A long history of derision and embarrassment for Syracuse University’s support of FC
Periodically, Syracuse University’s student newspaper, The Daily Orange, calls out SU for its continued use of Facilitated Communication (FC). These admonitions appear to fall on deaf ears, as SU’s administration implicitly endorses FC by remaining silent on the subject and the Center on Disability and Inclusion (under the auspices of “Inclusion and Communication Initiatives” or ICI, formerly known as the Institute for Community Inclusion and, before that the Facilitated Communication Institute, or FCI) remains fiercely loyal to its legacy of bringing the discredited and harmful technique from Australia to the United States in 1990 and appears unabashedly proud to promote a technique that was discredited by the mid-1990s.
Syracuse University Aerial View (Photographer John Marino, CC by 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Even if in the unlikely event FC founder Douglas Biklen was not aware that a state government Intellectual Disability Review Panel in Australia had thoroughly studied FC and debunked it in the eight years before he “discovered” it and brought it to the U.S. (see Prior and Cummins, 1992 and The Unusual and Excessive Hype of FC), he received pushback from critics for both his 1990 article, Communication Unbound, and his 1992 book of the same name. Despite the concerns critics had regarding facilitator cueing and control during letter selection, Biklen rejected research techniques that would definitively rule in or rule out facilitator influence and control of letter selection. (See controlled studies)
Certainly, by the time the documentary Prisoners of Silence aired in 1993, Biklen was well-versed in the technique’s flaws but continued to promote it despite a spate of false allegations of abuse and emerging research (e.g., message passing tests that controlled for facilitator cueing) in the U.S. that replicated Australia’s findings and called into question authorship. There was (and still is) no scientifically rigorous evidence to prove proponent claims that a facilitator-dependent technique such as FC can lead to independent communication. But, to Biklen, these failures, essentially, did not matter enough for him to change his (or his facilitators’) behaviors. As Brian Gorman recounts in an article called Facilitated Communication in America: Eight Years and Counting, Biklen moved forward in “defiance of the scientific community’s rejection of FC.” (Gorman, 1998, p. 64)
SU administration, it seems, took Biklen’s lead. Perhaps, as Gorman suggested in his article, because the FCI brought money into the university at a time when it was struggling financially. “Fair estimates place Syracuse’s cumulative revenue from FC in the millions of dollars. During FC’s peak of popularity, one weekend seminar alone might raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.” (Gorman, 1998). And, while it is doubtful the ICI brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars from its current-day bi-annual FC workshops, articles from The Daily Orange document large amounts of money filtering through the program from donors who, apparently, support the ICI, which includes its promotion of the pseudoscientific technique.
In 2005, The Daily Orange quoted executive editor and news editor for the Commission for Scientific Medicine and Health* as saying:
“Facilitated Communication is nothing to be proud of. It is a pseudoscientific therapy or practice that has been thoroughly discredited.”
That same year, Brian Madigan of Syracuse, NY, in a letter to the editor published in The Daily Orange, wrote:
“Syracuse University opened itself up to derision for last year’s promotion of Dr. Douglas Biklen to the position of the dean of the School of Education. His theories of facilitated communication have been widely criticized to the point where the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the New York State Department of Health have all gone on record advising against the use of facilitated communication.”
Indeed, the FCI changed its name to the ICI in 2010 in response to a spate of false allegation of abuse cases. As major donor John Hussman told a New York Times reporter:
“We need to do more on FC, but we can’t call it that. We have to come up with some other name to fly under the radar and maintain credibility.” (Engber, 2015)
In 2016, The Daily Orange Editorial Board publicly denounced SU’s continued promotion of FC, leading with the unambiguous statement that “It is inexcusable and equal-parts embarrassing for Syracuse University as a research institution to stand behind facilitated communication (FC) despite it being a potentially life-destroying practice that has been empirically debunked.” At the same time, the newspaper also ran a three-part series by student reporter Michael Burke, who, refreshingly, reported on FC with a critical, not credulous, perspective (links below).
And, yet, in a statement to managing editor Kyle Chouinard of The Daily Orange in a 2024 article called Mixed Messages: How facilitated communication persists at SU, Syracuse University’s ICI once again publicly defended its promotion of FC even though, as James Todd of Eastern Michigan University put it, the use of FC at Syracuse University is a “major embarrassment.” (Chouinard, 2024)
But neither the ICI nor SU’s administrators, it seems, let embarrassment motivate them into doing the right thing—that is addressing the concerns critics have about facilitator cueing (leading to influence and control over FC-generated messages), prompt dependency, and harms (such as false allegations of abuse and facilitator crimes, including sexual assault and, in one particularly tragic case, manslaughter). (See False Allegations and Facilitator Crimes)
In this latest Daily Orange article, the ICI did not—and could not—provide Mr. Chouinard with evidence to prove that FC enables clients to communicate independently and without facilitator influence or control. That’s because the ICI and other pro-FC organizations have never provided anything more than anecdotes and testimonials to back up their claims. They take an “FC works because people being subjected FC say it works” approach to documenting the phenomenon. Not only do proponents reject the scientific evidence (collected over decades) proving FC-generated messages are facilitator controlled, some, like Marilyn Chadwick, who at one time was the assistant director of the FCI/ICI, believe FC-generated messages are the product of psychic energy. As she stated for a 2008 Daily Orange article:
Facilitated Communication begins with a psychical communication, pointing at letters, words, or typing. The hope is the person will move to more advanced forms of communication without an aid or prop.
I shouldn’t have to point out that “hope” is not evidence, but since the late 1980s, controlled studies have shown that when facilitators are blinded from test protocols (e.g., blocked from knowing the answers to test questions), FC-generated messages fall into three main categories:
1) incorrect or unintelligible,
2) correct, but based on information provided to the facilitator but not the individual being subjected to its use, and
3) correctly spelled words or grammatically correct sentences, but not relevant to the topic(s) being discussed in the testing (in other words, facilitator generated).
And, while proponents have produced oodles of newspaper accounts, books, films, and journal articles filled with feel-good anecdotes and testimonials about authorship in FC, their research tools (e.g., interviews, observations, and ethnographic studies), however conscientiously employed, are not the right tools to rule in or rule out facilitator control. Proponents provide plenty of rationalizations as to why FC “works,” but as I stated earlier have completely failed to demonstrate empirically that facilitators are not controlling letter selection. (See Systematic Reviews)
The ICI seems proud of its long history with FC, which seems to run counter to their claim that their “scholarly efforts” support individuals with complex communication needs in their efforts to produce independent communication. They stand behind their promotion of FC (sometimes disguising the fact by using the term “supported typing” on their website), seemingly oblivious to the fact that, as a recent article points out, the continued use of FC not only robs people with complex communication needs of the right to communicate independently and poses significant risks (as discussed earlier), but replaces their thoughts, feelings, and desires with those of their facilitators. (See Interrogating Neurotypical Bias in Facilitated Communication, Rapid Prompting Method and Spelling 2 Communicate Through a Humanistic Lens).
Incidentally, the Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) department at SU has for many years included a public statement against the study and use of FC on their university website. As they stated in a 2023 statement, the CSD supports ASHA’s position on FC and does not advocate “for approaches, such as Facilitated Communication, where there is ambiguity regarding whether the client or a ‘facilitator’ is the source of a message.” (See Opposition Statements)
*Note: The Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH) was based out of Amherst, NY and was an investigation group sponsored by the Center For Inquiry. The CSMMH published two journals: the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practices. Although the CSMMH is no longer active, the Center for Inquiry is still in operation and, as stated on their website, “continues to foster a secular society based on reason, science, freedom of inquiry and humanist values.”
References and Recommended Reading:
Brown, Abram. (2008, April 17). Institute gets $500k for autism, speech research. The Daily Orange.
Burke, Michael. (2016, April 11). Double Talk: Syracuse University institute continues to use discredited technique with dangerous effects. The Daily Orange.
Burke, Michael. (2016, April 11). How facilitators control words typed in facilitated communication without realizing. The Daily Orange.
Burke, Michael. (2016, April 11). Why experts say evidence cited by facilitated communication advocates if flawed. The Daily Orange.
Burke, Michael (2018, March 19). Educator trained in discredited communication method at SU pleads guilty to criminal sexual contact. The Daily Orange.
Choulnard, Kyle. (February 2024). Mixed messages: How facilitated communication persists at SU. The Daily Orange.
Collura, Heather. (2005, August 28). University, Biklen dodge criticism. The Daily Orange.
Editorial Board. (April 12, 2016). Syracuse University’s reinforcement of facilitated communication inexcusable, concerning. The Daily Orange.
Engber, Daniel. (2015, October 25). The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield. New York Times.
Gorman, Brian. (1998). Facilitated Communication in America: Eight Years and Counting. Skeptic. Vol 6 (3), p. 64
Jacobson, J.W., Mulick, J.A., Schwartz, A.A. (1995, September). A history of facilitated communication: Science, pseudoscience, and antiscience. Science working group on facilitated communication. American Psychologist, 50 (9), 750-765.
Madigan, Brian. (2005, November 17). New dean’s theories questionable. The Daily Orange.
Muller, Jordan. (2018, June 17). Academics criticize conference co-hosted by SU. The Daily Orange.
Prior, Margot and Cummins, Robert. (1992). Questions about Facilitated Communication and Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Vol. 22 (2); 331-337.
Schlosser, Ralf W. and Prabhu, Anjali. (2024, February 5). Interrogating Neurotypical Bias in Facilitated Communication, Rapid Prompting Method, and Spelling 2 Communicate Through a Humanistic Lens. Current Developmental Disorders Reports.
Blog Posts focusing on FC and Psychic Abilities
A magician cannot dispute FC…or can he?
Do FCed Individuals have Telepathic Superpowers?
Haskew and Donnellan’s bizarre take on FC
The under-appreciated power of involuntary muscle movements—a review of Herman Spitz
Why FC isn’t AAC for people with disabilities, but only for their facilitators