Oz is no wizard

But there’s one glaring, inexplicable exception: What the hell is Dr. Oz doing here?

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the surgeon, talk-show host and Columbia Medical Center professor, is scheduled to speak tonight at McCosh Hall. Tickets are sold out, and the University is setting up five rooms where a simulcast will be broadcast. He’s kind of a big deal: After Oz began appearing regularly on The Oprah Winfrey Show, her production company helped launch The Dr. Oz Show in 2009, further propelling him into stardom. His Columbia website lists a litany of honors, including recognition from Time as one of “The World’s 100 Most Influential People” in 2008.

He’s a very popular, influential figure. Unfortunately, he’s also a charlatan, and CPS should be distancing itself from him — not lending its name to his appearance.

Oz is as qualified to comment on mental health as I am to comment on high fashion, and not just because he has no formal training in psychology or psychiatry. His dossier is so thick that it could fill several columns, so I’ll defer to the James Randi Educational Foundation, an organization devoted to debunking junk science: “Dr. Oz is a Harvard-educated cardiac physician who, through his syndicated TV show, has promoted faith healing, ‘energy medicine’ and other quack theories that have no scientific basis,” the group notes on its website.

It continues: “Oz has appeared on ABC News to give legitimacy to the claims of Brazilian faith healer ‘John of God,’ who uses old carnival tricks to take money from the seriously ill. He’s hosted Ayurvedic guru Yogi Cameron on his show to promote nonsense ‘tongue examination’ as a way of diagnosing health problems.” He has also hosted and promoted John Edward, a megastar TV “psychic” who has made millions by convincing grieving people that he can communicate with their dead friends and relatives. So it’s no wonder that the Randi Foundation made Oz the first back-to-back winner of its “Pigasus” award, reserved for the worst, most prominent promoters of pseudoscience — of which Edward is a former recipient.

None of this is to say that Oz shouldn’t be allowed to speak at Princeton. USG and SD, like student groups everywhere, have every right to invite whichever speakers they think will fill seats. The problem here is that CPS has lent Oz and the mounds of pseudoscience he peddles its imprimatur by not fleeing, hard, at the first sight of his name.

When I asked CPS to comment on Oz’s appearance via University Spokesman Martin Mbugua, Anita McLean, the office’s director, responded via email that “Counseling and Psychological Services is not a sponsor of specific events” during Mental Health Awareness Week. She wouldn’t comment one way or another on Oz’s appearance.

Technically, CPS is merely a “collaborator” on Mental Health Awareness Week, not a co-sponsor. But its leadership should have at least argued — perhaps futilely given the man’s wattage — that Oz is not an appropriate speaker and figured out some way to broadcast its displeasure after the decision was made. CPS has neither the right nor the responsibility to veto poor speaker choices made by student groups, but it has both a right and a responsibility to steer students away from snake-oil salesmen operating under the guise of mental health advocacy.

This is especially true here, where there is a fair amount of potential for misunderstanding: Much of the promotion for Mental Health Awareness Week, by noting the collaboration between the student-group sponsors and CPS, implies that CPS approves of all of the week’s events. So Mbugua’s claim in an email that “it would be incomplete to single out one office or organization” for criticism among the many who are collaborating on Mental Health Awareness Week doesn’t hold water. CPS is the only one of those organizations with a direct stake in this issue.

Oz isn’t a Princeton-worthy speaker. He embodies the worst excesses of America’s billion-dollar feel-good quackery industry. Oz and his oily ilk greatly exacerbate the already formidable challenges surrounding mental health by ladling up whatever sounds good or whatever’s trendy, ignoring the unsexy but important methodological systems underlying evidence-based approaches to mental health.

A lot of students are going to walk into McCosh later today thinking they are about to see a mental-health expert. And that’s a shame, because Oz is anything but.

Jesse Singal is a first-year student in the Wilson School’s Master in Public Affairs program. He can be reached at jsingal@princeton.edu