To the Editor:

Re: “Cleese Uses His Extensive Travel to Advise Hotelies,” News, April 21.

I was surprised that your extensive coverage of John Cleese’s recent lecture made no mention of what I found to be his most startling remarks: his claim that supernatural phenomena like astrology and human precognition have been scientifically confirmed and should therefore be incorporated into the study of human behavior.

Mr. Cleese is certainly free to believe in any superstitious absurdity he likes. However, his endorsement of pseudoscience in a public forum on Cornell’s campus is completely unacceptable precisely because he was presented to the audience as some sort of scientific authority. Provost Fuchs introduced Mr. Cleese as “part comedian [and] part psychologist,” and the moderator played up his (incomplete) scientific education and presented his relationship with Cornell’s psychology faculty as quasi-academic.

To have a visiting professor who is affiliated, however tenuously, with Cornell’s psychology department spout such nonsense is not only embarrassing for Cornell but is completely antithetical to our University’s mission as a scientific institution. Cornell should be working hard to countervail the ignorance of, and hostility towards science that is unfortunately so common among Americans today. Needless to say, Mr. Cleese’s remarks are extremely counterproductive in this regard.

I sincerely hope that if the administration wishes to retain Mr. Cleese as Provost’s Visiting Professor they will clarify the nature of his relationship with Cornell’s department of psychology and endorse him as the brilliant writer and performer that he is, rather than the scientist that he is not.

Igor Gorodezky grad