A Digital Library Guru Discusses New Rules on Sharing Scientific Data

It is precisely because there are commercial applications for National Weather Service data that they’re not freely available to the public. Academics have access to more of their data than the public through a special dispensation.

Libraries have seen this in the past with govt. products like STAT USA (now deceased) and FBIS. Once collected into databases with a mandate to recoup costs, access was restricted to either a librarian logged in secret password, or commercial subscription only.

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.    

There is still a market, I suspect, for writers willing to pen such letters for others to send, or even to speak directly on their behalf.  I got the part of Cyrano on stage as a senior in high school in part because I had been known for polishing up the sweet nothings of classmates–the Abe Burows of love notes.   But more than the words themselves, the decline of love letters has probably been a consequence of the decline of penmanship.  These days hardly anyone (myself included) can “write a good hand,” and a typed love letter, even converted to a fancy font, just won’t do.  Even in those old high school days when guys copied my suggestions in their own handwriting for authenticity they were often so struck by the disjuncture between the sentiments and penmanship that they couldn’t go through with sending the note.  I did make sure I got my dollar first.  

It seems to me that many confuse civility with servility. I think you’re on target with the reference to deference (rhyme unintentional): it’s a tricky business to acknowledge the rights of others while maintaining one’s own, but civilization seems to me worth the effort to treat others as we want to be treated. And of course, there’s that matter of enforcement.

Well done, Mr. Thrift. 

“Civility without deference” is an instructive summary. One of your many ideas worthy of extensive discussion is: “The problem for universities is that they were set up precisely to attempt to debate without anger and to respect others’ differing opinions about complex issues with the intention of generating better questions, not simple answers.”

My university failed. Friends at other institutions have experienced similar failures at their schools. I have documented a few failures in my research that originally started with opportunities for our university community to debate important issues that came to the attention of colleagues. They were fired or chased off. I’m married to an excellent, tough attorney who protected me from the wrath of intolerant administrators and their ally colleagues. They were supported, for all practical purposes, with the unlimited resources of the Institutions of Higher Learning, State of Mississippi. They spent approximately $2,500,000 to fire me. They failed.

Therefore, I have a continuing right to speak and write without fear and in a civil manner without deference. That privilege was earned, not granted by the University of Southern Mississippi. Thanks to my courageous wife and friends I am still a tenured full professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. Has the school learned civility without the insistence of deference from faculty? No. 

If you are interested in details of the incivility and intolerance of the University of Southern Mississippi we reported in our research projects, see: Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA (Accounting with a minor in Logic and Ethics), Professor, School of Accountancy, College of Business, University of Southern Mississippi. Recent academic research: http://ssrn.com/author=397169; Novels found at Amazon: Rufus McCoy and Profiteers in the Ivory Tower, and TobaccoPharm, A Divine and Deadly Green Factory. Editor, http://www.usmnews.net

Is civility really breaking down, or is discourse only disrespectful when women and minorities speak? I am reminded of an outburst during one of Obama’s speeches. To my knowledge, that has not happened to a white president since perhaps the 1800s (when debates at the national level were much less sedate affairs). With regards to Fluke’s testimony, Limbaugh’s attack on her was not just disrespectful but virulently misogynist. It seems to me that disrespectful speech is just another way to silence traditionally disenfranchised people.   

 I don’t have any hard data but it seems like quite a stretch to turn this into a racist or feminist issue. Virtually all of the churlish public behavior has been generated by extremists on both sides toward the other side. As an example, Limbaugh’s attack on Fluke would constitute perhaps 1% of his monthly quota of meanspirited behavior, most of it directed at president Obama and other Democrats and liberals, only a few of whom are female. Ditto for the many examples that come to mind in Congress. I don’t doubt that closet racism accounts for some of the whacko emails that are distributed against Obama but the ideologues are going after the ideology, not the race. You need only look back on the shamefully impolite way many CHE posters behaved with respect to president Bush to see an example on the other side.

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

well, teenagers nowadays are not so polite, they smoke in the public place, talk dirty in school and play world of warcraft, buy wow gold paypal from lootdude, hang around with prostitude, they are bad now

Or like Obama…

I further note that Deacon’s citations stop in 2005 except for references to his own work  (which seems strange for a book published at the end of 2011) and that Deacon and Juarrero were both keynotes at a 2007 conference in Cancun where Deacon was observed attending Juarrero’s talk.

Senior academics have a responsibility to properly cite the works of others and to be aware of the efforts of others whose research and writing addresses their own.  The example Deacon sets is that negligence, sloppiness, and perhaps deliberate ignorance are proper scholarship.  UC Berkeley should be ashamed of setting such an example.

For a picture of Deacon and Juarrero sitting together at a conference in Cancun see
http://isce.edu/speakers-at-ctns-stars-mtg-jan-2007.jpg

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.

Thanks.  Since I have not read any of the books I cannot speak to the alleged overlap.  But your supposed communication with him addressing the lack of citation(s) certainly makes his originality of thought suspect.  At the same time, the force behind your aggression toward this issue is revealed by the proximity you have with the other(s) involved, thereby making your perspective a little less objective.

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

At least Obama recalls giving that girl a shove in high school.  Remembered bullying is so much better, right?

DF

academic integrity seems to be getting the short shrift in your world

It is really quite simple.  Regardless of whether Deacon intentionally “borrowed” or not at best he was lazy or sloppy in looking at literature which he should have looked at IN THE NAME OF HIS OWN INTEGRITY before publishing an academic work.  Lazy, negligent or deliberate ends up in the same place — his work is FALSELY taking credit for ORIGINATING ideas which began with the work of others.  Deacon has every right to claim that he “built upon” those ideas.  If he wants claim to have been ignorant of them at the time of writing he surely is not ignorant of them now.  So give Juarrero, Thompson, Graves and Murphy their due acknowledgement.

This “affair” is only “messy” because Deacon refuses to even acknowledge that the others’ work SHOULD HAVE BEEN ACKNOWLEDGED and for whatever reason was not.  The “great man” is unwilling to acknowledge error and instead is claiming that it is he who is hurt by the fuss being raised.

It is very similar to Bill Clinton lying to the country about Monica Lewinsky and then refusing to admit that he made a mistake.  That seemed to require getting impeached and putting the country through a huge trauma when a simple apology would have sufficed.

Those who are “defending” Deacon should give pause to think about what their position says about academic integrity and about the idea of generosity of spirit.  Clearly hubris seems to be rearing its ugly head when a bit of humility would work much much better.

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

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Baloney Dr. Spitzer, no “scientific” research. The gay community forced the APA brass to drop the Homosexuality diagnosis. The occasion was the 1973 APA convention in San Francisco: the gay community got control of the convention site infrastructure and and demanded the APA drop the homosexual diagnosis or else no convention. The APA brass complied immediately.  Nothing “scientific”, but political force. 
More to be done with the rest of the APA  300 plus ”scientific” diagnosis!!!

 Huh. I had no idea the “gay community” had such power. I wonder when I’ll get my secret decoder ring?

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 Please prove that statement.

I agree with anon1972. The apology is accepted, It’s fitting, appropriate, and overdue. But Spitzer should not expect us to hold a parade for him. His work speaks for itself and the apology is a footnote.

http://conservativecolloquium.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/homosexual-activists-intimidate-american-psychiatric-association-into-removing-homosexuality-from-list-of-disorders/
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/204/81-words
http://www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=1220

Woodstock, I’ve read the sources you cite, and they don’t support your statements.  You seem to be confusing the disruptions that took place at the 1970 APA convention in San Francisco and the non-disruptive events that took place at the 1973 APA convention in Honolulu.  There is no reference in any of your sources to any attempt to shut down or otherwise interfere with the 1973 convention.  The segment from “This American Life” seemed to be the most detailed and even-handed account of the 1973 events.

Time marches on. I, for one, am grateful that Dr. Spitzer had the grace to do this.

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!

Cheers to both sides for conducting a fact-based argument. 

To recap: a claim was made. A challenge was issued. Citations were requested and links were supplied. Those links were read, analyzed, and responded to. Informed discussion being scarcer than unobtanium today, I feel compelled to draw attention and praise to even this one small but perfect example. Kudos!

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