Dioxin Dorms Blog :: SUNY New Paltz

TODAY (Saturday, Aug. 18) the biggest local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record, published another article about my efforts to warn students and parents about contamination in the SUNY dorms, Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scuddeer halls. Here is the article.

Jeremiah Horrigan, the writer, said during the interview that he would not have enough space to actually get into the issues, but wanted to get the fact that I had organized people to warn students and their families into the newspaper. He also advised me that the college would “denounce” me, following the usual protocol.

“Every year, the college issues statements similar to a recent one by spokesman Eric Gullickson, who pointed out the college has the state and county health departments in their corner,” Horrigan wrote in today’s editions.

“In addition to his ‘fear-mongering tactics’, Coppolino ‘has a history of misrepresenting the facts regarding the PCB contamination and cleanup on campus’, Gullickson said.”

I thought that quote was so priceless, I had already used it in one of my own articles — called Where’s Your Data, which is in the current edition of Chronogram, the local arts magazine I have written for since ’96. It was the college’s only response to the missing data that is the theme of my current work (see recent blog below, on a related topic).

Mr. Gullickson’s quote would be funny, were it not so sad. But it demonstrates one thing at least, you really need an iron stomach to do this work, or you have to laugh and move onto more serious business than the nonsense you hear from a small-town college spokesman.

I know personally many of the administrators who consider me their adversary, and psychologically they have three things working against them — which is why they let Mr. Gullickson do their bidding.

One, they know I’m sincere; two, they know my editors hold me to a high standard, and that I have never needed to publish a correction of fact on this story; and three, they are in a lot of conflict about their decision to not only contaminate students, but to deceive them and their parents as a way of life. I mean, would you be?

In the “old paradigm” — that is, the world as we knew it yesterday — they have no choice, because they bear what is called liability. In this old paradigm, you don’t tell the truth when you made a mistake or did what your boss ordered you to do — you just keep lying for as long as you can get away with it.

For those interested, the Times Herald-Record once published an op-ed piece that I wrote on the Capen and Gage vents. I went back and forth with the newspaper’s editorial page editor, Robert Gaydos, until he was satisfied that I had established the factual basis of every claim that I made. Here is that article, from 1993.

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