Au Contraire: Unity or Unanimity?

James R. Delisle

It didn’t take long for the letters to start arriving. Indeed, some might call the correspondence “hate mail.”

Seemingly minutes after my last Au Contraire column, “The Javits Debacle,” appeared in print, concerns were expressed by readers that my proposal to eliminate Javits funding from the federal budget was way off the mark. One of my colleagues, a professor of gifted child education in Indiana, called me “self-serving, myopic, and dangerous,” and suggested to the editor that my column be banished from future pages of Gifted Child Today. Another respondent sent an anonymous note to my wife, a school superintendent, that was attached to a copy of my Javits article. The note’s message: “Aren’t you embarrassed to be married to this man?” Yet another writer contacted the GCT publication office asking whether the editor had, in fact, read the manuscript before it went to print, amazed that such a critical piece would survive the editor’s scrutiny.

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