chuckkle, your hobby seems to be attacking Wood every chance you get. Why don’t you find a new hobby?

The day of selecting the brightest and best to lead has long past, and all we have are the typical politicians and charlatans like Stephen Meeks. It may be sour grapes, chuckkles, but he tells the truth about the corridors of power: at least he’s been near it.

I second ‘bringsomelight’ I would love to see more focus on the issues and less pettiness. At what point in higher education did personal attacks become a legitimate substitute for critique? The problem seems to be growing.

Why? I guess it’s partly that Wood is such an easy target that it doesn’t take any effort to take potshots. There’s no sense, for example, in his remarks on feminism and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies that he’s ever had lunch with the faculty who teach in such programs. He seems to have formed his prejudices 30+ years ago and to have never updated his information. When’s the last time he actually visited such a classroom, talked with Gender Studies faculty about curriculum or research? Of course, given his obstinate opinions, it would be charity work (at best, and probably an intractable burden) for any faculty to actually spend some time trying to school the man. But his imagined ideas about where the mainstream of the field is (of course there are always outliers to provide exceptions) are so far off base that you can readily conclude he hasn’t attended any feminist conferences or attended to the feminist presentations at more general conferences or read in the current scholarship (say Signs) for the past decade. In short, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about: a real problem in an academic setting.

Chuck Kleinhans

I agree with your causal attributions but I still think we can do better. I know I have made a conscious effort to rein myself in from my tendency to take potshots. As someone who has had a broader range of professional experiences than perhaps the typical professoriate, I know that I was quickly labeled not for what I said but based on fabricated attributions of my motives. Doing so seems unprofessional and just plain wrong.

I did note that RWT came at the problem from a different direction, very well thought out. I would like to have seen Mr. Wood give his perceptions of how much a lack of good information plays into leadership issues.

Peter,

We agree with respect to the negative criteria operating in the selection of college presidents. Your list, especially the first three, is what I had in mind. I advise my most competent VP friends to resist the natural tendency to apply for presidential openings if they really want to continue enjoying their role as innovators in higher education.

In rereading my post, I think it is possible to interpret my emphasis on metrics as disproportionate when I meant to position the two broad themes of selection criteria and metrics as more or less equal in impact. I gave metrics so much real estate because they appeal to a null set in the minds of some readers.

I disagree with a generalization of your statement, “A college or university president should command most of the data RWT identifies, and in my experience, quite a few do.” You must know a different group of presidents. In speaking to groups of them, such as NASULGC and NAICU, no president I know possesses this kind of information term-on-term by program. Many of them hold isolated aggregations of these data points (i.e., all programs in one out of a dozen colleges) or bits and pieces via special studies that produce a snapshot of a year old situation. They do not enjoy dashboards that make internal and external environmental analyses available by program. Frankly, some of them look at me as if I were speaking Choctaw when I mention these kinds of metrics.

You may be right in suggesting that negative culture trumps positive intelligence. History is on your side. However, I can’t help wondering if some of these presidents would rise to the occasion — despite the setting conditions you identify — if given the chance. Hope springs a kernel!

Robert

After you start working full time and experience the differences between your former life as an adjunct and the life of a tenure track professor, you can blog about that. When you’re a “fat cat” with the privileges of having an office, a phone, meetings to attend, a middle class salary, and whatever else adjuncts say about full timers (that we exploit them, etc.), you are bound to get lots of scathing feedback. Wait for it. :)

Your third paragraph really hits it.  Because they did well going through educational system, people often assume that they are going to be happy working there and that there’s nothing to do but go after the brass ring of tenure and go after it according to the rules.

To sum up my ramble, I think your core point is spot on, but it’s easy to conflate fear and tact.

Isaac, two points:
1) You don’t have tenure just yet. Be very afraid! :)
2) After a point, I think many of us demand more evidence of a critical thought process from our students than we do of ourselves. The faculty herd mentality and group-think identified by others here is pervasive.

Hope you do earn your tenure via a similarly unconventional path!

This is sub-optimal but probably better than the US News rankings on the following basis. When predictors are unreliable, adding more of them as US News does reduces the reliability of the aggregate. Because the criterion, the quality or value of an entire institution, is so fuzzy, reliable predictors won’t be found. So the fewer the better. Zero would be optimal.

The hilarious part of all this is that USNews has steadily reduced the weight of acceptance rate (it’s only 5%!) and utterly removed yield rate from their ranking calculations. Yet we profs, administrators, and admissions folks uniformly trash USNews rankings as nothing but a grubby status ranking! In fact, the U.S. college cartel is guilty of the worst possible hypocrisy, because we are  SOLELY to blame for how horrible USNews rankings are.

Why do you think that USNews rankings have to use mostly “input” metrics (quality of entering students, student faculty ratios, class sizes, academic reps of faculty, etc.)??? The fault lies in ourselves. Universities refuse to report or even measure learning outcomes (and few of the top ranked even participate in NSSE student engagement surveys of the learning process). USNews is actually the messenger and even the hero! Without USNews’ threat to allow nonreporting schools to fall in rank, comparable data on those few input measures would never have become available.

Imagine, a la John Lennon, universities where superficial landscaping and architectural “packaging” were not used to disguise a learning-free environment. Imagine an admissions office required to inform potential applicants about how their college compared in student engagement, learning outcomes, and employer satisfaction with their alumni. Fortunately, accreditation is now requiring relevant metrics to be collected and consistently be improved each year. Too bad this info never is made public. I still have hope that U.S. higher education will someday function as well as society believes it does.

Isn’t that convenient? Also untrue. You test students when they enter and when they graduate. The latest surveys reveal that students haven’t developed their analytical ability after 2 or even 4 years of college. Accreditors are requiring detailed, measurable and specific learning outcomes, so according to you these must be worthless. They’re not!

How does one play a villain in a play? Not as Snidely Whiplash tying fair damsels to the railroad tracks. In the bad guy’s mind, he is merely misunderstood and making the best of a bad situation. If you are not with us, then at least don’t block up the doorway.

Thanks Eric for another very helpful piece.  As many of us know too well, admission and yield rates are among the easiest metrics to manipulate.  Admission rate is simply a consequence of increasing applications, which can be had in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with a quality program or meaningful desirability.  A better yield is accomplished easily by admitting more through ED, or by identifying those applicants who have little interest in attending, which is much easier to do that many might realize. And, THESE are the very schools whose yield is somewhat guaranteed, by way of established prestige.  Congratulations, Kiplinger, on rewarding the already rewarded. For 20 years I have taught at schools with wonderful students who have these very ambitions.  The paradox is that if bright students would aspire to the very best undergraduate EDUCATION they could get, rather than the very best CREDENTIAL, they would be virtually guaranteed the prestige they think they need.  Students whose aspiration is defined by the values Kiplinger trumpets are invariably weaker applicants at these schools, than students who are hungry for a superb liberal arts education.  It is a pity.

Carl Ahlgren

The thing that always strikes me as inane about these rankings is they seem to promote the notion that the totality of a university is equally valuable to all its graduates.  If you go to the most prestigious university in the world but studied in the one department there that is a total dud, you did not receive the world’s best education, and would have been better off studying someplace that is generally respectable but stellar in your field.    

Alfred Hitchcock had a wonderful story about a man who neglected to pay a $2 parking ticket, and due to a highly improbable chain of subsequent events related to this oversight, eventually suffered the death penalty. His wry comment was that “sometimes it’s best to just pay the two dollars.”

Colleges who admit so many athletes who come from disadvantaged backgrounds should simply pay the two bucks, rather than suffering the outrageous slings and arrows due to those students committing crimes, both petty (NCAA infractions) and serious, often due essentially to their dire straights.

Also, those Colleges might rise to the moral level of admitting that they’ve been engaging in slave labor for lo these many years . . . 

I wonder if it’s a question of competition. With so many sources of communication inundating our lives, the only way to get noticed or heard is to be more outrageous than the last person. I don’t know what to do about it, but that may explain the source of some of the incivility.

If I read the article correctly, it looks like in the structure presented above there is an individual (or groups of individuals) that still set up and coordinate international activities (Quote: “..we still have regular joint meetings, e-mail lists and other ways to share information electronically, and common projects, such as organizing the rector’s annual welcoming reception for international students and staff members, helps us to cross organizational boundaries”). Therefore, it seems to me that the model of a centralized international leadership was not completely erradicated but rather “modified” to be perceived as more cohesive among faculty and administrators. 

I personally believe in a centralized model where the international office staff serve as “consultants/advisors” to faculty/staff interested in pursuing international initiatives. The international office must serve as a catalyst. 

A true partnership between faculty and staff is a critical vehicle to a successful international strategy.

It sounds like a workable solution in Finland, where faculty and students speak at least one foreign language fluently and must read and research in languages besides the national one.  Since faculty who do this are a minority in the U.S., this lack of centralization seems unlikely to work.

This article
is based on a misconception: “First and foremost, under this approach
internationalization cannot be marginalized to be the responsibility of a
few.” The purpose of a centralized structure for internationalization is
not that this is the only office engaged in internationalization, but to serve
in a role of coordination, administration, providing information, funding
development, and a resource to faculty/staff and students regarding
international initiatives and opportunities. For example, international
partnerships cannot be strategically developed and maintained without
centralized coordination. If entities across a campus all develop their own
partnerships without the benefit of consulting a coordinating office regarding
existing partnerships, successful models for the institution, study
abroad/exchange programs that meet students’ needs and interests, etc.,
partnerships generally remain narrow in focus, interdisciplinary collaboration
is less likely, and it is less likely that partnerships will be sustainable.
Lack of coordination introduces inefficiencies and tends to require more
resources.

I worked at
an institution as the head of a centralized international education division
which decided to eliminate this division and my position. The spin from the
administration was that we had integrated internationalization to such a
degree, that now the university no longer needed my office or my position. The
result is that the vision and strategies we were implementing according to an
internationalization plan developed with input from across the campus have
evaporated and the extent of “internationalization” at the
institution has regressed again to just counting the numbers of international
students and the numbers of students studying abroad. However, the numbers have
no meaning (other than revenue for the university) if they are not tied to broader
global learning initiatives. As a former colleague, a faculty member there,
said to me: internationalization is dead now.

This is on the nail:  it boils down to being polite, understanding that others have views, listening and responding properly.  The anger, as exemplified by Limbaugh, can appear synptomatic of a rush away from enlightenment into a kind of anti-rational dark age.  Indeed, there appears in general to be a move away from reason:  think of the necessity to be  a religious fundamentalist to appear a credible presidential candidate in the US.  It’s interesting, in this light, that the culture of research assessment, quality assurance, league tables is driving British universities away from the ideal of being disinterestedly civil places, because built into it is competitiveness, antagonism.  Few now in England certainly (Scotland and Wales would be different), would dare to articulate the notion that scholarship is worth doing because it’s worth doing, for this signals our having atttained a civilised and civil society.

For example, these comments: http://chronicle.com/article/Preventing-Suicide-May-Mean/131291/

 Sounds like Mitt Romney, arrogant and willing to believe the people he talks to will just accept his lies at face value. Why, everyone else remembers I assaulted a kid in high school and cut his hair off, but me, gee whilikers (mormon obscenity), I just can’t recall that. Deacon seems cut from same cloth. The big lie always works best.

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The spreadsheet referred to in the article is here:   http://emergence.org/Deacon-Juarrero.pdf

Deacon wrote me the following:

 Michael,
    As of yesterday I had resolved never to again reply to your emails.    But given your last email I have broken this resolution. Indeed, I    very much want to engage in close discussion with these other    scholars working along very similar lines. Both our various points    of theoretical agreement and disagreement are likely to be    illuminative. I am indeed embarrassed that Evan’s and Alicia’s books    were not known to me at the time of writing, but you can be sure    that as I become informed by them I will of course both cite them    and make appropriate assignments of priority in all future works    (including future editions of Incomplete Nature). Parenthetically, I    should say that Mark Graves (and you will find others) participated    regularly in discussions with me, sat in on my seminar on the topic    many years ago, and has used my approach centrally in his (though I    have only superficially skimmed his book as of now). I consider him    a colleague. That being said, I think that I will find it difficult    to have any direct scholarly association with you (and probably    Alicia), given what has transpired, but I will at least read    Alicia’s work and make a good faith effort to give her credit where    due. Perhaps the passage of time will change this, perhaps not.
    Sincerely, Terry

 For additional entertainment, read the piece titled Precursors and
Prototypes under the Selected Publications tab in http://www.aliciajuarrero.com
and then read  “Eliminativism,Complexity, and Emergence” by Terrence
Deacon and Tyrone Cashman (available online).

Deacon posted at http://deadvoles.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/deacon-and-oop?replytocom=4086

“I thank you all for putting up with this. As you now recognize, there is an unacknowledged agenda being played out. I urge you all to just read the books in question, make up your own minds, and ignore the rest. Don’t take these variously biased interpretations and personal inuendos masquerading as reviews and serious criticisms to provide any useful interpretation. Let the ideas speak for themselves. ”

Juarrero wrote in 1999, 
Thompson in 2007,  
Juarrero and Deacon spoke at the same conference in 2007, 
Nancy Murphy wrote about them all in 2010

Deacon writes in 2011 with no acknowledgement.

I took a look at the spreadsheet mentioned by a poster above: 
http://emergence.org/Deacon-Juarrero.pdf and urge everyone else to do the same before making any judgments.  It’s clear that someone has an obsessive mission to assassinate Deacon’s character.  The examples they used are often laughable.  For example, they claim Deacon’s use of the terms “God of the gaps” and “mereology” were plagiarized, but they are well known concepts which were NOT minted by Juarrero.  Also,  the “plagiarized” phrases aren’t plagiarized.  I can’t really see how ”a constraint is relational” and ”Constraints are therefore relational properties” prove any plagiarism.  They’re not unique phrases and probably meant something completely different within their contexts.  Some of them are so ridiculous, like saying he used “snowflakes” and so does Juarrero, that it makes me think it’s all overzealous academic pettiness and self-importance.  Another example of the tenuous nature of the plagiarism accusation is ”for the sake of preserving the integrity and persistence…” in Deacon’s and ”acting to preserve and enhance the integrity of the higher level” in Juarrero’s. 

I don’t know Deacon personally nor have I read his book, but to accuse a scholar of plagiarism, when it’s obvious he did not, at least from the examples given in the spreadsheet, made me very angry.  Most people will not investigate for themselves and will automatically assume Deacon to be guilty, and the scandal will stay with him for a long time if not for the rest of his career.

Deacon posted more at http://deadvoles.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/deacon-and-oop/#comment-4012

I have been directed to your blog by a colleague who noticed the comments about my book and Juarrero’s spreadsheet. This is a nasty business in which Juarrero is spreading false claims suggesting that I have used her ideas without attribution. I have not. I urge you to read both books, and you will see this for yourself. Although there are indeed superficial similarities, as inevitably occurs in an area of such intense intellectual discussion, these are ultimately quite superficial. I have only recently come to read her book and her one paper on Kant in response to her tirade about not being cited, and it is now clear that I disagree with her approach in far more ways than we agree. This is not just because she is a philosopher and I am a lab scientist by training. I think that we are fundamentally driving at very different ways of explaining almost every aspect covered in my book: life, mind, sentience, consciousness, information, work, and so forth, even though we both borrow insights from dynamical systems theories and share a criticism of simple eliminative materialism. Nevertheless, once you overcome the accusatory hype of her spreadsheet and actually do compare these two approaches the differences can be quite informative and worth debating.

Ignoratio Elenchi.

I am Michael Lissack  (once upon a time a long time ago I was in municipal finance)

see my note to Terry Deacon on this issue:

Terry:
 
Four months have gone by since you and I last corresponded re Incomplete Nature and its extraordinarily liberal use of ideas which might be better cited to Juarrero and Thompson.
 
As we left off you apologized for NOT having done the background reading which would have revealed the overlap between your book and the prior works
 
You claimed to have not kept in front of mind the joint discussions you Evan and I had at Esalen or the overlap between you and Alicia at a conference where you both were keynotes and where you attended Alicia’s talk
 
We both agreed that if Incomplete Nature is NOT to be viewed as a serious academic text then the prevailing standards of citations do not necessarily apply.  Nonetheless it is your moral responsibility to supply credit where credit is due, to not falsely take credit for being the first to originate ideas which can clearly be attributed to others before you, and to NOT pervert the academic standards of the fine institution where you hold a senior chair.
 
I suggested that the best remedy would be to hold a symposium involving you Alicia and Evan where your parallel streams of thought can be explored and from which a joint academic work with full citations can be created.
 
You informed me that you had no desire to ever work with me in the future and I accepted that but reminded you of your moral obligations to Alicia and Evan.
 
To date you have done NOTHING to fulfill your moral obligations in this regard.  No symposium. No apology to Alicia.  No note to the academic community.
 
I am attaching a copy of the review of Incomplete Nature from the New York Review of Books.  The author of that review goes much further than I in suggesting either deliberate lack of citations or laziness in sourcing.
 
This is no way for a senior academic to behave.
 
I am writing as the Director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence, the research institute at which Alicia Juarrero is a senior fellow.  As a matter of academic record we MUST insist that you and UC Berkeley do something to correct the lack of citation problem. 
 
Four months of silence is not an acceptable approach.
I would appreciate a response in a timely manner

westernfields:  I am NOT claiming objectivity here.  Institutionally I am trying to right a wrong done to one of my colleagues.

Yes, it is true that misrepresentation knows no ideological bounds but for Romney to say “I have no memory of assaulting this kid in high school” makes his arrogance even more annoying. Does anyone out there think he truly does not remember?  If you agree, then I am guessing you are keen on having someone with early onset dementia in the white House.

 Socratease2:  What in the world does this have to do with this blog posting?  Regardless of its relevance, your conflated argument devolved into the ad hominem rheotric typical of drones…

Holy smokes!  Let’s start a pissing-into-the-wind contest and see who can get the other the wettest.  First, if you want to use the standard of using any word to devolve into any topic you want, then talking with a schizophrenic would be more productive (not a personal attack.  Seriously, if talking with you means that you take anything said and rabbit trail it into a discussion about whatever in the hell is on your mind, then there is no purpose to the conversation).  Second, my question elicited why the poster (munibond) was pursuing this blog so aggressively.  He seemed to have a vested interest in showing/proving that T. Deacon had engaged in intellectual dishonesty, so I simply asked.  Guess what, it was more productive then your snide political drive-by hack job.  By learning it was one of his colleagues he was advocating for, I better understood the emotion behind each of his posts; to some degree giving him greater merit and in other areas less so.  His postings also helped expand the details that were not shared in the blog.

My reference to you being a typical drone is not a personal attack.  It is, in my estimation, a matter of fact — your talking points are recycled comments entertained by all Obama supporters.  Which leads me to wonder how you are going to bend this post into a discussion on the Mayan Calendar and how a Romney victory will usher in the great apocalypse…

katisumas

We study social complexity theory — applications of the study of complex systems involving people. To paraphrase Edgar Morin: Complexity occurs when previously separate elements are organized into something new (eg a family, a firm, a group etc).  The something new is emergent (and is thus something more than  just the sum of the parts).  But, if the something new is to maintain its coherence then each of the previously discrete parts must give up some of its previous degrees of freedom (so the complex is both more and less than the some of the parts.)  The more is the emergent and is a product of enabling constraints.  The less occurs for the sake of coherence and is a product of restrictive constraints.  (Note the constraints language comes from Juarrero and the main point from Morin — unlike Deacon I cite my sources)

Failure to know sources and failure to find sources and failure to cite sources–laziness, laziness or incompetence, and evil self aggrandisement and dishonesty—are the beginning flaws that our best colleges develop into full-blown massive historic scale theft—2008 by MBAs on Wall Street disproportionately educated at top 3 colleges of business.    A few more peccaddildos and this guy will qualify for chairman of Goldman Sacks (mis-spelling intended).   

It seems as though a challenge has been set: can an idea be found in DIA which was first written about by someone else and not attributed? A lot rests on the claim in a prior comment as to the “almost brutal originality of Juarrero’s ideas.” This sound like hyperbole (and in fact a quick search of the OED indicates so, “Brutal (hyperbolical): extremely demanding of difficult.”)  
Is it correct? 

speakersbenefit

if it were only one or two or even three or four “ideas” there would be no issue.  It is the entire structure and pattern of Deacon’s argument and the examples he uses to back them up.  It is the equivalent of having seen an old movie more than a dozen times and then magically writing your own script which seems to have the same plot and funny the same visual clues why my goodness even some of the music in the background happens to coincide at similar points in the plot.  But of course despite having seen the old movie many times when asked you claim that all the thoughts were original and that any resemblances were superficial after all that movie was about WASPY housewives in Connecticut and your movie was about stressed out soccer moms in Silicon Valley.  That may be an acceptable argument in Hollywood but it is completely lacking in academic integrity.

even if you leave out Juarrero there is still the issues of Thompson and Mark Graves (funny since Graves was a colleague of Deacon’s who sat in on many a Deacon seminar that Deacon would have never had the intellectual curiosity to even open Graves’ 2008 book never mind cite it)  or Nancy Murphy’s 2010 book which refers to the 2007 conference presentations by both Juarrero and Deacon or the total lack of references after 2005 (excepting himself) in a book written and published in 2011

Berkeley has claimed it has high standards for academic integrity — unfortunately those standards are NOT embodied in the behavior of its chairman of the Anthropology department

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Right after a session on the obvious plagiarism in Martin Luther King’s dissertation.

I’ve preferred to allow a close reading of the two books and the spreadsheet to speak for themselves, but since speakersbenefit lays out this challenge, I’ll be the first to answer it. Two books I should have been aware of when I wrote Dynamics in Action: Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory Systems and especially Scott Kelso’s Dynamic Patterns. Mea culpa again to Scott (I told him as much in person in Antwerp many years ago).

Jerry Fodor chimes in via the London Review of Books see http://emergence.org/Fodor-Deacon-LRB.pdf

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“My reference to you being a typical drone is not a personal attack.”

Yes, and war is peace and freedom is slavery. Good luck in the coming Rompocalypse.

Plagiarism is no excuse when all you have to do is be honest.  However, how many times have individuals come up with words that they honestly thought were really their own?  No one is perfect.

Watch out straw men, Jerry is on the attack again!

Deacon seems to think it is personal rather than a matter of academic integrity.  His inability or unwillingness to actually discuss what he believes to be differences between his work and that of Juarrero and Thompson unfortunately speaks volumes.  I am sure the academic community would welcome such a discussion (Juarrero says X, I say Y, Thompson says Z, I say A).  Instead we get the following:

On 5/22/12 4:48 AM, “deacon@berkeley.edu” wrote:
> Dear colleagues,>> You are one of hundreds who have received emails about me and my work> from Michael Lissack. I have compiled this long list of emails from only one> of his many broadcast emails to anyone he believes might be susceptible to> his game of slander. I do not know if you have received other defaming emails> from him, but if you have, you have probably guessed that he has> decided to do everything he can to defame me to you my many colleagues> throughout the world and to use his ill-gotten millions to both attack my> scholarship and my character in a very public and vicious way.>> As for the reviews of my book that he selects to broadcast, I do not mind> that some  people consider my new book threatening enough to want to critique> it. Indeed, such intellectual heat suggests to me that I have struck a> nerve. I think that it is becoming obvious that they do protest too much.> And this I hope will get people to read it and judge for themselves. I> have no doubt that my work will stand the test of time, for its> originality, scholarship, and significance. So I welcome serious> comparison and criticism.>> But I write for another reason.> Mr. Lissack is engaging in a ruthless campaign of character assassination.> If this is the first email you have received from him, it almost certainly> won’t be the last. Now that he has your email on his list I have little> doubt that he will continue to send you whatever he can find to defame me> in your eyes. Besides sending emails to hundreds of recipients like yourself> that he hopes will innocently spread his accusations without checking, he> has influenced the publication of scathing reviews and has spread rumors> of scandal to many sites and journal editors. He is savvy and without> scruples and he has very deep pockets.>> Those of you who know me will see this for what it is – a form of> intellectual slander – and I hope will not let it pass. But for those who> don’t know me I urge you to not let this kind of thing go unchallenged. If> we let the likes of people like Lissack succeed in infiltrating the world> of scholarship with this kind of personal vendetta masquerading as> intellectual dispute it will open the door to a very ugly future. Will> careful analysis and serious debate over ideas be replaced by character> attacks, scandalous inuendos, and disinformation in an effort to discredit> the work of others? We have come to accept this dishonesty in our> politics. I hope that we will reject it in the the pursuit of knowledge.> You don’t have to know me or know my work to stand against this. This use> of the electronic media to spread disinformation and invent scandal in> order to destroy one’s opponents is a growing danger that we dare not> ignore. I am the target today, but … Please do not be complicit by your> silence.>> Thank you.> Sincerely, Terry Deacon>

Sure, sometimes great minds think alike with respect to exciting, new ideas. Newton and Leibniz on the calculus, and Darwin and Wallace on natural selection. Note, though, that Darwin DID refer to Wallace in The Origin of Species. Darwin came up with the crucial ideas first BUT once he knew that someone else had arrived at a similar set of notions, he publicly acknowledged as much. Let’s suppose that Professor Deacon was not much influenced by others in formulating the main ideas in his new book. Still, once it was brought to his attention that others had written along similar lines, he ought to have acknowledged that fact and explained how his own views, while resembling these other theories in some respects, differed from them, too.

Deacon posted the following at:
http://joyuscrynoid.hubpages.com/hub/DeaconIncompleteNature-Review.

Terrence Deacon 17 hours agoDear Joyous Crynoid,Though I generally avoid interacting in blog forums, I feel the need to do so here. You have done an excellent job of reviewing my book. One of the best that I’ve read so far. Thank you for working so hard to accurately summarize my reasoning and to make the effort to try to understand the motivations behind this approach. And I also appreciate your divulging your own theoretical bias as well. I think that the interesting contrasts and parallels you draw are illuminating, even though they are unlikely to alter our divergent metaphysical commitments.But I am mostly writing because I wish you had applied same level of careful analysis to the highly charged claims and pseudo-evidence sent to you by Lissack and Juarrero before including it at the end of your review. I wish you had actually read her book and done the comparison for yourself rather than just accepting it a face value. Unfortunately, by following up your careful and detailed review by merely parroting their claims and passing on their suggested URLs without a similarly careful comparison I feel that you have done me and your readers a disservice.Though I had not read her book prior to finishing my book, I have been reading her work since. She has indeed done excellent work synthesizing Kant, dynamical systems theory, and issues of consciousness. It is now clear that she recognized some of these connections well before me. But it will not take a very detailed reading to notice that our assumptions, arguments, and purposes are ultimately quite different. I don’t harbor the illusion that my ideas have never been entertained before by others. Indeed, I suspect that intellectual synchronicity is the rule not the exception, though the stronger claims of identity are easy to refute if one reads the books.Having done such a careful job explaining exactly how my analysis demonstrates the inadequacy of the dynamical systems approach, you wii easily be able to recognize a critical difference. Juarrero ultimately believes that dynamical systems thinking is sufficient. Her work relies heavily on ideas that are quite opposite from those that are at the heart of my work — Ideas like Wholes being more that the sum of their parts, wholes constraining their parts, top-down causality, and her assumption that autocatalysis (=autopoiesis) exemplifies the basic logic behind life and mind. Thus the morphodynamic / teleodynamic distinction which is so central to my theory is not even recognized in her work. So whereas I argue that we need to go beyond the dynamical systems paradigm if we are to make progress toward understanding the distinctiveness of life and mind, she does not.There are, of course, a great many other problems that I struggle with that are not discussed in her book, and many philosophical issues that concern her but do not interest me. Perhaps some of the differences in focus can be traced to the difference between a scientific and a philosophical approach, and even our difference in philosophical commitments are likely relevant — her’s with Kant, mine with Peirce.I have no problem admitting that there are a large number of thinkers pursuing similar paths that I have overlooked in my preparations (some of which you also identify). At some point one needs to decide when to stop reading and get something down on paper. The relevant literature is vast when you consider the scope of my book — from emergence theory to thermodynamics to systems theory to origins of life and DNA to work to reformulating information theory to grounding semiotics to speculating about the nature of mind — and I believe that my citations and references reflect a serious effort to do this vast sweep of topics justice. Inevitably I did not read or cite many relevant books and papers that a more encyclopedic work might have. Since the publication of the book I have been been trying to follow up on these many suggestions of parallel theories and competing paradigms, and I am indeed finding this to be a rich field, though sadly more in philosophy than in the sciences. I notice for example that recently many quite notable philosophers of science have struggled with the comparison between Kant’s notion of self-organization and the modern dynamical systems view — as does Juarrero — however the majority seem to have also overlooked her work as I have. So I agree that her work deserves better attention than it has received.Despite this effort to attack my academic integrity, I will treat Juarrero’s work with the intellectual respect it deserves. For example, I have recently submitted a paper (already accepted for publication) in which I explore some of the similarities and differences between our theories as well as discussing how both approaches compare with a few others whose work was not discussed in my book (e.g. Thompson). Perhaps this reflects my naive trust in the old ideal of published intellectual discourse, focused on ideas, pursued in academic venues.In the mean time I reiterate my request: please take the time do the comparison yourself, and with the same care that you have exhibited in this review of my book. Yes there are similarities, but I am certain that with similar attention to detail your appraisal of the independence and originality of my work will not suffer by such a comparison. And it may even provide an interesting subject for a future blog ;-)Thank you.Sincerely, Terry Deacon

The latest to and from Berkeley.

Professor Broughton
 
We are indeed alleging the intentional misappropriation of the writings of others.  While my email to Prof. Deacon of Jan 27 suggested that the word plagiarism was too strong (where I take plagiarism in its literal sense to be the use of exact langauge) the idea chains and overlaps with Juarrero Thompson etc are too strong to have been mere coincidence.
 
My January 27th email was written in attempt to arrive at an acceptable compromise.  Professor Deacon has rejected that compromise.  My investigations subsequent to January 27th lead me to the inescapable conclusion that Deacons’ actions were either intentional or grossly negligent.  To claim originality and uniqueness in the face of overwhelming evidence that neither is the case is simply DISHONEST.  If it is your (and thus the University’s) policy to consider violations of intellectual honesty to not include continual repetition of claims of originality which are incorrect and fail to make proper attribution then it is a sad day for academic integrity.  Integrity includes apologizing for negligence.
 
We at ISCE are firmly of the belief that Terrence Deacon has violated any reasonable standard of academic integrity and has INTENTIONALLY misappropriated the works of others which he has then claimed as his own without attribution.  Your Code of Conduct includes the following standards which we believe Professor Deacon has violated “Professors make every reasonable effort to foster honest academic conduct. They accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge. They practice intellectual honesty.”
We are of the opinion Terrence Deacon has NOT been intellectually honest.  The University may desire to avoid dealing with this issue for political and budgetary reasons.  That quite frankly is its own violation of intellectual honesty
 
Once again I implore you to actually read the works in question.  The overlap and appropriation will be obvious (as they were to Thompson, McGinn, Fodor, Juarrero and James Coffman).
 
please acknowledge receipt of the above and please confirm that you understand that indeed we are formally accusing Terrence Deacon of intentional misappropriation.
 
as one of my research fellows stated “In my estimation, Terrence Deacon, whom I have never met, is a liar and a thief who stole from the work of others, including me, thinking that    he could get away with it.  Now that he has been caught, he is playing the victim, frantically backpedaling in a desperate effort to save his reputation.”
 
please note further that your tentative decision below may be of legal standing as far as UC Berkeley goes but that we will continue to do what we can to get this matter of academic integrity addressed, the University can play whatever role it likes in that effort, but the effort will continue until the matter has been corrected with or without the University’s cooperation
 
I feel a need to copy this note rather broadly.

On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Janet Broughton wrote:

Dear Mr. Lissack,

This responds to your various communications regarding Professor Terrence Deacon and his book /Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter./After careful review of the material you provided, I have concluded that the information available to me does not warrant appointment of an Investigative Officer under our campus faculty disciplinary procedures.The conduct you have alleged would not constitute a violation of the University of California’s Faculty Code of Conduct.

The Code defines unacceptable conduct in the realm of scholarship to include “[v]iolations of canons of intellectual honesty, such as research misconduct and/or intentional misappropriation of the writings, research, and findings of others.”UC Berkeley policy defines “research misconduct” as “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism.” You have not alleged fabrication or falsification; thus an allegation of either plagiarism or intentional misappropriation of writings, research, or findings of others would be required to constitute a basis for appointment of an Investigative Officer.In the communications you have sent me, however, you have expressly disclaimed making allegations of plagiarism or intentional misappropriation.For example, in your January 27, 2012 e-mail to Professor Deacon you wrote that “use of ‘plagiarism’ was much too strong a word.I regret the pain which my use of the word must have caused you.The way forward here is NOT to evoke that word.”In the same email, you stated: “I do believe (and have from the beginning) that you have not done anything here with nefarious intent.”

You have proposed that Professor Deacon should publicly acknowledge certain contributions of other scholars and should participate in seminars with those scholars.Please be aware that if Professor Deacon should decline to take these steps, this would not subject him to disciplinary action.

Finally, your May 22, 2012 email states that the Institute for Study of Coherence and Emergence “is making this complaint as the copyright holder.”In your May 23 email you state that “we at ISCE believe this to be a matter of ethics and integrity more than a matter of law.”My understanding is thus that ISCE is not raising a legal claim of copyright infringement.If I am wrong about that, please let me know, and I will ask the University’s lawyers to respond.

Sincerely yours,

Janet BroughtonVice Provost for the Faculty