of HM Flikr
THE HONOREE Barr at the 2011 award ceremony.
OPINION: REPORT FAILS THE SCHOOL
text here Julia Goldberg, Talia Winiarsky, and Adam Frommer Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor, and Issues Editor This week, The Record previewed the eight-page report explaining the Special Committee of the Alumni Council’s decision not to recommend revoking Attorney General William Barr’s 2011 Award for Distinguished Achievement. We analyze the full report later in this issue, but these are our overarching critiques.
The report’s scope is embarrassingly narrow.
The Special Committee wrongly assumes the opposition to Barr emerged solely from the incident at Lafayette Square. While the petition addresses only that incident, it is clear that signatories see Lafayette Square as one of Barr’s numerous abuses of power. Barr has been criticized by an array of authorities — from former Attorney General Eric Holder to over 80% of the faculty of George Washington University Law School, Barr’s alma mater — for undermining the legislative and judicial branches, for politicizing the Justice Department through his unrelenting loyalty to the president, and for attacking those with whom he disagrees. Last week, Phillip Halpern, a 36year veteran of the Justice Department, resigned in protest and publicly rebuked Barr, writing that he “undermined the rule of law, damaged public confidence that the law applies equally and fairly to all persons, and demonstrated contempt for basic constitutional rights.” In short, Barr failed to fulfill his oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The committee does not recognize these perspectives, but instead focuses on one troubling event in a 20-month tenure filled with misconduct.
The report is directly at odds with the school’s core values.
Horace Mann, according to our Mission Statement, values mutual respect and prepares its students to lead “giving lives.” While Barr may be distinguished by nature of his career, under his current position as Attorney General he has behaved in ways antithetical to his office and our core values. Since his appointment by President Trump in February 2019, Barr has placed politics above justice, interfered with the work of impartial career prosecutors, hampered Congressional oversight, and undermined the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The committee, however, did not consider our values as an institution in their criteria for revocation. As a result, they created a report incompatible with the mission of the school.
The report undermines the community’s voices.
In Issue 2, we published an article detailing the potential to revoke the award, including Barr’s character at Horace Mann and beyond, the implications of removing an award, and the varied opinions of students and alumni. Our reporters actively sought to speak to students, parents, and alumni with a wide range of perspectives, and we shared our findings with the community. The Special Committee did not hold themselves to the same standard. They claimed to review phone calls, emails, and comments on the petition and social media websites. By their own count, 1,751 alumni voiced discontent with the award — a number that should greatly alarm the members. This is especially concerning because the Alumni Council is supposed to be engaged with the larger alumni community. Because the committee created this report without properly giving voice to alumni and students alike, we felt unheeded and disrespected by their decision.
The report is an exercise in cowardace.
The type of narrow framework the committee has used — a legal-style analysis of cherry-picked evidence — is exactly what students are taught not to do in their humanities courses. The report forces a specific thesis without providing a larger context. The anonymity of the report’s authors reinforces our impression that the committee’s members knew this decision was flawed and felt uncomfortable taking responsibility for it. Even more alarming, the representatives of the council declined to say how many members of the committee supported the report.
The award should have been revoked.
Because the committee refused to acknowledge other evidence or perspectives, we can only speculate that they purposefully came to this conclusion because they were worried about potential repercussions of revoking the award. Might a handful of conservative donors be offended? Would the Alumni Council be accused of promoting cancel culture? Maybe. It is impossible to know — but we believe that the committee has chosen to stay out of headlines as opposed to making the morally correct decision.
SEE PAGES 4 AND 5 FOR OUR ANALYSIS.