Van Doren had refused interviews or public comment on the subject of the quiz show scandals. In a 1985 interview on "Today"—his only appearance on the program since his dismissal in 1959, promoting his book "The Joy of Reading"—he answered a general question on how the scandal changed his life. He revisited Columbia University only twice in the forty years that followed his resignation—in 1984 when his son John graduated; and in 1999 at a reunion of Columbia's Class of 1959. During the latter appearance, Van Doren made one allusion to the quiz scandal without mentioning it by name: