Would you name any building on a college campus after a man who helped sell the Vietnam War, in which countless college-aged men and women died for no reason? How about a man who decided to sue college students because nobody would pay to see crap movies? What about a man who was a strong adversary of new technologies that have had significant impacts on our lives, simply because he couldn’t see how to adapt his business to them?
The University of Houston thinks that it’s a great idea.
As some have already noticed, the School of Communication has a new namesake: Jack Valenti. For those unfamiliar with the name, he was a University alumnus and former member of the University’s Board of Regents. During his undergraduate years, he was on the staff of The Daily Cougar and served as president of the Student Association (which changed its name to the Student Government Association in 2000). He would later serve in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, working as a "special assistant" to the Johnson White House, as well as a speech-writer.
Valenti wrote several speeches in favor of the Vietnam War, which President Johnson allowed to spiral out of control. For his foreign policy blunder, a mistake on par with the current war in Iraq, thousands of young men were sent to die. Ultimately, the war made President Johnson unelectable.
This didn’t end Valenti’s career, though. Before President Johnson’s term of office ended, he became the president of the insidious Motion Picture Association of America, a copyright racket for the film industry. There, he would go on to create the now-familiar movie ratings system. This system has been used on multiple occasions to suppress films and ideas the MPAA or its directors do not want distributed.
What’s more, Valenti was an ardent opponent of technologies such as home video. He even went so far as to tell a congressional panel, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Of course, this was a completely bogus accusation, and the movie industry performed quite well during the advent of the VCR.
In keeping with his inability to adjust to changing times and technology, he would lobby for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, whose evils could fill an entire edition of the New York Times. After the act was passed, he would instigate the current lawsuit binge that the MPAA has unleashed upon college students in the image of the one brought by the Recording Industry Association of America. While he would claim that the film industry is suffering horribly because of piracy, it should be noted that in the later part of his career, the major studios started churning out little but remakes and sequels, with little in the budget left for original ideas. In many cases, these derivative works were of low quality.
Despite all of the work he has done to harm college students across the nation, this is not the first time the University has chosen to honor this man. In 2002, the University awarded him an honorary doctorate for his body of work, most of which has been to the detriment of college students across the country.
Jack Valenti is a disgrace to the University of Houston, and naming one of the University’s departments after him is a sign that the University administration really doesn’t care about its students. UH should rebuke him, remove his name from the School of Communication and revoke his honorary doctorate.
McCormick, a computer science post-baccalaureate student, can be reached via [email protected]
