A review of postings about scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, with observations regarding elite centrism – Part 1: behind “publish or perish”

Issues concerning scientific integrity and intellectual honesty have been given much attention in my blogging and social media posting, from the very beginning.

Here is the opening of my first blog post, dated January 29, 2009:

“It was eleven years before the New Millennium, in February 1989 only several months with my Mathematics Ph.D. degree out of the University of California, Berkeley, when the notion “Mathematics for the New Century” circulating in the mathematics community made a strong impression on me. A larger public-relations campaign was soon launched by then President George H. W. Bush and the U.S. state governors, spearheaded by a few including Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, for what would become the first National Education Summit held in September 1989 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where it was declared that, among other objectives, U.S. high school students would be leading the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000. Subsequent efforts would lead to the Goals 2000 project later signed into law in 1994 as a centerpiece of President Bill Clinton’s education reform.

In 1989 I was a computer science faculty member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, as an educator and researcher generally interested in good news for education and particularly impressed by declaration of lofty goals and projects to achieve them. Education, however, was often trumped by other more ominous or more urgent matters, such as the Gulf War in 1991; or at least that was what I would presume. But press archives indicate that on January 17, 1991, the day of the launch of Operation Desert Storm, or what Iraqi president Saddam Hussein called “Mother of all Battles”, President Bush, Sr. actually met with his education advisory panel to hear about creating national standards for student performance, though he made no commitments on their proposal at the time according to panel member and former U.S. secretary of labor William Brock.

Having grown up a peaceful child and done Ph.D. study under someone who happened to have a past background of vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War, I tended to look into things via more idealistic, less bombastic lenses, and my presumption could sometimes be quite naïve. The peaceful and beautiful British Columbia where I had moved to in 1988 was not all reclusive when it came to U.S. politics: the city of Nelson,B.C. was well-known as a haven for many of the Vietnam-era “draft dodgers”, and U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Catherine Glaspie, who was in the news over the controversy of exactly what the U.S. government told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 just days before his launching invasion of Kuwait, was originally from Vancouver.”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 1)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As my very first blog post indicated, in the late 1980s – early 1990s when I was in the academic fields of mathematics and computer science, “Mathematics for the New Century” was a captivating slogan, and both U.S. President George Bush, Sr. and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton championed math and science education in the first National Education Summit in 1989, that later led to the Goals 2000 project signed into law in 1994 by then U.S. President Clinton.

But as my post also showed, other matters of urgency could trump education, math and science education in particular – matters such as the Gulf War of 1991, which the United States launched to evict the Iraqi army of the Saddam Hussein regime out of Kuwait, even if Bush did not entirely forget education.

My post also pointed out that not everything was back-and-white in the picture of a war against a stereotype bad guy: U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Catherine Glaspie was in the news over the controversy of exactly what the U.S. government told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 just days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Well, someone may have lacked intellectual honesty and misrepresented something, and it became a part of the context, albeit a largely overlooked part, of the Persian Gulf conflict.

But that was politics and foreign relations, not science or education.

Over a year later in April 2010 I extended from blogging to social media presentation on Facebook. In my first posting on a Facebook community page I created, “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, I excerpted the above-quoted part of my first blog post, as well as what happened to Goals 2000 by the year 2000:

“When the new century, or rather the New Millennium as it was referred to by then, finally drew close the views on progress towards it were by no means universal. Some in fact were quite critical about perceived lack of progress in education despite the efforts: at the eve of the New Millennium, then The New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein described the movement toward “Goals 2000” as a failure’s shutout victory over the United States.”

(“Tumbling and fumbling toward the New Millennium – a look back”, April 24, 2010, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

As quoted, The New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein considered Goals 2000 a failure’s victory, that ambitious goals were not accomplished at all by the time the Clinton era was greeting the New Millennium; he described it:

“The goals were these: By 2000, all children will start school ready to learn; 90 percent will graduate from high school; all will demonstrate competency over challenging subject matter in English, math, science, foreign languages, civics, economics, the arts, history and geography; the United States will be first in the world in math and science; all adults will be literate; no school will have drugs, violence, firearms or alcohol; teachers will have needed skills; all schools will get parents involved.

Faced with unmet goals, it’s easy to maintain that sincere effort was all that mattered. That is the approach taken by the National Education Goals Panel, an agency run by governors, members of Congress, state legislators and federal education officials. Ducking accountability, the panel earlier this year proposed changing the name “Goals 2000” to “America’s Education Goals,” dropping any mention of deadlines. Then, in its 1999 report, it stated that its “bold venture” had worked, because the goals had “helped stimulate reforms.””

(“LESSONS; ‘Goals 2000’ Score: Failure 8, U.S. 0”, by Richard Rothstein, December 22, 1999, The New York Times)

Rothstein considered it a political failure as much as an education failure:

“The very leaders who set these national goals now demand accountability from districts and schools: principals and teachers should suffer consequences for not meeting state targets that sprang from the nationwide goals. But when national leaders fall short of goals, why do they not face similar sanctions? Policy makers’ lack of candor about the irresponsible way the goals were set can breed local educators’ contempt for the entire standards movement.”

(Richard Rothstein, December 22, 1999, The New York Times)

In April 2010 my new Facebook community page’s title was fittingly about science and education progress. It was also about “New Millennium Bugs”, but what were “New Millennium Bugs”?

My first blog post and the Facebook excerpt mentioned it:

“Just before the New Millennium began I was joining the Silicon Valley in California (after another stint as an educator at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu), arriving at the high-tech world among the dot-com and venture-capitalism rushes, which I wasn’t really part of. The ominous notion someone like me read and heard daily about the New Millennium at the time was not failure of education, but fears for Y2K (also called the ‘millennium bug’), and the tremendous amount of government and corporate efforts being made (and of course money being spent) to prevent disasters from materializing out of tiny numerical ‘legacies’ of computer programs. It was reported that one man in Ontario, Canada, had been preparing for the potential doomsday scenario for 20 years, burying 42 school buses deep underground as a home for himself.”

(April 24, 2010, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

Basically, in old computer programs the year in 4 decimal digits had been represented by only 2, e.g., 1989 as 89 and 1999 as 99, and there were fears that when 2000 came as 00 calculations would go wrong and catastrophes would strike where computers were relied on. It was called “Y2K”.

The U.S. government spent $8.5 billion, upgrading computer systems and software, to avoid potential Y2K disasters.

(“Federal Y2K glitches compiled”, by Brian Friel, January 13, 2000, Government Executive)

As in the above cited article, when year 2000 arrived there were only minor glitches, some described in my post:

“… The U.S. government later reported only a number of small technical glitches at the moment of the arrival of the millennium, such as: on the Naval Observatory web page the date read “19100”, the alarm systems at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston malfunctioned, a federal facility security access system in Nebraska was stuck in the open position, a Federal Aviation Administration system stopped processing some notices to airmen, an automatic backup system at the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center failed to activate, a fire alarm system at a Financial Management Service office in Kansas was falsely activated, also in Kansas a lock failed at a Food and Drug Administration leased facility, and a Chicago-area bank stopped electronic transfers of Medicare payments to healthcare providers; in the end only oddly behaving malfunctions like the above, without any obvious disaster, yet all the while in Guam the processing of federal food-stamp benefits was being carried out manually because the systems there were not Y2K-compliant.”

(April 24, 2010, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

Back in 2000 I had the feeling that the Y2K concerns were overblown. But then something else soon happened and was real, as I recalled in a late 2009 blog post, excerpted in my second post on the Facebook page:

“And on New Year’s Eve 2000 when the New Millennium was knocking at humanity’s door, there were few lofty yet well-defined and well-publicized goals for the world community to stride for befitting the euphoria, but instead fears about Y2K which turned out to be over-worrying. Then soon hard-to-believe destructions happened to the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, and the world saw that at least Al Qaeda was likely real.”

(“Was the New Millennium here? Barack Obama didn’t quite think so”, April 24, 2010, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

“Al Qaeda was likely real” and so, once again, war trumped things like education – this time under U.S. President George Bush, Jr. as I noted in my first blog post:

“In any case, when it came to the junior president Bush, the facts have appeared solid that he was more willing to let other issues such as education be trumped by his focus on fighting terrorism: another summit in the National Education Summit series first started in 1989 by his father George Bush, Sr., was held on October 10, 2001 and the U.S. president was a no-show, as were a large number of state governors, drawing criticism from a key sponsor of the event, then IBM chairman Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.; many of those who did attend this 2001 summit soon after 9/11, including then Gov. Gary Locke of Washington and then Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, deplored the poor state of minority-student education in the United States and the widening gap in performance between white and minority students.”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

So that was a rationale for my naming this Facebook community page “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, namely that science and education need to be on solid grounds and to make good progress, in order to uncover and eliminate “bugs” that otherwise might obstruct, or even ruin, humanity’s progress toward a better future.

In the academia, excellence of scholarly pursue, scientific research included, has traditionally been measured by a scholar’s body of publications in both its quantity and its quality.

The saying, “publish or perish”, reflects what is demanded of an academic as well as the competitiveness of the academic environment. The academia being relatively autonomous in the broader society, there has been a tendency by academics to explain themselves to the outside entirely in this context.

But such explanations could actually be counter-scientific, as philosophical as they may be.

A personal story early in my academic political activism, in 1992 when I had been actively questioning the management style of my boss, Computer Science Head Maria Klawe at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, illustrated this point.

My job there ended at the end of June 1992 amid the dispute and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was called to evict me from the office on July 2. Then on August 24 in the city of Montreal, Quebec, Concordia University faculty member Valery Fabrikant gunned down several colleagues in an escalating dispute that had involved credits for scholarly publications but now had his job on the line. Two days later, UBC Faculty Association President William Bruneau was quoted in Kitsilano News, blaming the “publish or perish” mentality for both the Fabrikant murders and two local disputes including mine, and calling them “consequences of Reaganism and Thatcherism of the 1980s”:

“The local story in the community newspaper, Kitsilano News, sounded even worse, not because of the local violence the story claimed but as a result of UBC Faculty Association President William Bruneau’s excessive politicizing, who made it sound like the conservative policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher caused people to fear losing their jobs and to resort to violence:

“A Montreal professor who shot to death three of his colleagues this week was affected by the same “publish or perish” mentality behind two violent incidents involving University of B.C. professors in the last 18 months, says UBC Faculty Association president Bill Bruneau.

…

“He had to be dragged from his office,” Bruneau said. “It was related to the level of pressure on the campus.”

…

Staff Sgt. Bern Jansen of the RCMP’s university detachment confirmed that a former faculty member was held in police custody for a short time in early July after refusing to leave his office…

“Tenure issues are pretty big here,” Jansen said. “But we’ve never had anything anywhere near as big as the Concordia event.”

“There’s a lot of personality issues that takes place here – it’s just like any other community.”

…

In an interview Tuesday, Bruneau said the Concordia shootings recalled the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre, in which Marc Lepine fatally shot 14 women engineering students. The rising level of violence in society is a concern to academics: “Universities are supposed to be concerned with reason and compassion.”

…

The university incidents point to a larger social question: “People are terrified they are going to lose their jobs – it’s a consequence of the 1980s, Reaganism and Thatcherism.””

So someone like me trying peaceful academic politics was now bundled – though my name wasn’t released – with Valery Fabrikant as causing “violent incidents” in universities.

…”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 5) — when law enforcement considerations reflect entrenched interests”, February 20, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Bill Bruneau expressed everything in the rightful way from his faculty association president position, that the academia was about “publish or perish”, and when violence occurred Reaganism and Thatcherism were to blame in the views of the politically left-leaning Canadian academics.

This was not limited to his faculty association role, or later his role as president of Canadian Association of University Teachers, but an academic specialty of Bruneau’s, who was also a scholar on Bertrand Russell. In the same February 20, 2012 blog post I also quoted from a scholarly book of Bruneau’s:

“Bill Bruneau’s political hyperbole seemed a righteous grandstand from his position, but it could do more harm to a former member of his faculty association like me. Bruneau would continue to pound on similar issues, including writing a book:

“Performance indicators have a long history. But it is no accident that PIs became the vogue in the Thatcher/Reagan era and beyond—one part of the movement to transform universities into business corporations complete with  CEOs and the top-down structures favoured by the business community. … In the end the result has been the exact opposite—the imposition of costly and highly centralized bureaucracies onto the university system, and the triumph of a right-wing nomenklatura.”

Wasn’t it a little hypocritical when the faculty association president, later president of Canadian Association of University Teachers, and also a Bertrand Russell scholar, effectively denied about a local management flaw while denouncing, in his publications, the wrong management theory for the world according to him?”

(February 20, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Bruneau’s logic seemed both scholarly solid and politically righteous, that Reaganism and Thatcherism were business oriented and performance focused. But unfortunately as applied to my case it was lacking in the disposition of scientific inquisition, and simply untrue: in the Kitsilano News story, the police at UBC did not confirm any violence; and as in Part 4 of my blog-post series where Part 5 is quoted above, in June 1992 the faculty association had held a hearing on my grievance about Klawe’s management-style problems – so the association president should know that it was not about “publish or perish” mentality on my part.

Almost two decades later in 2009-2010, nothing had changed for the better as UBC and RCMP never acknowledged any mistake on the part of the management, and probably for the worse for me because by then Klawe was a much more powerful figure in the academia and the computer science field: in Part 4 of the quoted blog-post series I noted that after the start of my blogging in 2009, she became a board director of Microsoft Corporation.

It was about 10 years into the New Millennium as in the title of my first blog post, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”; but the academia in its core thinking continued to defer to the established prestige for its sense of judgment.

This was illustrated by an August 1, 2012 article in The Scientist magazine, summarized and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, critical of the recent open-access model of scientific publication that has loosened the peer review process:

“… the open-access movement is producing an almost boomtown-like increase in the number of scholarly open-access publishers, fostered by a very low barrier to entrance into the learned publishing industry. To become a scholarly publisher, all you need now is a computer, a website, and the ability to create unique journal titles.

Bolstering this trend is the so-called “gold open-access” model, in which publishing is supported not by subscription fees but by author fees. …

This increase in the number of open-access journals has major implications for scholarly publishing. Authors become the publishers’ customers, an arrangement that creates a conflict of interest: the more papers a publisher accepts, the more revenue it earns.

Not surprisingly, acceptance rates at gold open-access journals are skyrocketing, and article peer review is decreasing. Scholarly communication is now flooded with hundreds of thousands of new, second-rate articles each year, burdening conscientious researchers who have to sort through them all, filtering out the unworthy ones.

Exploiting the trend is an increasing number of what I define as “predatory” publishers—those that unprofessionally exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit. These publishers use deception to appear legitimate, entrapping researchers into submitting their work and then charging them to publish it. Some prey especially on junior faculty and graduate students…

…

The implications for tenure and promotion are significant. Previously, traditional publishers played a validation role: if an article appeared in a journal of a respected publisher, generally everyone accepted it as quality work worthy of publication. Now, predatory publishers assign lofty titles to their journals, making the task of judging a tenure candidate’s list of publications much more complicated. Sadly, a few academics are gaming the new system, exploiting the scholarly vanity press to buy prestige.”

(“Predatory Publishing”, by Jeffrey Beall, August 1, 2012, The Scientist, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

While no doubt a “boomtown-like” atmosphere and lesser-quality publications come with an expanded journal publishing landscape, in my view the proper context needs to be understood: traditional publishers did charge author fees but the fees were small, not the main source of revenue; the emergence of the “gold open-access” model is likely partly due to increased availability of research funding that can cover publication costs, besides easier public access to journals without paying for subscriptions.

A journal’s dependence on author fees can be incentive for laxer peer review. But in a similar logic the tenure system, in part intended to protect academic freedom, can mean disincentive to scholarly productivity once a scholar has mustered enough – most reliably with publications in traditionally respected journals as in the above quote – to secure tenure at an academic institution.

Another The Scientist article in late August 2012, also summarized and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, proposed an effective remedy to inadequate peer review and inadequate quality in open-access publications, through making peer review open-access:

“The Research Works Act, which made the rounds of the US Congress earlier this year, brought the question of access to the fore and motivated scientists to become activist in their support for open-access publishing. Many universities (for example Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco) have strongly urged their researchers towards open access, and, in the first nationwide push in the same direction, the British Government announced a couple of weeks ago that all publicly funded research will be published open access by 2014.

There has been a rising tide of blog posts, seminars, and workshops discussing the problems of the peer review system, with numerous proposals being floated for how to fix it, and also much discussion about the need for more openness and transparency, particularly with respect to the data behind research findings. …

…

At F1000, we believe that if everything is out in the open, then biases will lose their power and errors will quickly be addressed and discussed. Furthermore, the contributions of referees, whose role in improving published science is vital, can be publicly acknowledged and formally recognized as important and valuable outputs.

The F1000 Research publication model works as follows: New submissions go through a rapid internal pre-publication check and are then published immediately, labeled clearly as “Awaiting Peer Review.” Expert referees are then invited to review the submissions and are asked to do two things: first, assign a quick “Approved” … “Not Approved” … or “Approved with Reservations” … status within a matter of days. The paper’s status will be prominently displayed along with the referee’s name. Second, referees are asked to write a more standard referee report that they sign and publish alongside the article (this is optional if the referee status provided in the first step was “Approved”). Authors are then encouraged to revise their articles in response to the referee’s comments and each article version will be separately accessible and citable.”

(“Opinion: Transparency in Science Publishing”, by Rebecca Lawrence, August 28, 2012, The Scientists, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

I can think of a few minor problems with this open-access peer review system: the quick-response requirement, when referees typically take on peer review as additional work to their scientific activities; the referee’s no-report option if the recommendation is approval, when even experts can act lax; and the open display of all revisions of a paper, intimidating to potential authors who prefer to be known for their satisfactory final product.

Other than the above, this open-access pear review approach preserves the key ingredients of, and with open access does not appear inferior to, the traditional peer review.

The context of these two articles’ appearance is telling of what The Scientist editors favored.

The article on predatory publishing was in the August 2012 issue, which had a panel question-and-answer article on the future of scientific publishing, titled “Wither Science Publishing?” with a negative tone, and two other related articles, “Predatory Publishing” quoted earlier, and “Bring on the Transparency Index”, both choosing to identify open-access publishing with predatory publishing.

(“The Scientist”, August 2012, Volume 26, Issue 8)

In contrast, the August 28, 2012 article quoted above, “Opinion: Transparency in Science Publishing”, favoring open access, was not in the magazine but an opinion piece on the website of The Scientist.

The contrast illustrated that as the governments and the public embraced open access of scientific publications, The Scientist magazine was not so positive, seeing ills in the new trend.

The Scientist isn’t just any scientific publication. It was founded in 1986 as the first ‘trade magazine’ for science in the U.S.:

“Oddly enough, up to now scientists have had no equivalent to the trade papers of other professions. Physicians and attorneys have access to such papers, which keep them up to date on developments that affect their professional lives. Don’t scientists need the same kind of information, in the same kind of format? We think the answer to that question is Yes, and so we are publishing THE SCIENTIST.”

(“A Voice for the Science Professional”, by Eugene Garfield, October 20, 1986, The Scientist)

From the start, this “trade papers” inspired magazine gave plenty of coverage to government policies on science and to science policies internationally, as shown in articles in its first issue with titles such as, “Congress Hikes NIH Budget”, “Report Sees Decline In British Science”, and “Chinese Move Ahead On Science Reforms”.

(“The Scientist”, October 1986, Volume 1, Issue 1)

Another article, “New Ideas Are ‘Guilty Until Proved Innocent’”, in this founding issue strongly stated that traditional ideas should be favored over new ideas in science:

“Acceptance of any new theoretical framework depends on credibility and improvement on existing alternatives. In cases where the choice is not immediately obvious, the burden of proof generally lies with the new idea. Given a choice, the scientific community invariably sticks with the conventional wisdom. Furthermore, the older ideas have usually been around long enough to have accumulated supporting evidence, whereas the new idea rarely has much going for it, at least at first. It is not a fair game.

Despite the lack of “fairness” to new ideas, the traditional practice in science may serve us better than a more democratic mode. History shows that most new ideas fall. Science would be very confused much of the time if all new ideas were given precisely equal treatment. It is clear that the new theory is guilty until proved innocent, and the pre-existing theory is innocent until proved guilty.”

(“New Ideas Are ‘Guilty Until Proved Innocent’”, by David Raup, October 20, 1986, The Scientist)

One can read it, that “traditional practice” is better than what would be “more democratic”, and that the new theory is “guilty until proved innocent” whereas the pre-existing theory is “innocent until proved guilty”.

Not much changed from 1986 to 2012 in the mindset demonstrated by this first ‘trade magazine’ of U.S. science, and it was little wonder in 1992 in Canada a university faculty association president used the “publish or perish” mentality like a ‘veil’ to explain all academic disputes that concerned him – the tradition was it.

So while a magazine like The Scientist has been a good source of reports on scientific ideas and advances, which I frequently shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, it is by no means the best place to look for open coverage of flaws in science or fair judgment on science politics.

Next to publications, funding is a top issue for scientific research. Here, scientific biases can occur when the funding source has an interest in seeing particular types of conclusions.

On both my personal Facebook page and “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, I summarized and shared a November 2012 article from The Washington Post on a major case of such bias in the publication of research funded by pharmaceutical companies:

“For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup.

The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best.

“We now have clear evidence from a large international study that the initial use of [Avandia] is more effective than standard therapies,” a senior vice president of GlaxoSmithKline, Lawson Macartney, said in a news release.

… The trial had been funded by GlaxoSmithKline, and each of the 11 authors had received money from the company. Four were employees and held company stock. The other seven were academic experts who had received grants or consultant fees from the firm.

Whether these ties altered the report on Avandia may be impossible for readers to know. But while sorting through the data from more than 4,000 patients, the investigators missed hints of a danger that, when fully realized four years later, would lead to Avandia’s virtual disappearance from the United States:

The drug raised the risk of heart attacks.

“If you looked closely at the data that was out there, you could see warning signs,” said Steven E. Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist who issued one of the earliest warnings about the drug. “But they were overlooked.”

A Food and Drug Administration scientist later estimated that the drug had been associated with 83,000 heart attacks and deaths.”

(“As drug industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias”, by Peter Whoriskey, November 24, 2012, The Washington Post, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

Money likely spoke with this piece of scientific research work, beyond “publish or perish”; and The New England Journal of Medicine is more than any respected traditional scholarly journal, but one of the world’s most influential scientific journals – No. 9 in the 2012 Thomson Reuters journal impact factors rankings – and the leading medical journal with “highly rigorous peer-review and editing process”. It was established prestige as ultimate qualification for the Avandia drug maker GlaxoSmithKline.

(“New Impact Factors Released”, by Bob Grant, July 6, 2012, The Scientist; and, “Publication Process”, The New England Journal of Medicine)

It showed that even a preeminent peer-reviewed scientific venue is not immune to serious errors – in this case with an associated human cost of thousands of lives.

As a matter of fact, the sanctums of science and academia have never been so pure as to be separated from human flaws, not with “highly rigorous” peer review as illustrated, and not even in their great glory or established traditions.

A classic example is the popularity of occult studies, including magic and alchemy, in the glory days of the British Royal Society, practiced by prominent scientists the like of Isaac Newton, as told in a September 2012 The New York Times article summarized and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”:

“Founded in 1660, the Royal Society is the world’s oldest continuous scientific society. Newton, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and many more came together in a spirit of revolutionary if at times eccentric inquiry. Magic and alchemy greatly fascinated the society’s founders.

…

The society no longer occupies that globe-dominating perch. The United States casts a much longer shadow, with billions of dollars spent on research and industrial might; American scientists dominate many disciplines. And other nations, not least China, are gaining.

…

The society took root in the soil of revolution. More than half of its founding members favored the Parliamentary cause in the 17th-century civil war that cost Charles I his crown and then his head. During that intoxicating century, nearly everything holy, from royal rank to economics to science to the immortality of the soul, was challenged. In the early days of the Royal Society, knights and earls sat shoulder to shoulder with metalsmiths and merchants.

Though rationalists, these scientists viewed God as central to their universe and their work. As Edward Dolnick, author of “The Clockwork Universe,” an entertaining history of the early society, noted, the founders viewed the laws of nature and God as inseparable. They were mapping his universe.

The historian Christopher Hill termed this the “stop in the mind.” The scientists, philosophers and politicians of any era confront limits to their consciousness. How do you imagine a world, or even know what questions to ask, when you lack reference points?

And there is that question of magic. Society members lived in a time shadowed by apocalyptic dread, from plague to fire to war. They were fascinated by alchemy, unicorns’ horns and magic salves, and they often experimented on themselves.

“They researched the phenomena a lot, and they weren’t all wrong,” [Royal Society librarian] Mr. [Keith] Moore noted. “They knew there was an invisible world.”

Critics attacked Newton as an occultist for theorizing about gravity, as it was unseen and not mechanical. (Over his lifetime, he would write far more pages on biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on math and science.) Still, he dominated the society’s early years.”

(“A Redoubt of Learning Holds Firm”, by Michael Powell, September 3, 2012, The New York Times, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

In a blog post in a different context, I have mentioned that Newton was deeply influenced by the ancient mystical Rosicrucian Order.

(“Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 1)”, January 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Another case in point is the long dominance of the theory of the “luminiferous aether”, a hypothetical medium carrying light. It has been cited by several scientists advocating greater openness for publishing negative results from research, in a January 2013 The Scientist article summarized and shared on my Facebook personal page:

“Negative data have always been harder to disseminate, yet ostensibly insignificant results can sometimes lead to a paradigm shift. One noteworthy example is that of Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, two 19th-century physicists, who performed a series of experiments to detect the relative motion of matter through the “luminiferous aether”—a theoretical medium thought to carry light waves. Despite the fact that their negative results clearly contradicted the theory of stationary aether, the scientific community initially overlooked them. It was only when they eventually published their findings in the American Journal of Science in 1881 that the prevailing theory was questioned, thereby opening up a line of research that ultimately led to Einstein’s special theory of relativity.”

(“Opinion: Publish Negative Results”, by Gabriella Anderson, Haiko Sprott and Bjorn R. Olsen, January 15, 2013, The Scientist, shared on Feng Gao’s Facebook page)

The notion of the “luminiferous aether” dated back to Isaac Newton’s study of light in the early 18th century.

(Isaac Newton, The Third Book of Opticks, 1718, online at The Newton Project; and, Pietro Giuseppe Frè, Gravity, a Geometrical Course: Volume 1: Development of the Theory and Basic Physical Applications, October 2012, Springer)

The advocates for publishing negative results also pointed out an important link to “a “publish or perish” culture”, that this academic culture may be biased against dissemination of negative results due to the uncertainty they create:

“In an ever more competitive environment, it may be that scientific journals prefer to publish studies with clear and specific conclusions. Indeed, Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom suggests that results may be distorted by a “publish or perish” culture in which the progress of scientific careers depends on the frequency and quality of citations. This leads to a situation in which data that support a hypothesis may be perceived in a more positive light and receive more citations than data that only generate more questions and uncertainty.”

(Gabriella Anderson, Haiko Sprott and Bjorn R. Olsen, January 15, 2013, The Scientist)

Similarly in August 1992 at the University of British Columbia, murders from an academic dispute elsewhere became a pretence by UBC academics collectively, as spoken for by the faculty association president, to condemn Reaganism and Thatcherism in relation to “publish or perish”, and the “distorted” political righteousness served to disregard local cases including mine that could lead to more openness.

But how prevalent are the problems hidden behind the traditional prestige or the contemporary political correctness? GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia drug case showed that such problems can be potentially very serious, and that publications of questionable research results are not confined to less established venues.

A number of major scandals in the 1980s led to the policy of educating and training researchers about “responsible conduct of research” (RCR), initiated by U.S. policy makers for research funding agencies, as reviewed in a May 2013 The Scientist article summarized and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”:

“… “Lack of formal discussion about responsible research practice and the ethics of research is a serious flaw in the professional training of young scientists and clinicians,” the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies stated in 1989. The assumption was that formal RCR training would reduce the incidence of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in research. Over the next decade, training programs evolved slowly, and by the turn of the century, RCR instruction for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows was firmly established in policies from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).”

(“Opinion: Ethics Training in Science”, by James Hicks, May 14, 2013, The Scientist, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

But despite the ethics training, problems have remained common. As reported in 2009, 1/3 of the scientists responding to surveys anonymously admitted to “questionable research practices”.

(James Hicks, May 14, 2013, The Scientist; and, “How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data”, by Daniele Fanelli, May 29, 2009, PLOS ONE)

In an April 2015 blog article, excerpted on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, I quoted from a The Guardian article by Australian medical scientist John Rasko and researcher Carl Power, who mentioned works by pharmaceutical researchers revealing that a majority of the “landmark” published experiments studied by them could not be independently reproduced – and are thus questionable if not false:

“In its recent comprehensive reporting of the Obokata scandal – a feature article dated February 18, 2015, written by John Rasko and Carl Power – The Guardian has solemnly informed the public that the phenomena of published scientific research results incapable of verification by independent reproduction, i.e., replication, have been widespread and could even be in the majority.

Firstly, scientists would rather produce new results than reproducing others’ work:

…

Secondly, those who find it important to verify others’ published results, such as some pharmaceutical industry researchers do, may find to their horror that even most of the so-called “landmark experiments” in their field can not be reproduced:

“…

A few years ago, Glenn Begley put this suspicion to the test. As head of cancer research for pharmaceutical giant Amgen, he attempted to repeat 53 landmark experiments in that field, important work published in some of the world’s top science journals. To his horror, he and his team managed to confirm only six of them. That’s a meagre 11%. Researchers at Bayer set up a similar trial and were similarly depressed by the results. Out of 67 published studies into the therapeutic potential of various drugs (mostly for the treatment of cancer), they were able to reproduce less than a quarter.”

And thirdly, if the public haven’t known about it, researchers know “in their heart of hearts” that for various reasons, fraud being one, “reproducibility is the exception rather than the rule”:

“The Amgen and Bayer studies were too small to tell us how bad the problem really is, but they do illustrate something that biomedical researchers already know in their heart of hearts: reproducibility is the exception rather than the rule. There are probably many reasons for this. Apart from outright fraud, there are all those “benevolent mistakes” that scientists make more or less unwittingly: poor experiment design, sloppy data management, bias in the interpretation of facts and inadequate communication of results and methods. Then, of course, there is the devilish complexity of reality itself, which withholds more than it reveals to the prying eyes of science.”

…”

(“Young Japanese researcher’s stardom fraud begs questions about American Science don’s intellectual practice”, April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

In the Amgen case cited above, 53 “landmark” publications – papers in top journals, from reputable labs – were checked before the pharmaceutical company could use them for cancer drug development, and 47 of the 53 could not be verified:

““It was shocking,” said Begley, now senior vice president of privately held biotechnology company TetraLogic, which develops cancer drugs. “These are the studies the pharmaceutical industry relies on to identify new targets for drug development. But if you’re going to place a $1 million or $2 million or $5 million bet on an observation, you need to be sure it’s true. As we tried to reproduce these papers we became convinced you can’t take anything at face value.”

…

George Robertson of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia previously worked at Merck on neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s. While at Merck, he also found many academic studies that did not hold up.

“It drives people in industry crazy. Why are we seeing a collapse of the pharma and biotech industries? One possibility is that academia is not providing accurate findings,” he said.

…

When the Amgen replication team of about 100 scientists could not confirm reported results, they contacted the authors. Those who cooperated discussed what might account for the inability of Amgen to confirm the results. Some let Amgen borrow antibodies and other materials used in the original study or even repeat experiments under the original authors’ direction.

Some authors required the Amgen scientists sign a confidentiality agreement barring them from disclosing data at odds with the original findings. “The world will never know” which 47 studies — many of them highly cited — are apparently wrong, Begley said.

…

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.

“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.””

(“In cancer science, many “discoveries” don’t hold up”, by Sharon Begley, March 28, 2012, Reuters)

Amgen’s Glenn Begley concluded that “you can’t take anything at face value”. Likewise with disputes in the academia, a politically correct explanation, such as Reaganism and Thatcherism being the culprit asserted by Bill Bruneau, is only face value that would block others from sorting out the real problems.

The real thinking behind such face value can be complex. It can involve research funding considerations as the earlier discussed RCR training suggested, or it can be due to ambitious drive for “greater fame and power”, as pointed out in an April 2015 blog article by me:

“The reported prevalence of published scientific experiments that are actually irreproducible, and thus suspect in the forms presented, if indeed known in the hearts of researchers can make it more likely for the ambitious among them to take bolder steps, catapulting themselves on the back of falsehood to a higher plateau for greater fame and power.”

(“Young Japanese researcher’s stardom fraud begs questions about American Science don’s intellectual practice”, April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

South Korean genetics scientist Hwang Woo Suk is a well-known example of what greater fame and potential power can be achieved by a scientist making a major discovery, as recalled in a October 2014 Bloomberg article summarised and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”:

“A decade ago, he became one of the most celebrated scientists in the world when he published two studies in the journal Science that announced the first successful cloning of a human embryo. Hwang, then a Seoul National University (SNU) professor, said he’d been able to extract stem cells from the embryo, apparently creating a new and potentially unlimited source for these important cells, which were becoming recognized as a possible treatment for all kinds of diseases. Time named him one of its “People Who Mattered” in 2004, and in June 2005, Korea’s Ministry of Science and Technology declared Hwang the first “Supreme Scientist” in the country’s history. He was honored on a postage stamp.”

(“For $100,000, You Can Clone Your Dog”, by Josh Dean, October 22, 2014, Bloomberg Business, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

The scientific breakthrough brought Hwang fame beyond the science field, with the recognition by Time magazine as one of the “People Who Mattered” in 2004.

The South Korean government’s honoring Hwang as the first “Supreme Scientist” in the country’s history no doubt would bring him the influence and power to be a great leader of science there.

But Hwang’s invention, published on Science journal – the world’s No. 3 influential scientific journal according to the 2012 Thompson Reuters impact factors rankings cited earlier – was a fraud. Its exposure led to Hwang’s disgrace as a scientist and punishment of criminal conviction:

“Then it all came undone. An American researcher who’d been one of the co-authors on the Science papers disavowed the work later that year. In Korea, a member of Hwang’s team went public, claiming that he’d paid women, including underlings at the university, for their eggs—a major ethical breach. An inquest launched by SNU subsequently determined that Hwang’s group hadn’t actually cloned an embryo, despite harvesting cells from 288 different human eggs. Pictures of the results, investigators learned, were fakes—merely multiples of the same photo—and government funds had been misused. Hwang called a news conference to apologize and announced that he would resign from his numerous posts. “I was blinded by work and my drive for achievement,” he said.

It wasn’t over. The government assigned a prosecutor to the case and eventually convicted Hwang of bioethical violations and embezzlement of $700,000 in public research funds. It also stripped him of his license to practice stem cell research.”

(Josh Dean, October 22, 2014, Bloomberg Business)

Despite his troubles, many South Koreans still believed in Hwang:

“Hwang was, in his own words, “penniless and devastated” after the scandal, but a sizable portion of the Korean public never turned against him and continued to support him and his work. Donors included sympathetic citizens, who mailed in checks for as little as $100 or sent him food and clothes, as well as investors, who still believed in his ability to do important research. “Thanks to all of them, I was able to start Sooam,” he says.”

(Josh Dean, October 22, 2014, Bloomberg Business)

Hwang’s ambition and hard drive continued, and he returned to media attention as the founder of a research company leading the world in commercial dog cloning:

“In 2007, Hwang met an American named Lou Hawthorne who had led the unsuccessful effort to clone a border collie mix named Missy in the late 1990s … Hwang took the samples and cloned Missy on the first attempt, producing four pups. Hawthorne brought all four Missys back to California.

One year later, Sooam sold its first cloned dog to Edgar and Nina Otto, a Florida couple so distraught over the death of Lancelot, their beloved Labrador, that they were willing to pay $155,000 in an auction for the opportunity to receive the world’s first commercially cloned dog. They named him Lancelot Encore. Six years and hundreds of cloned dogs later, Sooam has streamlined the process enough so that anyone with $100,000 and the patience to wait in line for up to six months can have a dog cloned. A team of scientists works under Hwang with the ability to carry out every part of the painstaking process, and the lab has the capacity to produce 150 to 200 commercial clones a year for clients who so far have included celebrities, Middle Eastern royals, and a few proud, non-anonymous buyers such as Dr. Philip Dupont, a veterinarian in Lafayette, La.

…

What’s most intriguing to Hwang now is the study of clone performance, particularly among what Sooam calls special purpose dogs. He wants to know if a puppy cloned from a truly exceptional working dog will end up performing at that job as well as his genetic twin. …

Recently, Sooam secured a contract to provide 40 cloned special purpose dogs to the South Korean national police, and several are already in service at the Incheon International Airport near Seoul. …”

(Josh Dean, October 22, 2014, Bloomberg Business)

Less than a decade after the South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk’s fraudulent work published in the journal Science and his notoriety, fame and then notoriety occurred to a female Japanese scientist, Haruko Obokata, for her work published on Nature – the world’s No. 1 influential scientific journal according to the 2012 Thompson Reuters rankings. My April 2015 blog article reviewed this case in detail:

“Barely 30 years old and already leading her own laboratory at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, Haruko Obokata shot to scientific stardom in January 2014 when she and her colleagues published two breakthrough papers in Nature, one of the world’s top science journals, demonstrating a surprisingly simple way of turning ordinary body cells into something very much like embryonic stem cells.

…

It would be a faster and easier way to reprogram cells, much less likely to damage them or make them cancerous, than the genetic manipulation pioneered in 2006 by another Japanese scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for it.

It was Haruko Obokata’s turn to become an instant media sensation. As Britain’s The Guardian newspaper reports, the media wondered when she would be given a Nobel Prize…

But within days of the Nature papers’ publication, disturbing allegations emerged in science blogs and on Twitter: some of the papers’ images looked doctored, and chunks of her text were lifted from other papers.

The RIKEN research institute, of which the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology is a part, conducted an investigation in February and March, confirming there was at least some research misconduct…

RIKEN’s investigation findings of “research misconduct” were announced on April 1. Haruko Obokata’s short-lived scientific stardom was now a scandal, and public shaming of her followed. …

…

Obokata insisted that her STAP cells exist, that she had created them “over 200 times”, and would be willing to go anywhere to reproduced them with other scientists:

…

But despite her method’s simplicity, other scientists were unable to reproduce the results. One by one, Obokata’s co-authors expressed doubt and asked to retract the papers, and in June so agreed Obokata. …”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

What could have motivated scientists like Hwang Woo Suk and Haruko Obokata to commit research misconduct and/or scientific fraud? Their ambition for fame and power may be one reason.

Taking note of information from Australian researchers John Rasko and Carl Power, quoted earlier, that researchers know “in their heart of hearts” that reproducibility of scientific experiments is “the exception rather than the rule”, I have asserted that the staying fame and power of others in history, achieved partly through fraud, may make ambitious modern researchers eager to do it that way:

“An acquired habit may likely have been peer influenced. The reality that some of the notorious frauds in science history took a long time to be uncovered, or settled, may well have given some of the ambitious researchers of the modern generation a sense of rightfulness, namely that they, too, deserve greater fame and power, based on scientific half-truth at best, than their own solid accomplishments could bring them.”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

A famous, and infamous, such case in history discussed in the The Guardian article by Rasko and Power was that of Nobel prize winner Alexis Carrel a century ago:

“… Carrel discovered that, if you remove some cells from the body, sit them in a nutritious broth and handle them correctly, they can not only survive, but thrive and multiply. Also, if you take some cells from one culture, you can start a new one and, with that, a third, and so on. The importance of this technique – know as cell “passaging” – can’t be overstated. With it, Carrel literally opened a new era in cell research. Unfortunately, he did so with an experiment that, while earning him international superstardom, proved to be a complete and utter train wreck.

On 17 January 1912, Carrel removed a chick embryo from its egg and cut out a small fragment of its still-beating heart with the aim of keeping it alive as long as possible. He had hardly begun this experiment when he announced to the world that his chicken heart culture was immortal, that immortality belonged potentially to all cells, and that death was only the consequence of how cells are organised in the body. In other words, the secret of eternal life is within us all, an attribute of our basic biological building blocks. It captured the public’s imagination and was soon accepted by the scientific community.”

(“What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata”, by John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

I compared the grandiose optimism in Carrel’s claim of potential eternal life for a cell culture to that by Haruko Obokata over a century later; and I noted that the Nobel prize was awarded to Carrel – for his earlier work on organs – in the same year after his publication of the cell life discovery, and that he demonstrated a living chicken cell culture for 34 years – science now knows that a chicken cell culture can only live for months – and it was accepted by the scientific community as truth for half a century:

“I note that Alexis Carrel’s grandiosely optimistic claim of potentially eternal life for a cell culture, published in May 1912 a few months after the start of his experiment, bore remarkable resemblance to the kind of claim made by Haruko Obokata and her co-authors in January 2014 that mature cells could be bathed to re-emerge as youthful stem cells. …

…

I should comment that the world must have been so excited by Alexis Carrel’s good news of eternal life in the horizon, as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Carrel, for his earlier work as a pioneer of organ preservation and transplant, by the end of 1912 – exactly a century before its awarding to Shinya Yamanaka:

…

Carrel’s optimistic claim of potential permanent life seemed to bear out as one of those chicken cell cultures continued to live and grow for 34 years. Other scientists tried in vain, none could reproduce Carrel’s results, but they dared not question his scientific statue:

…

Long after Carrel and his famous chicken culture had died, scientific research finally proved that his success was scientifically impossible, that the same chicken culture can live no longer than 35 times of multiplying, which would take several months only:

…”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

This kind of lifetime scientific glory based on falsehood happened when other researchers dared not contradict a famous and authoritative scientific figure, discarding instead of publishing their own negative results for the scientific community’s attention.

Alexis Carrel is now in the long past, but an article in the 1986 founding issue of The Scientist still asserted, as quoted earlier: “Despite the lack of “fairness” to new ideas, the traditional practice in science may serve us better than a more democratic mode”.

Still not quite open today, the academia and the scientific community are not necessarily fair when it comes to scientific integrity.

Reviewing the recent Obokata scandal, I have compared the investigative and corrective measures taken on Haruko Obokata to the lack of such taken on her co-author and mentor, prominent U.S. scientist Charles Vacanti, and compared this case to other recent major cases of scientific improprieties; my conclusion is that Vacanti has likely benefited from “elite impunity”:

“The Scientist magazine in December 2014 named the Haruko Obokata story No. 1 on its list of “The Top 10 Retractions of 2014”.

At No. 2 on the list was an Iowa State University researcher who spiked rabbit blood samples with human blood to make it look like his HIV vaccine was working. The fraud led to serious penalties not only for the researcher, Dong-Pyou Han, who resigned and is facing criminal charges, but also for the institution, Iowa State University…

…

Given the illumination by John Rasko and Carl Power that the contemporary scientifically disgraced Hwang Woo Suk and the early 20th-century Nobel Prize laureate Alexis Carrel were top examples of scientific fraud in biomedical research history, and given that the ramifications during the two’s respective career and life times were polar opposites – criminal conviction versus lifelong glory – I have to wonder if the inaction on the part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the Haruko Obokata/Charles Vacanti case has been due only to the absence of a concrete allegation of intentional fraud, or also to a sense of elite impunity – when compared to the Iowa State University case.

Next down on the No.3 spot of The Scientist’s top-10 retractions of 2014 was Taiwanese researcher Peter Chen and his fraudulent peer-review ring, a connected circle of researchers who peer-reviewed and approved one another’s papers for publication – often relying on false identities.

The unraveling of the Peter Chen case led to the retraction of 60 published papers deemed to have been accepted due to fraud, Chen’s departure from his university professorship, stepping down of a U.S.-based scientific journal’s editor-in-chief, and the resignation of the Taiwanese government’s education minister in 2014. A former president of the National Central University, the Taiwanese education minister Chiang Wei-ling had advised Chen’s twin brother on his Ph.D. thesis 10 years earlier, and was named by his former student as a co-author on 5 of those fraudulent papers. …

…

In comparison, even if he had not been a party in the fraudulent experiments conducted by Haruko Obokata, Charles Vacanti was a senior author of the now retracted Nature papers, an academic and scientific mentor of Obokata, and the intellectual father and leader of this whole framework of spore-like cells and STAP cells. His acts of posting special recipes online, claiming creation of STAP cells in his laboratory as described but providing no evidence, already were much more involvement in activities of questionable scientific honesty than the former Taiwanese education minister Chiang Wei-ling.”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

In short, on The Scientist’s top-10 retraction list of 2014 there were serious investigations that led to corrective and punitive measures in the No 2. case of research at Iowa State University, in the No 3. case of researchers in Taiwan, and in the No. 1 case with respect to Haruko Obokata at Japan’s RIKEN institution; but in the No. 1 case with respect to Charles Vacanti, a scientific research leader who had guided Obokata onto this path of research that eventually led to the fraudulent results and their publication in Nature journal, nothing has been done at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston – a leading U.S. hospital – and the affiliated Harvard Medical School.

Though my academic dispute at UBC in 1992 was about academic management style rather than “publish or perish”, a core issue of it was the lack of intellectual integrity and honesty – beyond UBC Faculty Association president Bill Bruneau’s use of collective political correctness as explanation. Moreover, the substance of the dispute was incorrectly dismissed by Bruneau’s calling it a case of “publish or perish” mentality.

In a May 2011 blog post I recalled how I became involved in the academic dispute:

“In late spring of 1990 with hiring over for the year, David Kirkpatrick described to me the remaining open positions and suggested that I have lunch with Klawe to discuss my situation. It turned out Klawe had no time for lunch with me but quickly laid out her priorities for the remaining tenure-track positions – I noticed she told me one fewer than David did.

Klawe then raised the alternative of a one-year extension to my 3-year job – with her help to convince Dean of Science Barry McBride about it. Intelligently I asked that my ongoing tenure-track application be withdrawn, and a few days later Klawe told me I would be given an additional year 1991-92 – as Lecturer instead of Assistant Professor due to UBC Faculty Association’s objection to a non-tenure-stream position lasting too long.

…

Soon there was malcontent among some faculty and staff members that every former Computer Science Head had served at most 4 of a 5-year term but Klawe, who thrived at using confrontational pressures and office-politics tricks, showed every intent to break with the tradition. …

…

In the summer of 1991 I entered my last year at UBC, so without naming anyone I spoke to Head Klawe about some sentiments against continuation of her Headship. She was surprised by my willingness to push her but agreed to include airing of criticisms of her in the new monthly Department meetings starting in the Fall.

The theme I was raising went like this: Klawe was a great fundraiser for the Department in a period of major expansion she had been hired to oversee, and was good at handling relatively difficult situations, but her style of management wasn’t a good fit for an academic department in normal situations where faculty and staff would enjoy a high degree of autonomy. This theme had substantial input from David Kirkpatrick, and some from David Lowe of the Artificial Intelligence group who pointed out Klawe’s management was of a corporate style.

Maria Klawe had in fact moved from IBM Research in California where she had been group and department manager. Moreover, unlike most North American universities UBC’s academic departments were not run by elected chairmen, but appointed heads hired with the advice of departmental head-search committees.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 4) — when power and control are the agenda”, May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted, the situation was that Klawe had moved from research management in the giant computer industry corporation IBM to become UBC’s Computer Science Head, an appointed position in contrast to most academic department chairs that were elected. There was disgruntlement among some faculty members about her management style and her intent to break the department’s ‘honored’ tradition limiting the length of headship, and I agreed to raise the issue in the hope that there would be a more democratic way for department members to express their opinions.

In the summer of 1991 when I requested that we went to a lunch so I could discuss with her some concerns I learned of about her management, Klawe accepted – as quoted above she had declined having lunch in the summer of 1990 when I needed to ask about my prospect of getting a job potentially more permanent.

It was our only lunch alone together. Klawe appeared surprised by my willingness to raise the headship issue and to suggest that she use a formal department meeting to listen to criticisms. At one point she said to me, a little portentously and a little incredulously, that she was a trustee of the American Mathematical Society and the president of Western Canada computer science association.

I replied that as an AMS member I had voted for her trustee candidacy as well as for the vice-president candidacy of “Lenore”, but that professionally the two matters – her AMS trusteeship and her UBC computer science headship – were different. As for the Western Canada computer science association, I hadn’t heard of it until then – a sign of how disconnected I might be already.

“Lenore” was a friend of Klawe’s, and a mentor for me when I was a mathematics Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. I have mentioned her in another blog post about what happened later in 1999 when I spoke with her on the phone:

“Friends with Klawe and Pippenger, this time around in 1999 Lenore responded to me coolly, “If you can program, you don’t need to be in the academia”.”

(January 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Maria Klawe and Lenore Blum were among a small number of ambitious female academics and activists in mathematics and computer science. In hindsight, to the ambitious and hard-bargaining Klawe my professionally-oriented attitude that each issue be considered in its proper context must have looked naive and wrongheaded: every power position, be it appointed or elected, added to a portfolio of achievements with which she could aim for more – that would be consistent with the mentality of taking pride in breaking an honored tradition meant to keep the department head from becoming too powerful.

The relevance of intellectual honesty in this decades-old dispute has been, metaphorically, in the saying of “no news is good news”, i.e., for Maria Klawe.

The notion of her management style being corporate suggested that Klawe got her management positions partly because of her willingness and skills to do certain things not so common in academic management. Some of it could be unpleasant as shown in my May 2011 blog post, about the minimal chances she allowed others to air criticisms:

“At the start of the first Fall 1991 faculty meeting, Head Klawe voluntarily expressed that I had brought to her attention existence of dissent about her leadership and she would welcome criticism. I was pleased, but no one aired anything during a few minutes of waiting and the meeting then moved on to other topics.

Typical of Klawe’s trickery, from the next Department meeting on airing of criticism of her was no longer on the agenda – everyone had a chance already. I could see frustrations on the faces of some colleagues…”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

When I pressed on, Klawe used her deceptiveness and ‘dirty trick’-like hardy ways to dodge the issue, and then brought in management suppression:

“So I reluctantly decided to use my case as a ‘lightning rod’ and informed Head Klawe and others that I had a employment grievance. It was scheduled among the February 1992 Department retreat agenda.

…

My grievance was the last item on the retreat agenda, and Head Klawe had promised beforehand she would not stay for it so others could discuss freely.

But at the prior session’s end Klawe refused to leave, instead insisting on hearing first what I wanted to say.

It was threatening to be a stalemate again.

So I said briefly to the effect that I felt Maria had committed wrongdoing in her handling of my tenure-track application, it was part of a pattern of political tricks possibly interrelated and potentially scandalous, and it reminded me of a former U.S. president of the 1960s and 1970s who had to resign early and unceremoniously.

Some were a little taken aback by it. To the astonishment of everyone, the usually very competitive and assertive Maria Klawe suddenly started the motion of weeping, and said something like Feng I had been nice and helpful to you – it was in a sense not untrue other than her trickery which sometimes could be her way of hard bargaining. Sensing others’ impatience she now got up and left the room – with a rueful but vindictive expression on her face – but stayed outside.

The last session was then led by Kelly Booth, who asked that I provide the facts to support my assertions.

Now I made my second major mistake – the first being starting the dispute with a rather serious personal case instead of general criticism more likely for others to join in. I said that Maria was in tears, that considering the good things she had done for the Department it wouldn’t be a good time to push the details – unbeknown to me this was my only realistic chance as political and administrative counter-measures from her and the Dean would come immediately.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Without referring to the name, I compared Klawe to Richard Nixon. As an academic manager, she played tricky and hardy games instead of sitting down to listen to others and promise improvements in order to head off their discontent.

Imagine if an academics was one who, like Amgen’s Glenn Begley found out in disillusion, did an experiment 6 times and published the only good result as the proven result, would that academic be willing to persist in questioning the management? The type of politically correct explanation by Bill Bruneau on academic disputes would only be a facade to hide systemic problems.

UBC management and a small number of faculty and students then took part in schemes to falsely brand me as “violent” so that psychiatric oppression could be brought in to silence me. These schemes involved UBC Dean of Science Barry McBride, as I recalled:

“Dean McBride would have been challenged to produce any real evidence that any UBC Computer Science person I had expressed anger with I had ever complained against – except of course Head Maria Klawe above me in authority – or used my faculty position to do harm to, such as in a grade or a reference.

On the contrary, it was my vulnerability Dean McBride immediately “targeted” in a separate memo to me on the same day, making clear that I had no chance of further employment at UBC, implying also that I wouldn’t win the employment dispute, and suggesting counseling for me instead:

…

The fact that Barry McBride subsequently forwarded these e-mails to John Leslie, a psychiatrist at Vancouver General Hospital, shows the so-called “counselling” as intended to be psychiatric, and therefore coercive and oppressive in nature.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

When the long-premeditated psychiatric oppression finally came it was after I had left UBC and filed a lawsuit against the university, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for its role in the incident discussed by Bill Bruneau in the Kitsilano News article quoted earlier.

In November 1992 I sent out press releases to discuss the UBC case and also the leadership conduct of then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Several hours after my faxing the documents to the local Member of Parliament Kim Campbell, a former UBC faculty member and the Mulroney government’s Justice Minister, RCMP Sergeant Brian Cotton and a fellow officer came to my apartment to take me to a psychiatric assessment and committal; Cotton cited a request by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, who was the wife of former UBC colleague David Kirkpatrick involved in the academic politics, as I recalled in a March 2012 blog post:

“After the phone conversation, Cotton turned to me and said that CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] had asked me not to phone them or I could get a criminal charge. I replied that I understood but there were urgent issues about PM Mulroney’s leadership that needed attention.

Sgt. Cotton then said, “You need to come with us for a psychiatric assessment at UBC Hospital.”

I was taken aback, and responded that I had not been back to UBC, was perfectly normal as assessed by private psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Remick in April while still at UBC – mentioned in Part 4 – and it made no sense for RCMP to interfere with my publicity efforts when Vancouver Police did not intervene.

Sgt. Brian Cotton said he would insist so I asked, “Do I have to?” He replied, “You have to. It’s a request from Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick of the B.C. Supreme Court.”

It’s a shock to me! Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick was just the wife of my former UBC senior colleague David G. Kirkpatrick who had been a mentor during my 4 years there, consulted by me on various issues including in my dispute with Head Klawe for which he contributed insightful clarifications. But as discussed in Part 4, in the end Kirkpatrick, and especially his new associate Jack Snoeyink and former graduate student Andrew Martin, had crucial roles in things sliding toward negative for me.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 6) — when law and justice reinforce the authorities”, March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

So when my political activism expanded, oppression originated from higher authorities.

During my first involuntary psychiatric committal at UBC Hospital in December 1992, I was shown documents revealing that back in early 1990 at UBC when I applied for a faculty job with a more permanent prospect, two UC Berkeley professors who had agreed to write letters of recommendations for me likely did not write them – one was Richard Karp, a friend of Klawe’s – although the number of letters written met the minimum requirement:

“Only in December 1992 when I was committed in a psychiatric ward by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after they had conferred with David Kirkpatrick’s wife, a former lawyer appointed a Justice in November, that I was given information that only 3 of the 5 letters of reference I had requested in the spring of 1990, namely Kirkpatrick’s, one by my Berkeley Ph.D. adviser and another by a Columbia University professor, were in the Department file. The other two requested from Berkeley professors were no shows, but the Department Head didn’t bother to inform me even if only three were required.

One of the missing reference was to be from Berkeley theoretical computer scientist Richard Karp, who had told me on the phone he would write that my recent research was in Theoretical Computer Science, when my Ph.D. had been in Math.

A meticulously commanding professor, Karp was also a close friend of Maria Klawe and Nicholas Pippenger…

Kelly Booth, a leader of the Computer Graphics group, had received his Berkeley Ph.D. under “Dick” Karp years before…

…”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Thus, my personal experiences in the academia showed that things can be much less forthcoming, and that hidden behind elite images and smart political correctness academic politics can be deceptive, tough and even nasty. Such politics can revolve around technical or procedural matters, as illustrated by my case, and center on traditional academic points of views, “publish or perish” included.

But if on certain issues of broader societal ramifications academics do not take the challenges and yet the elite facade accord the academia a noble role, then it is not only intellectually dishonest but a disservice to the society; in a collective manner it can also be a treachery toward those academics who would like to do.

There is no question that many academics are passionate about and active on worthwhile social issues. For female academics, increasing the roles of women in various academic fields is one which Maria Klawe, and frankly I would think most female academic administrators, devote time and efforts to when they can.

But if the pursue of some important issues came with the exclusion of other important issues, that would be akin to medicine with both desired effects and undesirable side effects; and if it came with a consequence of undermining other important issues, that could be like targeting civilians when fighting a war viewed as just.

The psychology of Steven Dale Green, a U.S. soldier in the Iraq war who had a major role in the murder of an entire Iraqi civilian family, has been reviewed in a blog post by me.

(“The baffling rise of suicides in the U.S. military — plausible theories and grim reality”, September 9, 2014, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

The academia is not the hospital or the war zone, which I would agree, that education is a primary objective and, as Bill Bruneau stated, “publish or perish” can be more of the mentality.

On the other hand, if righteous condemnation of Reaganism and Thatcherism as causing social ills was deemed the higher calling, then it would demand a sense of responsibility and a level of care closer to dealing potentially with life and death. In such a circumstance, invoking the academia’s elite pedigree as the rightful qualification would be worse than “disillusioning” – it would be intellectual fraud.

Suppressing an academic dispute such as mine regarding a boss’s management style, to the point that the issue would not become open even within the academia, and that the matter would discredit the complainant due to his lesser pedigree versus the management’s authority, was intellectual fraud in my opinion.

As an academic administrator, Klawe typically aimed for good public relations in the media, with little or no controversy. So the following news story was rare, but revealing of her management tactics, reported long after I had lost the UBC dispute with her and she had served out a full 5-year term headship and been appointed a second term; the story took place shortly after her 1995 promotion to become a UBC vice president:

“Several years later in 1995 Maria Klawe became a UBC Vice President, and on June 20 in the B.C. press was the following story revealing of Klawe’s management style – even when she acted for the university:

“Technically foul.

That’s the mood around parts of the University of B.C. campus following the apparent firing of women’s basketball coach Misty Thomas.

…

No UBC official could be reached for comment. Athletic director Bob Philip and intercollegiate athletics co-ordinator Kim Gordon were on their way to a conference in P.E.I. Monday.

Dr. Maria Klawe, vice-president of academic services, was also away from the office.

But a source said Klawe told Thomas that “competition has no place in athletics at UBC.

“She (Klawe) said she was doing Misty a favor because Misty would not want to stay in that kind of situation.

…

The day after the Thunderbirds lost in the Western Canada playoff to the University of Victoria, school officials sent questionnaires to players soliciting their views about Thomas.

Officials then told Thomas that her players wanted her out and that the desire was unanimous.

[Starting point guard Lori] Kemp disagrees that the feeling was unanimous, and says several players have sent letters to university administration expressing disapproval of the move.

“Some players weren’t surveyed and there was no indication that the survey could lead to a firing,” said Kemp.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The firing of UBC women’s basketball coach Misty Thomas was carried out deceptively, and presented to different persons differently: a survey was done to get players’ views about their coach, but not all players were asked, and they were not told its purpose; the results were then used as the basis to fire Thomas, deceivingly UBC officials told Thomas the players unanimously wanted her fired, and Klawe even explained to Thomas that it was for her good because UBC athletics – obviously the players included – was not competitive.

So in this Misty Thomas case, Klawe easily handled an unpleasant management task by deftly shifting the expenses of blame to the players and the coach mutually – were it not for a player like Lori Kemp who publicly aired her disagreement with the way it was done.

Perhaps the controversial handling of firing a varsity sports coach was not as much an academic ‘taboo’ as a dispute about the management of an academic department, and it was thus easier for Lori Kemp’s disagreement to get past any hidden ‘censorship’ there might be.

It certainly saved the hassle of having to explain a dispute in one’s academic management record, for an occasion like in 2002 – Klawe was then UBC Dean of Science, a position not as high as her previous vice presidency for student and academic services but more prestigious for a scientist – when the highly prestigious Princeton University in the United States decided to hire her as Dean of Engineering and Applied Science:

““Maria Klawe is a leader in science education, and particularly
in encouraging and increasing women’s participation in information
technology and sciences,” said Princeton President Shirley
M. Tilghman.

“As dean of science at the University of British Columbia,
Maria has been remarkably effective in developing innovative science
programs, and promoting interdisciplinary research to achieve results,
while looking outward to build new relationships with industry. I’m looking forward to working with Maria as she leads the initiatives
that will keep Princeton at the forefront of academic engineering.”

Klawe, 50, has been UBC’s dean of science since November, 1998.
Before that, she was vice-president, Student and Academic Services,
and she headed UBC’s computer science dept. for six and a half years.

“We are truly sad to be losing a scholar of Maria’s rank,” said UBC President Martha Piper, “but we take some consolation in knowing that she will be joining one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions.”

…

Born in Toronto, Klawe holds bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in
mathematics from the University of Alberta. She has held faculty
positions in mathematics and computer science at Oakland University
in Michigan and the University of Toronto, and worked for eight
years with IBM.

Klawe steps down as science dean on Nov. 1 and takes up her new
position at Princeton Jan. 1, 2003. …”

(“UBC science dean is Princeton’s top pick”, June 26, 2002, UBC News)

Both Klawe and myself had started working at UBC in the summer of 1988. According to this UBC news release, Klawe served her headship for 6 & 1/2 years – breaking the computer science department honored tradition of 4 out a 5-year term – as vice president for about 2 months shy of 4 years, and as dean for exactly 4 years.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Klawe served the shorter lengths of around 4 years only for better trophies, one after another, than a department headship.

Then UBC President Martha Piper had good words for Klawe as quoted, “a scholar of Maria’s rank”.

Klawe had good words for Piper in return:

“Shirley Tilghman, 55, might be different. Elected the first woman president of Princeton University in May last year, Tilghman has since turned more than half the top administrative positions over to women at an institution that has been co-ed only since the 1970s.

Within a week of her own appointment, the Toronto-born Tilghman named Amy Gutmann as provost. This May, she named a woman as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and in June, she appointed Maria Klawe as dean of the school of engineering and applied science. She also extended the appointment of Nancy Weiss Malkeil as dean of the undergraduate college for a second five-year term. Out of nine top academic jobs at Princeton, five are now held by women.

…

Maria Klawe, 51, currently dean of science at the University of British Columbia, thinks being female was “almost something they had to ignore about me.” Klawe herself would never ignore the effect of having a woman at the top of a hierarchy, however. At UBC, Martha Piper has been president since 1997. “Until Martha came along, it was an oddity not dragging your spouse along to university functions. But her husband is a distinguished psychiatrist, and he had a life. Then it became the norm to show up by yourself. It’s like this is how it’s done and it’s OK.”

When Klawe takes over in January as dean of engineering and applied science at Princeton, she will join a small club. There are a handful of female deans of engineering in the United States and one in Canada, Tyseer Aboulnasr, at the University of Ottawa.

…

Before Shirley Tilghman became president of Princeton, she said the key to getting recognition for women was to appoint more women as administrators. …”

(“Shaking the old boys’ club: Female president of Princeton appoints women to top jobs at university”, by Janet Bagnall, July 12, 2002, The Gazette)

Maria Klawe said that being female was “almost something they had to ignore about me” – this context was clearly important for Princeton president Shirley Tilghman determined to hire female administrators to increase “recognition for women”.

As for Klawe becoming one of only a few female deans of engineering in the U.S. and Canada, that wasn’t too surprising: UBC computer science was in the science faculty but Princeton’s was in the school of engineering and applied science; and as Tilghman said in an earlier quote, Klawe had been effective at “looking outward to build new relationships with industry”.

To me, what was surprising is Klawe’s emphasis on the “distinguished psychiatrist” husband of UBC president Martha Piper, the successor to David Strangway who had handled my grievance about Klawe in 1992 as discussed in my May 2011 blog post cited earlier.

Given my personal experiences with the political use of psychiatry to suppress my activism in academic politics and in Canadian politics, I can be sensitive about such coincidences.

A psychiatrist connection in former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s family – his psychiatrist father-in-law – to the Vancouver psychiatrist who sent me to a committal at the B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute in January-February 1994, which falsely branded me a “Paranoid Schizophrenic”, was recalled by me in an October 2012 blog post:

“Attending the Forensic Clinic on January 26 as [probation officer Fred] Hitchcock advised, I didn’t get to meet my counselling psychiatrist Dr. Clifford Kerr, who held the opinion … that despite no observed psychotic symptom I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia” as inferred from my persistent behavior.

Instead, I was interviewed by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Mel Dilli, whom I hadn’t met before. Dr. Dilli said he would have to send me to an FPI committal for two reasons: one, since I claimed Haldol didn’t have effect but had bad side effects, FPI would try a new experimental medication; and two, if he didn’t send me to a committal for the experiment to calm me, I might be sent to “Matsqui” – the medium-security Matsqui Institution prison in now Abbotsford, B.C. – where I could be “raped” by other inmates – a scary claim but in any case the committal was involuntary and not up to me.

Months later in May, I read a newspaper article by him and realized Dr. Dilli was the leader of Bosnians in British Columbia:

…

For years afterwards I didn’t realize that there had been a stream of political news with Dr. Dilli at the center of, that had connections to the psychiatric oppression against me.

On December 7, 1992, as I was sending a second letter to MP Kim Campbell a week into my first psychiatric committal for attempting to publicly challenge the leadership conduct of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as in Part 6,  Dr. Dilli appeared in his first major political news story, meeting Mulroney whose wife Mila – mentioned in Part 1 – was a Serbian Canadian with a psychiatrist father Dr. Dilli had known, over the plight of Bosnian refugees:

…

A February 7 forensic psychiatrist’s report to the review panel, based on January 26 & 31 and February 7 interviews, recorded my explanation about TV & radio messages, namely that I “read between the lines”. Despite referring only to the UBC dispute regarding “delusion”and no psychotic symptom, the report concluded that I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia”, and that without medication I might “deteriorate” and be “potentially dangerous”…”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 9) — when individual activism ranks at oblivion”, October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Then the next person to become UBC president had a psychiatrist husband, a fact that even Maria Klawe emphasized.

In my view, when the real facts are not in the open it is justified for those potentially affected, like myself, to maintain a healthy degree of concern about, and attention to, what might be going on behind the scenes.

The UBC news story mentioned Klawe’s academic degrees from the University of Alberta. But her roots were much deeper there, as I noted in an April 2012 blog post that her parents were professors at U of A, and had longer British roots:

“… Maria Klawe didn’t just come from an Edmonton family with her parents University of Alberta professors, but one in which her British mother had been a intelligence officer during World War II and her Polish father the chief cartographer (map maker) for Thomas Nelson & Sons, one of the oldest publishers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories …”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 7) — when legal and judicial prudence means the powerful is right”, April 30, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

When Martha Piper became UBC president in 1997, she came from none other than the University of Alberta, where she had been vice president of research and external affairs:

“Martha Piper, Vice-President (Research and External Affairs), has been appointed the University of British Columbia’s next president.

…

The UBC Board of Governors made the appointment on the unanimous recommendation of a 19-member presidential search committee, chaired by UBC Chancellor William Sauder, which conducted an extensive search throughout North America.

…

“I regret seeing her leave,” said the chair of the Board of Governors community and government affairs committee Betty Anne Pearson. “This is a wonderful opportunity for her and the U of A should be proud. …” she told Senate.

Dr Piper has the proven academic and institutional leadership, and management and administrative abilities necessary to successfully head a complex institution such as UBC, said UBC Board of Governors Chair Shirley Chan.

…

In August 1994, she was appointed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien to the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology and she chaired a sub- committee on Quality of Life. …”

(“Vice-President Martha Piper to be University of British Columbia’s next president”, November 29, 1996, Folio)

The boss of Klawe’s parents at Klawe’s alma mater became Klawe’s boss at UBC; so obviously nothing could go wrong for Klawe.

The two news stories quoted earlier about Klawe’s move to Princeton mentioned that both her and Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman had been born in Toronto, Canada.

Tilghman was a graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

(“Princeton President speaks on gender gap in science and technology”, September 27, 2010, Queen’s Gazette)

A little over a year after moving to Princeton, Klawe received an honorary degree from Queen’s University. I reviewed a few of the interesting co-honorees in my February 2012 blog post:

“… in the next year 2004, both Jean Chretien and Maria Klawe – by now Princeton University’s Dean of Engineering and Applied Science – as well as Brian Mulroney’s in-law Lewis Lapham, the “famously liberal” Harper’s Magazine editor mentioned in Part 1, received honorary degrees from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, with Chretien on May 27, Lapham on June 3, and Klawe on June 4.

The other honorary-degree conferee on June 4 as Klawe was Gordon Wells, Sub-Lieutenant of the Royal Canadian Navy, advisor to the Government of Jamaica and Senior Advisor to the Contractor General, and Chairman of the Jamaica Broadcasting Commission.

…

I should say it out loud, that June 4, 2004 happened to be the 15th anniversary of what the Western media refers to as the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, China, when democratic protests were ended by military force.”

(February 20, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The various coincidences among these 2004 Queen’s University honorees were very unsettling from my perspective: Klawe along with Jean Chretien, for whose government Klawe’s and her parents’ former boss Martha Piper worked as a science and technology advisor, and along with Brian Mulroney’s in-law – though not the psychiatrist father-in-law – and Klawe’s date of receiving it being June 4.

If these were merely ‘coincidental’, what about the other June 4 honoree, Queen’s graduate Gordon Wells, Canadian navy officer who was also a government advisor and official in Jamaica, the capital of which is also named Kingston? Was that merely by chance and not thoughtfully selected?

As my above-quoted blog post and also my March 2012 blog post pointed out, a key UBC person in false profiling of me as violent and mental ill, graduate student Andrew Martin, was a Queen’s graduate.

The official name of greater Kingston, Jamaica, happened to be ‘Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation’.

(“Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation”, Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Foreign Trade, Jamaica)

It did look like a few selected through connections of alma maters, bosses, political bosses and families, by Queen’s University to honor in 2004.

There is no question that being a vocal advocate for women in mathematics and computer science, and in science and engineering, had much to do with Maria Klawe’s steady ascent to become an elite academic administrator. Belatedly in 2012, Klawe herself admitted that being a woman had had a lot to do with the important positions given to her, recalling a conversation with a male Princeton faculty member:

“Shortly after Maria Klawe was named Princeton University’s first female dean of engineering, she met a long-serving male faculty member on a campus walk. “He said, ‘I don’t have to listen to a word you say, because I know you only got the job because you’re female,’” Dr. Klawe, now president of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., recalls. “And I said, ‘Actually, this is one of the few times in my life when I know I wasn’t hired because I’m female because President [Shirley] Tilghman told me she was going to receive a lot of flak for hiring me, but I was the best candidate.’ He just walked away. He didn’t say a word.””

(“How some universities are attracting more women to math, science programs”, by James Bradshaw, November 25, 2012, The Globe and Mail)

Klawe admitted her sense that prior to Princeton most of the important jobs she got had to do with her gender: “… this is one of the few times in my life when I know I wasn’t hired because I’m female …”.

As for Princeton, she told this Princeton man that President Tilghman told her she was the best candidate. While that was true, Tilghman had also stated, as quoted earlier from a July 2002 The Gazette article, that the key to getting recognition for women was to appoint more women as administrators; thus the female preference had already been decided by Tilghman.

Klawe must have been aware of Tilghman’s ‘pre-condition’ of appointing more women, but she cited Tilghman’s words of her being “the best candidate” to rebuff this long-time Princeton man, while making a compromise by admitting the female factor in her earlier jobs – enough for the man to walk away rather than escalating the argument.

Maria Klawe has been deviously clever, if not devilishly smart.

But to begin with, this Princeton male professor had decided to keep silent about his dismissive attitude toward the new female Dean – I wonder if this anecdote had resemblance to the lid kept on my dispute with her at UBC?

Tilghman said that Klawe was good at building relationships with the industry. Clearly she should be, given her years of experience as an IBM Research manager, and her corporate style of management as UBC faculty member David Lowe pointed out in 1992, as quoted earlier.

So it’s not surprising that in 1998 Klawe was the keynote speaker at then British Columbia Premier Glen Clark’s business summit in the city of Kamloops; what surprises me is that Clark’s finance ministers played school math kids in front of Klawe:

“Take the premier’s announcement yesterday to finally cut stumpage rates — the fee the government charges forest companies to cut trees on Crown land.

The announcement is welcome — but the damage has already been done.

Clark and the NDP have beaten this proud industry into the ground for six years straight.

…

As of January 1998, stumpage costs were 285 per cent higher in B.C. than in Alberta.

…

The forestry CEOs gathered around Clark barely peeped about all this yesterday. Not surprising, since Clark just cut their expenses by $600 million.

“If your landlord promised to cut your rent as long as you smiled for the cameras for a few minutes, wouldn’t you?” asked Liberal forests critic George Abbott.

…

CLASS CLOWNS

It was a no-brainer question for Finance Minister Joy MacPhail and predecessor Andrew Petter yesterday.

“Who here loved math in school?” asked UBC’s Dr. Maria Klawe in her keynote speech to Clark’s business summit here.

MacPhail and Petter both shot their hands in the air.

You didn’t expect any less, did you?”

(“Premier’s savior act wearing thin”, by Michael Smyth, May 29, 1998, The Province)

The staunchly socialist premier already had smart business brains back then, if no one expected where it would lead; Glen Clark is today the president of Jim Pattison Group, the company of one of Canada’s richest, Vancouver billionaire Jimmy Pattison:

“It’s not the fare normally associated with a God-fearing 84-year-old billionaire whose first job was as a trumpet player in youth gospel camps. But today, Mr. Pattison is the king of the checkout counters, with a distribution network that encompasses at least half the magazine and book racks in North American supermarkets and pharmacies.

…

No one is closer to the whims, fantasies and economic challenges of ordinary North Americans than Jimmy Pattison, the ordinary titan whose wealth is estimated by Forbes magazine at $4.3-billion (U.S.), amounting to the fifth-largest fortune in Canada and 248th biggest in the world. All this for a compulsive striver who was born on the eve of the Great Depression in Saskatchewan, grew up poor in east-end Vancouver, and started out as the lowest of the low salesman in a downtown car lot.

…

Twelve years ago, he took a chance on Glen Clark, the former B.C. premier and socialist stalwart who had left his post amid allegations of corruption and was then hired by Mr. Pattison. …

… Mr. Clark, 55, is a big part of that team, having assumed a first-among-equals role as Pattison Group president, while Mr. Pattison remains chief executive officer. A lot – although not all – of the Pattison operating businesses are now under Mr. Clark’s purview.”

(“Lunch with the irreplaceable Canadian billionaire Jimmy Pattison”, by Gordon Pitts, January 18 (updated March 22), 2013, The Globe and Mail)

But in March 2009 I was taken aback, in part because of the timing, when  Microsoft Corporation announced Maria Klawe as a new director of its board; I had started intensive political blogging in January, as I recalled in my May 2011 blog post:

“Years later in early 2009 I began my political blogging, first on Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces as Hotmail had long been my primary e-mail. …

On March 9, Microsoft Corporation announced the appointment of Maria Klawe to its Board of Directors.

Microsoft was of course influential. When I was teaching at the University of Hawaii in 1997-1999, my teaching assistant “Hu” … did her summer internship at Microsoft in Seattle, and my teaching assistant “Wang Lingwang” … was hired by Microsoft in Seattle after his master’s degree …

Then in the New Millennium working in Silicon Valley in California, I received a phone call from engineering recruiter “Ken Button” on behalf of Microsoft in Seattle …”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Apparently earlier as a Princeton dean, Klawe and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates had appeared together in a 2005 Microsoft Research Summit.

(“Media Alert: Bill Gates and Maria Klawe to Address Importance of Collaboration Between Academia and Industry”, July 13, 2005, Microsoft News Center)

So through step-by-step ascent, one as a base for the next, in 2009 Klawe finally re-entered the corporate world – at a top level as a board director of Microsoft, a computer industry giant no smaller than IBM.

Again, Klawe’s high media profile was advocating for women.

After top-level management changes at Microsoft and Satya Nadella became the CEO, in 2014 Klawe persuaded Nadella to appear at the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference – as the first-ever male headline speaker:

“Earlier this year, Maria Klawe persuaded Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella to spend a day at the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Phoenix this October.

She dangled the prospect of his becoming the first man ever to be a headline speaker at the event. For the 8,000 female technologists and diversity activists planning to attend, Klawe herself may be the bigger draw.

Since she became president of Harvey Mudd College in 2006, the 800-student liberal arts college near Los Angeles has made tangible progress creating a blueprint for encouraging women to become computer scientists. Last year, more than half the school’s engineering majors were female for the first time. Women made up a record 47 percent of its computer science majors.”

(“Harvey Mudd’s Klawe Maps Way to Woo Young Women Into Tech”, by Peter Burrows, August 7, 2014, Bloomberg Business)

But this time, the distinguished guest speaker said something that annoyed all the women present:

““It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise,” Nadella told a confounded (and predominantly female) audience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing on Thursday.

…

Nadella made the comments in an on-stage conversation with Maria Klawe, a computer scientist, president of Harvey Mudd College, and member of Microsoft’s board of directors. He seemed to suggest that “faith in the system” is akin to magic.

“That might be one of the initial ‘super powers,’ that quite frankly, women (who) don’t ask for a raise have,” he told the straight-faced Klawe. “It’s good karma. It will come back.””

(“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Women: Don’t Ask For A Raise, Trust Karma”, by Selena Larson, October 9, 2014, ReadWrite)

Nadella seemed to be saying that women who have “faith” in “the system” and do not ask for a pay raise tend to have ‘super powers’ and thus will be able to make higher pays in the future. But he called it a “karma”, as if asking for a pay raise would lead to some undesirable consequence – it couldn’t be as bad as my challenging Klawe’s management, could it?

It’s kind of sad that the first public rebuff of Maria Klawe I have read in the press has come as a rebuff to all women who want higher pays. On the other hand, Maria Klawe has been this decades-old unfinished story for me that I don’t yet know what was really in it.

Regardless, I feel that the following comments I made on the Haruko Obokata scandal, quoted earlier, may have relevance in this case – not so much about scientific research but about management ambition:

“An acquired habit may likely have been peer influenced. The reality that some of the notorious frauds in science history took a long time to be uncovered, or settled, may well have given some of the ambitious researchers of the modern generation a sense of rightfulness, namely that they, too, deserve greater fame and power, based on scientific half-truth at best, than their own solid accomplishments could bring them.”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

From my perspective, “affirmative action” – to borrow an old political term – is truly affirmative when aligned with broader societal progress; otherwise it can lead to negative trade-offs when the focus is on the “rightfulness” of having something.

In Klawe’s case, advocating for women was a broader cause for her academic management career; but when she reached Nadella he seemed to say: for what I manage, gender rightfulness can’t cover it all and I emphasize ability.

Never mind for Maria Klawe, though, when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella publicly poured some cold water on this board director’s enthusiasm advocating for female employees in computer industry, Klawe had already reached a higher plateau in her fame.

In 2014 Fortune magazine named Maria Klawe No. 17 on its list of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” – behind Chinese company Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma at No. 16 – with the following citation:

“A mathematician and computer scientist by training, Klawe is leading the charge to bring more women into science, technology, and engineering. At Harvey Mudd, freshman women go to computer conferences, and introductory coding classes are now designed to be more welcoming to newcomers. Thanks in no small part to Klawe, women now make up 40% of computer science majors at the college, up from 10% in 2005.”

(“The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders”, March 20, 2014, Fortune)

Amazing, becoming one of the world’s greatest leaders for achievements at an 800-student college – but I have read she’s done more than that.

Klawe has been the president of Harvey Mudd College since the summer of 2006 when it was a 700-student college, after 3 and 1/2 years as Princeton dean of engineering and applied science.

(“Diamond in the Mudd”, by Melissa Ezarik, July 2006, University Business)

As I am finishing this blog post intended for this Friday on my blog, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring, I come across a local news item, the list of Spring 2015 honorary degree recipients at the University of Toronto; here I list a few ones of interesting relevance:

“…

Ceremony 5	Thursday, June 4	2:30 p.m.	Convocation Speaker – Tye Farrow
Ceremony 6	Friday, June 5	10:00 a.m.	Honorary Graduand – The Honorable Paul Volcker
Ceremony 7	Friday, June 5	2:30 p.m.	Convocation Speaker – Professor Jeffrey Karp
,,,
Ceremony 18	Friday, June 15	10:00 a.m.	Honorary Graduand – Dr. Alfred Aho
…
Ceremony 24	Thursday, June 18	10:00 a.m.	Convocation Speaker – Margaret Wilson
Ceremony 25	Thursday, June 18	2:30 p.m.	Convocation Speaker – Margaret Wilson
Ceremony 26	Friday, June 19	10:00 a.m.	Honorary Graduand – Dr. Maria Klawe

”

(“Honorary Graduands and Convocation Speakers for the Spring 2015 Convocation Ceremonies”, University of Toronto)

As selected: the only ceremony on June 4, with Tye Farrow, Toronto designer, as convocation speaker; all two ceremonies on June 5, one with American economist and banker Paul Volcker as honorary graduate, and the other with Jeffrey Karp, stem cell scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School – thus a colleague of Charles Vacanti of the Haruko Obokata scandal fame – as convocation speaker; the first of two ceremonies on June 15, with Alfred Aho, Columbia University computer scientist and U of T graduate, as honorary graduate; all two ceremonies on June 18, both with Margaret Wilson, Toronto secondary school teacher and Ontario Teachers’ Federation leader, as convocation speaker; and the only ceremony on the last day, Friday, June 19, with Maria Klawe as honorary graduate.

There are only two computer scientists among the 2015 honorees: Alfred Aho and Maria Klawe, both with specialization in theory, both in industry research before becoming head or chair of an academic department – for Aho it was AT&T Bell Labs and then Columbia University.

Like with Queen’s University’s in 2004, these University of Toronto honorees have been thoughtfully chosen.

It is a special addition to the honors Klawe has already, because U of T is where she had turned her fortune around:

“By the late 1960s, when Klawe entered the University of Alberta, the hippie movement was in full swing… “I couldn’t figure out how math could make the world a better place,” Klawe recalled. So Christmas 1970, halfway through her third year toward an honors degree, she dropped out of the university and went to live with a Yale dropout. In summer 1971, the pair headed overseas…

In India, Klawe found herself craving mathematics… she returned to the University of Alberta in fall 1972. After finishing her bachelor’s degree in May 1973, she went straight on to grad school at Alberta, earning her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1977, and getting divorced in 1978. Hearing of booming job opportunities in theoretical computer science, she enrolled at the University of Toronto, one of the three best programs in the world (along with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). By summer 1979, she was named assistant professor at Toronto.

That fall, a young hotshot theoretical computer scientist named Nick Pippenger from IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, flew to Toronto to give a colloquium at the university. “He was extraordinarily shy, extraordinarily bright, and extraordinarily nice,” she recalled. The two young mathematicians rapidly developed a long-distance romance, flying between Toronto and New York every week or two. When they announced their engagement, “IBM Research was so afraid of losing Nick that they made me an offer to join either Yorktown Heights or a new theory group in San Jose.” Klawe and Pippenger married in May 1980 and moved to California in July.”

(“Maria M. Klawe: Welcoming the Excluded”, by Trudy E. Bell, Fall 2012, The Bent of Tau Beta Pi)

As she herself told it, not becoming a social activist, with a math Ph.D. but not committed to mathematics, Klawe enrolled as a computer science graduate student at the University of Toronto and soon in 1979 was made an assistant professor; she had recently divorced her ex-husband – the Yale University dropout I presume – and now met Nick Pippenger, an IBM researcher in her math-oriented field of theoretical computer science, and in about a year they were married and moved to IBM Research.

The corporate world was better for Klawe, both professionally and in personal life, and the University of Toronto started it all.

By the time Klawe started her UBC computer science headship along with my arrival in 1988, she had been with IBM for 8 years, as a manager for several years. So I wonder why in 1992 UBC Faculty Association president William Bruneau was quick to hide my local management-style dispute with her by dismissing the issue as “publish or perish”, and yet so eager to blame Reaganism and Thatcherism globally?

In fact, compared to Klawe’s own IBM experience, UBC management – Klawe included – and the faculty association were worse than IBM management in handling an internal dispute:

““At first, I did not realize how little value my manager put on me as a woman,” Klawe reflected. “I could have been anyone, and he would have hired me to keep Nick.” By 1984, relations with her manager had deteriorated so bitterly that Klawe started her own research group in discrete mathematics. In 1985, she was promoted to head all mathematical research within the computer science division at what became the IBM Almaden Research Center—leading what was regarded as one of the three best theoretical computer science research groups in the world and becoming manager of her former manager.

Ultimately the two became lifelong friends. At the time, however, the confrontation with gender discrimination left Klawe both angry and thoughtful—and led her to discover a major goal. “I began to wonder: How can we build institutions and groups to create a culture within science and engineering to nurture all people, beginning with undergraduates?” She began thinking about returning to academia.”

(Trudy E. Bell, Fall 2012, The Bent of Tau Beta Pi)

Maria Klawe was allowed to start her own research group after her manager had given her a hard time, and she then rose within the IBM Research system to become manager of her former manager!

But in this sense, at UBC and in Canada, and perhaps even more broadly affected, having disputed the management style and leadership conduct of powerful figures like Maria Klawe and Brian Mulroney, it has been endless career stall, recurring political persecutions, and life frustrations for me.

I have been living in Toronto for nearly 13 years. With the availability and accessibility of the internet I have been able to engage in intensive political blogging since 2009 – compared to in 1992 when the World Wide Web did not exist – but otherwise my predicaments haven’t improved.

Now Klawe is back receiving an honor in Toronto, as one of the world’s greatest leaders according to Fortune magazine.

I do notice that she isn’t given a higher profile, such as a convocation speaker, and the ceremony with her is scheduled as the last of the season. In comparison, a day earlier local school teacher Margaret Wilson gives two convocation speeches. But that is very subtle, nearly unnoticeable.

In contrast, much local media attention has recently been given to a case of child sexual exploit by University of Toronto education professor Benjamin Levin, who had been deputy education minister of Ontario province.

The case is rather bizarre, involving Levin’s urging women, in online chats, to sexually assault their daughters:

“There were two very different sides to Benjamin Levin.

The version known to his family and friends was a “kind, gentle” and “treasured” man, who served as Ontario’s deputy education minister and taught and researched at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

“Mr. Levin also had a hidden, dark side,” Ontario Court Justice Heather McArthur said Friday, when she sentenced him to three years in prison for making and possessing child pornography and for counselling to commit sexual assault.

…

It was a stunning fall for a man one former colleague said in a letter of support was “one of the world’s most outstanding educators over the past three decades,” who worked on Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team in early 2013, following Dalton McGuinty’s resignation.

…

His foray into the online realm of child pornography put Levin on the radar of three undercover officers.

An image Levin sent to one of the officers was of a bound girl with a gag in her mouth, a leash hanging down her body and a woman standing over her, writing “mmm, so hot to imagine a mother doing that to her girl to please her lover.” In another instance, he sent her a story he wrote about the violent sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl.

He told two undercover officers posing online as mothers with young girls that he and his wife had been sexually active with their own three daughters. Levin told one officer that “he hoped his daughters would ‘share’ their own children with him and his wife,” McArthur wrote.

The judge said there is no evidence that Levin actually sexually abused a child. His wife of 36 years and his daughters wrote him letters of support.”

(“Benjamin Levin sentenced to 3 years in prison on child porn charges”, by Jacques Gallant, March 29, 2015, The Toronto star)

As “one of the world’s most outstanding educators”, Levin had a starkly opposite life online, distributing pornographic images, advising women to sexually assault their daughters, bragging about doing it to his own daughters – this was denied by his family – and expressing hope that his daughters would “share” their children sexually with him.

It sounds worse than any umbilical cord-like, everlasting desire of keeping children from moving on, I am afraid.

That brings me to the following impressions I recorded in Part 2 of my very first blog article, dated January 29, 2009:

“Sitting in front of a cableless old TV this New Year’s Eve in Toronto, I suddenly realized that unlike previous New Year’s Eves there are no longer Time Square and Dick Clark on television, normally carried by CTV network’s local affiliate CFTO; Ben Mulroney must have an aversion to the year 2009, I said to myself. Settling on watching the New Year countdown and celebration at Nathan Phillip Square live on CityTV – the only thing there was on the TV set – I was surprised to see the Toronto “Jersey Boys” appear to say “I love you baby” from a 1967 song, Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You, but I did not remember hearing the Auld Lang Syne, or perhaps it was too noisy for me to notice the sing-along.”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 2)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In my recollection, in the years before and after at least one TV station live-broadcast the New York City Time Square New Year’s Eve celebration that I could watch on a “cableless”, analog TV. But not 2009’s.

Now I hope what I recorded of the Toronto 2009 New Year’s Eve celebration wasn’t a Benjamin Levin kind of perverted love: “I was surprised to see the Toronto “Jersey Boys” appear to say “I love you baby” from a 1967 song, Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You, but I did not remember hearing the Auld Lang Syne…”

Think of it again:

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off (Of) You” said, “I love you, baby, And if it’s quite all right, I need you, baby, To warm the lonely night”, whereas “Auld Lang Syne” had said, “Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?”

(“‘Auld Lang Syne’: What Does it Mean Again?”, by Christina Ng, December 31, 2012, ABC News; and, “Bob Crewe, Songwriter for Frankie Valli and Four Seasons, Dies at 83”, by William Yardley, September 12, 2014, The New York Times)

Who’s to blame?

At the time I hoped 2009 would be a good year because I was starting political blogging, hence my explanation for the lack of Time Square event on TV air, “Ben Mulroney must have an aversion to the year 2009”, referring to Brian Mulroney’s son, a CTV entertainment reporter in Toronto.

It turned out not to be, as by March 9 Maria Klawe became a Microsoft board director and, as almost always before, wherever she went not a whiff of disagreement would be in the press.

But at least in January 2009 there was another type of excitement, namely Obamamania, and even my landlady’s daughter, a secondary school principal, was reported in the press for it:

“It probably doesn’t matter to most people as they are swept up in another type of euphoria, i.e., Obamamania, anyway. The other day my landlady Mrs. Kristensen proudly showed me a copy of the January 16 Toronto Star newspaper in which her daughter Kyra Kristensen-Irvine, a Toronto-area school principal referred to as “Mrs. K.I.” by her students, made front-page news for forming an “Obama Committee” and encouraging students’ enthusiasm on the first African-American U.S. president.”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Mrs. Kristensen’s old house was across the street from the University of Toronto.

Later by 2012 Canada’s TV broadcast standards were upgraded to digital, and the old TV set Mrs. Kristensen had for me no longer worked. In late 2014 she passed away at a good old age of 99, this March I moved and now I get to watch a digital TV.

But since 1993 I haven’t been able to find a civil lawyer willing to legally confront the oppressions, nor the money for it at this point. Meanwhile, Brian Mulroney’s children are nesting comfortably and successfully in the same city.

And my extensive and in-depth blogging since 2009 has not led to any media coverage I have been hoping for. Yet today Maria Klawe is back in Toronto to roost.

But at the least, the lurid stories of online child sexual-assault chats by Benjamin Levin, the disgraced former Ontario deputy education minister, in the Canadian media has presented a tempting political blame.

For instance, some blamed Levin for the proposed radical changes to Ontario schools’ sex education curriculum – something Premier Kathleen Wynne, once Levin’s boss as education minister, vehemently denies despite some evidence for it:

“On March 6, 2009, Levin wrote and signed a memo that put himself in charge of Ontario’s school curriculum.

“Dear colleagues, I am writing to provide an update on our sector’s agenda … I will be filling the ADM (assistant deputy minster) position previously held by George Zegarac … The division formerly headed by George Zegarac will be renamed as ‘Learning and Curriculum.’ It will have responsibilty for curriculum and for Special Education including Provincial Schools.”

…

For some, it’s a question of what children should be learning. For others, it’s about age appropriateness. But for many, the key question is should such a strategy be moved forward when the man at the top of it is accused with crimes against children?

…

“Ministers and deputy ministers do not write curriculum,” Wynne told reporters. “Curriculum is written by subject experts in conversation and in consultation with a wide array of people and curriculum is reviewed and written on an ongoing basis.”

…

No involvement?

Memos show Levin announcing he is taking over the “renamed” Learning and Curriculum department and “will have responsibilty for curriculum.” It’s nonsensical and troubling to suggest Levin was not involved. In the interest of children, with these documents now public, members of the legislature should sanction the premier and minister for spinning attempts.”

(“Liberals can’t deny Levin’s role with sex-ed curriculum”, by Joe Warmington, March 2, 2015, The Toronto Sun)

How sexually explicit and age inappropriate is the proposed new sex-ed curriculum?Even University of Toronto students have their eyebrows raised:

“Benjamin Levin is a tenured University of Toronto professor, former Ontario deputy education minister, and was a member of Kathleen Wynne’s transition team. This July, the U of T community was shocked when Levin was arrested and charged with seven counts of child pornography.

…

In 2010, as Ontario’s deputy education minister, Mr. Levin proposed a radical sex education curriculum, which then education minister and current premier Kathleen Wynne was hoping to adopt. Parts of the program suggested teaching eight-year-olds about sexual orientation and identity and eleven-year-olds about anal and oral sex, as well as masturbation. Premier Dalton McGuinty rejected it at the time due to opposition from parents.

Wynne now denies that Mr. Levin played any role in forming the sexual education curriculum.”

(“Canada’s most scandalous university”, by Laura Charney, December 11, 2013, The Newspaper)

As the deputy education minister, Levin supervised far more than sex education, of course. He had a vision for a “whole-system reform” of education:

“… The moral and political purpose of whole-system reform is ensuring that everyone will be affected for the better, starting on day one of implementing the strategy. The entire system should show positive, measurable results within two or three years.

We have done this in Ontario, Canada, where we have had the opportunity since 2003 to implement new policies and practices across the system—all 4,000 elementary schools, 900 secondary schools, and the 72 districts that serve 2 million students. Following five years of stagnation and low morale, from 1998 to 2003, the impact of the new strategies has been dramatic: …”

(“The Fundamentals of Whole-System Reform: A Case Study from Canada”, by Michael Fullan and Ben Levin, online June 12 (in print June 17), 2009, Education Week)

But Levin’s education reform success has been questioned by a Ph.D. thesis produced at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education where Levin has been a professor. In her 2011 thesis, Lindsay Anne Kerr wrote:

“… this study is an intertextual analysis of print/electronic documents pertaining to students ‘at risk.’ … This study questions the accounting logic that reduces education to skills training in workplace literacy/numeracy, and contradicts the official ‘success’ story that promotes Ontario as a model of large-scale educational change. …

…

As distinct from the messy haphazardness of ruling directives that teacher/participants experience on the ground, Levin, Glaze, and Fullan (2008) paint a rosy picture of Ontario’s success story as a made-in-Canada model for large-scale education reform. As I have pointed out, this disconnect between frontline teachers and the official story marks the operation of ruling relations. … The purpose of this section is not to single out individuals, but to show how the ruling apparatus operates to bring about institutional capture to the ruling ideology. …

…

… From my analysis, it becomes apparent that the Liberal government in Ontario is actually building on education reforms begun by the Harris/Eves regime, rather than bringing about any substantive change to the original plan that exacerbated the problem of students dropping out of high school before graduation. Thus, the Liberal government’s SS Strategy continues to reproduce socio-economic inequity through strengthening neoliberal education reforms and displacing critical democratic approaches to education. …”

(“The EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTION of STUDENTS at RISK”, by Lindsay Anne Kerr, 2011, Graduate Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto)

It reads like, away from the public eye, the Ontario education reform process overseen by Levin was to a degree authoritarian, and discriminative against “at risk” students.

Now I wonder what Benjamin Levin’s possibly concocted stories of sexual assaulting his daughters might be for – getting extra jail time on a pathetically cooked tale in exchange for hiding other matters of substance in a kind of scam justice?

(Continuing to Part 2)