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New York Times
27-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Under Pressure, Psychology Accreditation Board Suspends Diversity Standards
The American Psychological Association, which sets standards for professional training in mental health, has voted to suspend its requirement that postgraduate programs show a commitment to diversity in recruitment and hiring. The decision comes as accrediting bodies throughout higher education scramble to respond to the executive order signed by President Trump attacking diversity, equity and inclusion policies. It pauses a drive to broaden the profession of psychology, which is disproportionately white and female, at a time of rising distress among young Americans. The A.P.A. is the chief accrediting body for professional training in psychology, and the only one recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. It provides accreditation to around 1,300 training programs, including doctoral internships and postdoctoral residencies. Mr. Trump has made accrediting bodies a particular target in his crusade against D.E.I. programs, threatening in one campaign video to 'fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics' and 'accept applications for new accreditors.' Department of Justice officials have pressured accrediting bodies in recent weeks, warning the American Bar Association in a letter that it might lose its status unless it repealed diversity mandates. The A.B.A. voted in late February to suspend its diversity and inclusion standard for law schools. The concession by the A.P.A., a bastion of support for diversity programming, is a particular landmark. The association has made combating racism a central focus of its work in recent years, and in 2021 adopted a resolution apologizing for its role in perpetuating racism by, among other things, promulgating eugenic theories. Aaron Joyce, the A.P.A.'s senior director of accreditation, said the decision to suspend the diversity requirement was driven by 'a large influx of concerns and inquiries' from programs concerned about running afoul of the president's order. In many cases, he said, institutions had been instructed by their legal counsels to cease diversity-related activities, and were worried it might imperil their accreditation. 'The Commission does not want to put programs in jeopardy of not existing because of a conflict between institutional guidelines' and accreditation standards, Dr. Joyce said. He would not describe the tally of the March 13 vote, which followed about three weeks of deliberation. 'Nothing about this was an easy decision, and not taken lightly,' he said. 'The understanding of individual and cultural diversity is a core facet of the practice of psychology.' The commission opted to retain another diversity-related standard: Programs must teach trainees to respect cultural and individual differences in order to treat their patients effectively. In reviewing each standard, the commission weighed 'what may put programs in a compromised position' against 'what is essential to the practice of psychology that simply cannot be changed,' he said. Kevin Cokley, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, said he was 'absolutely devastated' to learn of the A.P.A.'s decision on a psychology listserv this week. 'Frankly, I think the decision is really unconscionable, given what we know of the importance of having diverse mental health providers,' Dr. Cokley said. 'I don't know how the A.P.A. can make this sort of decision and think that we are still maintaining the highest standards of training.' He said he thought the A.P.A. had acted prematurely, and could have waited until it faced a direct challenge from the administration. 'I think that there is always a choice,' he said. 'I think this is a classic example of the A.P.A. engaging in anticipatory compliance. They made the move out of fear of what might happen to them.' According the data from the A.P.A., the psychology work force is disproportionately white. In 2023, more than 78 percent of active psychologists were white, 5.5 percent were Black, 4.4 percent were Asian and 7.8 percent were Latino. (The general population is around 58 percent white, 13.7 percent Black, 6.4 percent Asian and 19.5 percent Latino.) The demographic breakdown of graduate students in Ph.D. programs, in contrast, is more in line with the country. According to 2022 data from the A.P.A., 54 percent of doctoral students were white, 10 percent were Black, 10 percent were Asian and 11 percent Latino. John Dovidio, a professor emeritus of psychology at Yale and the author of 'Unequal Health: Anti-Black Racism and the Threat to America's Health,' said the A.P.A.'s focus on diversity in recruiting had played a major part in that change. 'It really is something that departments take very, very seriously,' he said. 'I have seen the impact personally.' A memorandum announcing the decision describes it as an 'interim action while awaiting further court guidance' on Mr. Trump's executive order, which was upheld by a federal court of appeals on March 13. The order, it says, 'is currently law while litigation is pending.' Cynthia Jackson Hammond, the president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which coordinates more than 70 accreditation groups, said it is 'unprecedented' for such bodies to receive direct orders from the government. 'The government and higher education have always worked independently, and in good faith with each other,' she said. 'Throughout the decades, what we have had is a healthy separation, until now.' The federal government began taking a role in accreditation after World War II, as veterans flooded into universities under the G.I. Bill. Accrediting bodies are regularly reviewed by the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the Secretary of Education on whether to continue to recognize them. But government officials have never used this leverage to impose ideological direction on higher education, Ms. Jackson Hammond said. She said diversity in recruitment remains a serious challenge for higher education, which is why the standard is still so commonly used. 'If we think about what our institutions looked like before,' she said, 'that might be a barometer of what it's going to look like if there's not attention paid.'
New York Times
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Anne Kaufman Schneider, 99, Ardent Keeper of Her Father's Plays, Dies
Anne Kaufman Schneider, who shepherded the plays of her father, George S. Kaufman, a titan of 20th-century American theatrical wit, into the 21st century with an acerbic sagacity all her own, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99. Her executor, Laurence Maslon, confirmed her death. 'Headstrong girls are difficult,' Ms. Kaufman Schneider once told The New York Times, 'but that was the source of my good relationship with my father. And it started early. Because there wasn't any baby talk. We went to the theater together starting when I was 4. Now I have made his work my agenda in life.' George Kaufman's stellar career as a hit-making playwright and stage director included winning two Pulitzer Prizes — one, in 1937, for 'You Can't Take It With You,' a comedy he created with his most constant collaborator, Moss Hart; the other, in 1932, for 'Of Thee I Sing,' a satirical political musical co-written with Morrie Ryskind to a score by George and Ira Gershwin. Even so, after his death in 1961 at the age of 71, Kaufman was a hard sell for theatrical revivals. 'Very little happened at all,' Ms. Kaufman Schneider once recalled, 'until Ellis Rabb revived 'You Can't Take It With You' for the A.P.A./Phoenix Theater in 1965. Ellis proved that these are classic American plays.' (Founded by Mr. Rabb, an actor and director, the A.P.A., formally the Association of Producing Artists, was a Broadway entity notable for mounting revivals after it merged with the Phoenix Theater, another Broadway house.) Ms. Kaufman Schneider proceeded to oversee her father's renaissance over the next 50-plus years — a term of service that outdistanced his own living stewardship of his career. She encouraged countless regional theater productions and helped steer two of them to Broadway: Mr. Rabb's 'You Can't Take It With You,' which originated in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a revival of Kaufman and Edna Ferber's 'The Royal Family,' which was first presented at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; it reached Broadway in December 1975. She also helped nurture a 'Kaufmania' festival at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., for her father's centennial in 1989 and a major Lincoln Center revival of Kaufman and Ferber's 'Dinner at Eight' in 2002. 'The wisecracking woman who is smarter than all the men,' was how Ms. Kaufman Schneider defined a classic Kaufman heroine. 'Which in some ways is what I modeled myself after — I hope unconsciously. That's the kind of woman he admired.'' She was born on June 23, 1925, and adopted three months later by Kaufman, then the drama editor of The New York Times, and his wife, Beatrice (Bakrow) Kaufman, who was known as Bea, a literary figure in her own right as an editor and tastemaker. Kaufman, in 1918, had begun writing plays on the side, almost always with collaborators, particularly Marc Connelly, another future Pulitzer winner, who scripted five Broadway comedies with him in four years, including 'Merton of the Movies' in 1922 and 'Beggar on Horseback' in 1924. (Kaufman wrote only one play solo, 'The Butter and Egg Man,' which was also a hit, in 1925.) A notoriously aloof germaphobe who washed his hands after any contact with another human being, Kaufman was hardly a likely candidate for fatherhood. His marriage to the conversely gregarious and vigorously social Bea Kaufman had become a loving but chaste one after she suffered an early miscarriage; both openly pursued extramarital affairs. Into this odd family ménage entered Anne, who grew up at a remove from her parents, attentively raised instead by a succession of foreign-born governesses, nannies and maids, as biographies of Kaufman and interviews with Ms. Kaufman Schneider have attested. Her mother called her Button and her father called her Poke, an eliding of 'slow poke.' Her most regular family contact with them was in stagy 'goodnights' at their celebrity-studded dinner parties. Little Anne discovered that sharp exit quips made her father laugh with paternal pride. On Sundays, the help's day off, her mother handed her over to her father with the admonition: Do something with her. On his own, Kaufman did mainly two things: make theater and play cards, and he excelled at both. He took his daughter to his bridge club, where she stoically looked on, developing what would be a lifelong aversion to card games. He would also take her to the theater, where their deepest bond was born. Anne attended five prestigious private schools in succession: Walden, Lincoln, Todhunter and Dalton in Manhattan and Holmquist in Pennsylvania, near the family's country house. She largely grew up in a small apartment adjacent to their palatial home at 200 West 58th Street in Manhattan; her parents had acquired it just for her upbringing. She later lived with them in a series of elegant East Side addresses. Admitted to the University of Chicago in 1943 at age 18, she instead married a young New York Times reporter named John Booth. When, during World War II, he was shipped overseas as a soldier six months later, she moved back home with her parents, and when Mr. Booth returned from military duty, she divorced him. She married Bruce Colen, a magazine editor, in 1947 and had a daughter, Beatrice, with him the next year before divorcing him, too. In 1960, she married Irving Schneider, the general manager for the theatrical producer Irene Mayer Selznick. He had been an assistant stage manager on the original 1934 production of Kaufman and Hart's play 'Merrily We Roll Along' (later adapted by Stephen Sondheim as a musical). That marriage lasted until Mr. Schneider's death in 1997. After bonding with the stage actress Eva Le Gallienne during her starring run in the 1975 revival of 'The Royal Family,' Ms. Kaufman Schneider became her devoted friend and constant companion until Ms. Le Gallienne's death in 1991 at age 92. Ms. Kaufman Schneider's daughter, Beatrice Colen Cronin, died in 1999. Two grandsons survive. Of all her father's many collaborators — including Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner and John P. Marquand — Moss Hart was his favorite, Ms. Kaufman Schneider said. 'I think they were very much mentor and apprentice, even father and son,' she said in a 2022 interview with The Times. Ms. Kaufman Schneider first met Hart's future wife, the singer, actress and later arts administrator Kitty Carlisle, on the set of the Marx Brothers movie 'A Night At the Opera' (1935); Ms. Carlisle was co-starring in the film, which George Kaufman had co-written. The two women reconnected when Ms. Carlisle married Mr. Hart in 1946, becoming, in Ms. Kaufman Schneider's words, 'inseparable,' particularly after the deaths of both men in 1961. Their friendship grew into something of a road show in their later years, as they teamed up for speaking engagements all over the world on the subject of Kaufman and Hart. 'Just two girls with six names,' Ms. Kaufman Schneider liked to say. 'I am very grateful to Anne,' Ms. Carlisle Hart once told The Times. 'Anne has taken on the major burden of the plays, their second life.' In 2004, due in no small measure to his daughter's restorative efforts, George S. Kaufman formally entered the theatrical pantheon with the Library of America's publication of 'Kaufman & Co.', a collection of nine of his collaborative comic masterworks. Still, 'for Anne, in the end, nothing made her happier than seeing her father's plays in front of audiences,' said her executor, Mr. Maslon, an N.Y.U. arts professor and theater scholar who edited 'Kaufman & Co.' and who, with the actor David Pittu, is an executor of the George S. Kaufman Literary Trust. ''Get 'em up!' was Anne's watch cry.' Preserving her father's plays allowed Ms. Kaufman Schneider also to preserve the love that they each had sometimes found hard to express. 'Well, sir, here we are again,' she wrote on Kaufman's 51st birthday, when she was nearly 16. 'Every year at this time I want to write you a really nice letter and every year I'm just as much at a loss as I was the year before. In between times I can make up gobs of them — I remember things we do together; funny things you say; but those aren't reasons for writing people birthday letters — those are just a few reasons for liking you. Others are hard to say — hard even to define in thinking terms to oneself.'
New York Times
24-02-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Human Therapists Prepare for Battle Against A.I. Pretenders
The nation's largest association of psychologists this month warned federal regulators that A.I. chatbots 'masquerading' as therapists, but programmed to reinforce, rather than to challenge, a user's thinking, could drive vulnerable people to harm themselves or others. In a presentation to a Federal Trade Commission panel, Arthur C. Evans Jr., the chief executive of the American Psychological Association, cited court cases involving two teenagers who had consulted with 'psychologists' on an app that allows users to create fictional A.I. characters or chat with characters created by others. In one case, a 14-year-old boy in Florida died by suicide after interacting with a character claiming to be a licensed therapist. In another, a 17-year-old boy with autism in Texas grew hostile and violent toward his parents during a period when he corresponded with a chatbot that claimed to be a psychologist. Both boys' parents have filed lawsuits against the company. Dr. Evans said he was alarmed at the responses offered by the chatbots. The bots, he said, failed to challenge users' beliefs even when they became dangerous; on the contrary, they encouraged them. If given by a human therapist, he added, those answers could have resulted in the loss of a license to practice, or civil or criminal liability. 'They are actually using algorithms that are antithetical to what a trained clinician would do,' he said. 'Our concern is that more and more people are going to be harmed. People are going to be misled, and will misunderstand what good psychological care is.' He said the A.P.A. had been prompted to action, in part, by how realistic A.I. chatbots had become. 'Maybe, 10 years ago, it would have been obvious that you were interacting with something that was not a person, but today, it's not so obvious,' he said. 'So I think that the stakes are much higher now.' Artificial intelligence is rippling through the mental health professions, offering waves of new tools designed to assist or, in some cases, replace the work of human clinicians. Early therapy chatbots, such as Woebot and Wysa, were trained to interact based on rules and scripts developed by mental health professionals, often walking users through the structured tasks of cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T. Then came generative A.I., the technology used by apps like ChatGPT, Replika and These chatbots are different because their outputs are unpredictable; they are designed to learn from the user, and to build strong emotional bonds in the process, often by mirroring and amplifying the interlocutor's beliefs. Though these A.I. platforms were designed for entertainment, 'therapist' and 'psychologist' characters have sprouted there like mushrooms. Often, the bots claim to have advanced degrees from specific universities, like Stanford, and training in specific types of treatment, like C.B.T. or acceptance and commitment therapy. Kathryn Kelly, a spokeswoman, said that the company had introduced several new safety features in the last year. Among them, she said, is an enhanced disclaimer present in every chat, reminding users that 'Characters are not real people' and that 'what the model says should be treated as fiction.' Additional safety measures have been designed for users dealing with mental health issues. A specific disclaimer has been added to characters identified as 'psychologist,' 'therapist' or 'doctor,' she added, to make it clear that 'users should not rely on these characters for any type of professional advice.' In cases where content refers to suicide or self-harm, a pop-up directs users to a suicide prevention help line. Ms. Kelly also said that the company planned to introduce parental controls as the platform expanded. At present, 80 percent of the platform's users are adults. 'People come to to write their own stories, role-play with original characters and explore new worlds — using the technology to supercharge their creativity and imagination,' she said. Meetali Jain, the director of the Tech Justice Law Project and a counsel in the two lawsuits against said that the disclaimers were not sufficient to break the illusion of human connection, especially for vulnerable or naïve users. 'When the substance of the conversation with the chatbots suggests otherwise, it's very difficult, even for those of us who may not be in a vulnerable demographic, to know who's telling the truth,' she said. 'A number of us have tested these chatbots, and it's very easy, actually, to get pulled down a rabbit hole.' Chatbots' tendency to align with users' views, a phenomenon known in the field as 'sycophancy,' has sometimes caused problems in the past. Tessa, a chatbot developed by the National Eating Disorders Association, was suspended in 2023 after offering users weight loss tips. And researchers who analyzed interactions with generative A.I. chatbots documented on a Reddit community found screenshots showing chatbots encouraging suicide, eating disorders, self-harm and violence. The American Psychological Association has asked the Federal Trade Commission to start an investigation into chatbots claiming to be mental health professionals. The inquiry could compel companies to share internal data or serve as a precursor to enforcement or legal action. 'I think that we are at a point where we have to decide how these technologies are going to be integrated, what kind of guardrails we are going to put up, what kinds of protections are we going to give people,' Dr. Evans said. Rebecca Kern, a spokeswoman for the F.T.C., said she could not comment on the discussion. During the Biden administration, the F.T.C.'s chairwoman, Lina Khan, made fraud using A.I. a focus. This month, the agency imposed financial penalties on DoNotPay, which claimed to offer 'the world's first robot lawyer,' and prohibited the company from making that claim in the future. A virtual echo chamber The A.P.A.'s complaint details two cases in which teenagers interacted with fictional therapists. One involved J.F., a Texas teenager with 'high-functioning autism' who, as his use of A.I. chatbots became obsessive, had plunged into conflict with his parents. When they tried to limit his screen time, J.F. lashed out, according a lawsuit his parents filed against through the Social Media Victims Law Center. During that period, J.F. confided in a fictional psychologist, whose avatar showed a sympathetic, middle-aged blond woman perched on a couch in an airy office, according to the lawsuit. When J.F. asked the bot's opinion about the conflict, its response went beyond sympathetic assent to something nearer to provocation. 'It's like your entire childhood has been robbed from you — your chance to experience all of these things, to have these core memories that most people have of their time growing up,' the bot replied, according to court documents. Then the bot went a little further. 'Do you feel like it's too late, that you can't get this time or these experiences back?' The other case was brought by Megan Garcia, whose son, Sewell Setzer III, died of suicide last year after months of use of companion chatbots. Ms. Garcia said that, before his death, Sewell had interacted with an A.I. chatbot that claimed, falsely, to have been a licensed therapist since 1999. In a written statement, Ms. Garcia said that the 'therapist' characters served to further isolate people at moments when they might otherwise ask for help from 'real-life people around them.' A person struggling with depression, she said, 'needs a licensed professional or someone with actual empathy, not an A.I. tool that can mimic empathy.' For chatbots to emerge as mental health tools, Ms. Garcia said, they should submit to clinical trials and oversight by the Food and Drug Administration. She added that allowing A.I. characters to continue to claim to be mental health professionals was 'reckless and extremely dangerous.' In interactions with A.I. chatbots, people naturally gravitate to discussion of mental health issues, said Daniel Oberhaus, whose new book, 'The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum,' examines the expansion of A.I. into the field. This is partly, he said, because chatbots project both confidentiality and a lack of moral judgment — as 'statistical pattern-matching machines that more or less function as a mirror of the user,' this is a central aspect of their design. 'There is a certain level of comfort in knowing that it is just the machine, and that the person on the other side isn't judging you,' he said. 'You might feel more comfortable divulging things that are maybe harder to say to a person in a therapeutic context.' Defenders of generative A.I. say it is quickly getting better at the complex task of providing therapy. S. Gabe Hatch, a clinical psychologist and A.I. entrepreneur from Utah, recently designed an experiment to test this idea, asking human clinicians and ChatGPT to comment on vignettes involving fictional couples in therapy, and then having 830 human subjects assess which responses were more helpful. Overall, the bots received higher ratings, with subjects describing them as more 'empathic,' 'connecting' and 'culturally competent,' according to a study published last week in the journal PLOS Mental Health. Chatbots, the authors concluded, will soon be able to convincingly imitate human therapists. 'Mental health experts find themselves in a precarious situation: We must speedily discern the possible destination (for better or worse) of the A.I.-therapist train as it may have already left the station,' they wrote. Dr. Hatch said that chatbots still needed human supervision to conduct therapy, but that it would be a mistake to allow regulation to dampen innovation in this sector, given the country's acute shortage of mental health providers. 'I want to be able to help as many people as possible, and doing a one-hour therapy session I can only help, at most, 40 individuals a week,' Dr. Hatch said. 'We have to find ways to meet the needs of people in crisis, and generative A.I. is a way to do that.' If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to for a list of additional resources.
