Endless Knots

Sylvia Nasar's statement about her suit against Columbia

Photo by Dario Cantatore/Getty Images from NY Times, March 19, 2013

Earlier this week, Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind and a tenured professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, filed suit against Columbia "accusing the university of misdirecting $4.5 million in funds over the last decade," according to Christine Haughney's article in the NY Times.

The suit arises from Nasar's appointment in 2000 as the John S. and James L. Knight professor of business journalism at Columbia and claims, among other charges, that while Knight provided $1.5m for endowing the chair she holds, the university failed to provide matching funds required by the grant. According to the complaint, Columbia instead paid her salary out of the Knight funds and failed to meet a number of other stipulations of the agreement, including supporting research, which, the suit says, she had to pay for out of pocket.

It's a bold move and a difficult thing to do, i.e. a lone professor is bringing a suit against one of the biggest, best endowed, and most powerful universities in the world. Sylvia, who's been a close friend since we met on our first day as students at Antioch College, has issued a statement, which I'm posting here with her approval:

Statement by Sylvia Nasar re: 

Nasar v. Trustees of Columbia University

 

Filing a lawsuit against Columbia, and having concerns about a key source of funding -- the Knight endowment -- become public, is not a course of action one chooses. But after more than two and a half years of attempts to engage university officials to discuss, and remedy, the issues described in the complaint, Columbia’s refusal to respond has, regrettably, led to this painful step. 

What’s at stake here: a great university must be able to assure donors that it will honor its promises. The default mode of a great journalism school must be one of transparency.

I love Columbia and intend to remain the Knight professor of business journalism until I retire.

The Knight Chair is a unique opportunity to make a difference in the way economics and financial reporters are trained in the digital age.  

In creating the Chair, Columbia’s, and Knight’s, original intentions were the best. And, partly, they were fulfilled.

In crucial ways, unfortunately, they were not and, as a result, Columbia has short-changed the very students and faculty the Trustees pledged to support. For that reason, I feel compelled to take this action.

 

Goodbye, MA STEM Summit

Think about it. Eleven hundred people in Massachusetts came together today to talk about science, technology, engineering, and math in education (STEM). A whole day. And there were reportedly several hundred more who wanted to come but there was no room. If the numbers keep growing like this, in a few years, the Massachusetts STEM Summit may fill all of Gillette Stadium.

I snapped this picture while leaving after a long day of talks and workshops. With no responsibilities other than to attend, I spent the day tweeting. What follows are some of my tweets -- not a record of the day, per se, but a record of what I noticed, slightly edited for readability, as I moved from session to session.

Breakfast Plenary

Bob Kraft [owner of Gillette Stadium and host for day]: "Eight years ago, there was no Facebook; Twitter was a sound; a cloud meant rain; LinkedIn meant you were in prison; and apps were something you ate before dinner."

Kraft: Announces a new award of $5K for Mass STEM Teacher of Year.

Kraft: "Invites" everyone to come to Gillette Stadium on Sunday to watch Pats defeat Jets.

LtGov Timothy Murray: Announces $650K additonal funding for @Scale STEM Initiative, exemplary STEM projects across Commonwealth.

Lt Gov Murray: Our advantage in Mass is our "innovation economy;" STEM was referenced 16 times in Mass Economic Development Plan

Me: Wondering what ratio is between 1100 people at MA STEM SUMMIT today and total # of educators in state.

Rose Kirk [keynote speaker, president of Verizon Foundation]: "Every $10B invested in broadband creates 500K new jobs;" 30% of Verizon Foundation staff have STEM degrees.

MA Secretary of Education Paul Reville: "This is no longer a conference or a summit; it's a movement"

SecEd Reville: So much STEM stuff going on all around state; have double # of STEM jobs in MA as in nation

SecEd Reville: Massachusetts is developing national models for having pre-K frameworks in STEM

SecEd Reville: "We're on a roll, we've got a movement, and we've got to keep going!"

SecEd Reville: "I recently visited Newton North [High School]'s Innovation Lab" -- Go my hometown, Newton!!!!

SecEd Reville: "We need to close the inspiration gap"

MA Sec Labor & Workforce Dev Joanne Goldstein: Fascinated to watch prez debates w/kids tweeting, reading endless tweets

Sec Goldstein: Challenge to all: how to more effectively join workforce development with K-12, particularly with high school students

Sec Goldstein: Department of Labor gave community colleges $20m to collaborate & figure out work & education needs in Mass

Morning Workshop on Workforce Development

[Governor's STEM Advisory Council Executive Director] David Cedrone: Baby boomer retirements pose challenge to fill STEM jobs; must build talent pipeline by aligning programs

JD Chesloff [Executive Director, MA Business Roundtable]: Raytheon survey of 1K high school students: do you prefer doing your math homework or eating broccoli. 56% preferred broccoli

Gary DiCamillo [Chair, Berkshire Manufactured Products]: youngest tool & diemaker [we have] is 55. No one to hire! VoTech gone!

David Cedrone: STEM programs are capital-investment heavy; need continuous conversations with the business community to insure employment

Me: [It's a] complex system of economics/education/career counseling disconnects [coupled with] poor forecasting + budget cuts that has decimated pipeline for [the] trades

Precision machining company owner from SE Mass is also looking for employees with skills for jobs

Me: Would small business networks like [those formed by] manufacturing companies in '80s & '90s help STEM pipeline problems? See TEAMNET FACTOR http://amzn.to/RHhBGu 

Educator from Marlborough, MA: "Soft" skills, e.g., collaboration, [that are] sometimes dismissed, just as important as "hard" skills

MA Sec Housing and Economic Development Greg Bialecki: Turf issues still holding us back. Are we educating citizens or training a workforce? We need both!

Sec Bialecki: Is mission of K-12 to train people for jobs or educate people to go to college? Again, should be both

Lunch Plenary

Most impressive presentation yet: Janet LaBreck, Commissioner, MA Commission for the Blind, brilliantly delivered all from memory

Janet LaBreck: Technology has been a game changer for the blind, "leveling the playing field" in the 21st century

Commissioner LaBreck: "as a blind person, I never imagined being able to read newspaper - never mind all those apps"

Afternoon keynote by NASA Astronaut Cady Coleman, MIT undergrand, UMass PhD, 3 space missions, last 159 days on space station

Astronaut Coleman, accomplished flutist, played first earth-space duet & read to her child from space

Dr Coleman shows slide of space station and says, "I used to live there."

Coleman: things are *hard* & amazing. Lack of space station now forces NASA to think about what we *really* do.

Coleman: Private companies doing things we used to. They also make decisions like that (snaps fingers) "without a meeting! Imagine!"

Coleman: [There's a] "certain optimism about space" that we need to encourage

Coleman: 8.5 hrs to get into orbit. Showing video from space, not animation. You're not floating in space; you're flying."

Now video of Cady Coleman paying flute duet from space to earth with flutist in Russia in honor of 50th anniv of space flight! 

Coleman: INCREDIBLE video from space showing astronaut pitching ball then floating ahead of it to hit it back with bat

Now she's showing how the toilet works in space. Use your imagination, tweet-readers

Coleman: saw Cape Cod from space! Fellow astronaut said, "Oh my god, it looks just like the map."

Coleman: Took 60K pics in space, including Aurora Borealis. Spectacular. Extraordinary. Not enough characters to describeColeman: Get "Be a Martian" app or "SpaceCraft 3D" or "AstroApp"  

 Coleman: Ending with photos of glass-artist husband who keeps house when she's gone + gorgeous shot of her son (and cat)

MA Sec of Housing & Econ Dev Greg Bialecki: "In Massachusetts, collaboration happens at regional level"

Afternoon Workshop on "Designing Courses Based on Evidence of How People Learn"

Robert Milner, Prof, Neurology, UMass Med School: Demo of memory -- deeper analysis involving affect causes greater retention

Karen Kashmanian Oates, WPI Dean, Arts & Sciences: Learning depends on forming cognitive networks. Lemon>feel>image>taste>smell>lemon law?lemongrass etc

Oates: "Practice consolidates learning and feedback enhances this learning"  

Oates: In-depth teaching, not just facts [results in] active collaborative learning; experiences that link theory and practice  

Tara Mann: "For mastery, subject matter must be taught in-depth with many examples in which the same concept is at work"  

Oates: "Learners must reflect on own learning--metacognition, "knowing about knowing;" asks students to write about it

Oates: Emotional component to learning. Cancer course [is] very different from Cell Biology course; AIDS course is very different from Immunology course 

Oates: "Need to move to participatory learning around topics of impact to students." From "Inert" to "Liberating" Literacy 

Tara Mann: Experiential Learning Cycle: Active Experimentation>Concrete Experience>Reflective Observation>Abstract Experimentation

Karen Oates: Let students know why you're doing what you're doing, which motivates directed learning. "Give them voice."

At which point we did an exercise. Everyone got a peanut in a shell. Our job was to write down what it looked like to us. Here's what I wrote:

Ode to the Peanut

First the feeling, the rough shell, dirt still trapped in the crevices, spine after spine that reaches from end to end, the shape of a kidney, not that I know what a kidney looks like and there is a splotch, not just dirt but an indentation, a birthmark, poor little peanut alone out here away from your tree, your mother, your family, likely harvested by someone allergic to you who is now on the verge of death or maybe dead but doesn’t know why which makes me ask whether if the peanut did kill you, do you know  it? And I haven’t even cracked the shell, wherein lies the fruit of the woody pellet.

Milner: Learning activity provides closure and should continue beyond class. Think on way home of 2-3 things you've learned today.  

Goodbye, MA STEM Summit  pic.twitter.com/9jnHtZOk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Live from Massachusetts STEM Summit

I'm attending the Masschusetts STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) Summit today at Gillette Stadium (who knew it was a conference venue?). I'm sitting in the introductory session where the Governor's STEM Advisory Council Executive Director David Cedrone is providing an overview of the STEM initiative here in the state. David is a long-standing colleague--we first worked together when he was doing fabulous things with networking at Digital Equipment Corporation where I was an external consultant.

Here are some (incomplete) notes from the introductory session:

9th Annual STEM Summit in State--1100 people registered with 250 on waiting list.

Student interest in STEM in MA lags nation – 37% vs 43% nationwide

@Scale Project – Phase 1 – lots of good initiatives; not scaled, not replicated; identified first set of 7 projects endorsed by Advisory Council; secured additional funding for them; got 3:1 private:public match. Focused on student interest and student readiness, 2 of top 5 goals

Funding for 2012 increased to $1.5m; hope to fund complete portfolio across pre-K-12 of 20 projects; going for NSF funding for research on “best practices”

Opportunity through pre-K providers to start simple interest in STEM for kids and reach parents who bring their kids to school every day; “WOW” public awareness campaign also begun ($130K for this year) featuring “Wowsters” in MA who do exciting STEM things in state; posters available here at Summit.

Focus in 2012 on Student Interest/Readiness; Public Awareness; Workforce Alignment: Employer Awareness & Readiness

 

Saybrook University reissues Jeff Stamps's PhD

UPDATE: I forgot to include the best part of this story and the reason why Jeff received a new degree from Saybrook. After he was interviewed by Saybrook Alumni Director George Aiken and Wendy Thayer last fall (published here), Jeff sent an email to George thanking him and including this request: "Since I only have an HPI degree certificate, am I eligible for an upgrade to an actual certified school? I may have to present credentials at the pearly gates." The longer story follows. I accepted the degree last Fri night at Saybrook's graduation. Keep reading for more background...

Two posts now related to Jeff Stamps noting some "doin's" this weekend related to him in San Francisco.

This evening, at Saybrook University's graduation ceremony, I will accept the following on Jeff's behalf:

In Honor of his Outstanding Contributions in the Fields of Networks and Systems Theory, Alumnus Jeffrey Stamps will posthumously receive a re-issue of his 1980 Humanistic Psychology Institute Doctoral Degree as a Saybrook University Diploma. His wife, Jessica Lipnack, will be present to accept the degree.

Background:  In 1980, Jeff received his PhD in Human Systems Theory from what was then called the Humanistic Psychology Institute. The school had been founded by psychologist Eleanor Criswell in 1970 as the academic arm of the Association for Humanistic Psychology where luminaries like Virginia Satir, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and, of course, Abraham Maslow found large followings. In a break from rat-oriented views of human development, these pioneers defined a new approach to psychology that recognized the complexity of people, i.e. a more humanistic approached.

Jeff had originally studied for his PhD (actually called a D.Phil there) at Oxford, where he wrote an original dissertation on the metaphysics of Thomas Hobbes. As the home of Hobbes study, where scholars focused almost exclusively on Hobbes's politics, Oxford dons were not taken with Jeff's non-derivative views of The Leviathan, including a deep dive into Hobbes's mathematics. Orginally trained as a mathematician, Jeff was able to derive his own number theory, referenced in the dissertation. Plus he wrote the entire thesis without including references to other scholars as none had approached the aspects of Hobbes's thinking, including his work on cosmology. Let's put it this way: his dissertation committee was not pleased and Jeff was given a consolation degree instead: an M.Litt from Oxford. It's not as bad as it sounds. His Oxford tutor, Zbigniew Pełczyński (just a wonderful human being, IMHO), once told us that some 50% of Oxford dissertations end the way Jeff's did. So at least he was in good company. 

But, like many a brilliant person, Jeff wanted a PhD -- and wanted to pursue his thinking around systems theory, which is where the Hobbes work took him conceptually. So in 1976 he discovered the Humanistic Psychology Institute and enrolled in their program. Thanks to an early encounter with Gregory Bateson, who confirmed that Jeff's approach to his topic was precisely the way he absorbed new material -- read like crazy, allow yourself to become so stuffed with ideas that you're confused, then let it sort itself out over time, Jeff took off reading and writing. He consumed everything he could about general systems theory, a field that looked at overarching principles, which always fascinated Jeff. From there, he identified two common themes that appeared in all systems theories: whole-parts and level structure. Arthur Koestler, who later invited Jeff to lunch at his cottage in the English countryside, was the principal architect of the whole-part concept, inspired the title of Jeff's dissertation, Holonomy: A Human Systems Theory, which was published by Intersystems Publications just months after he finished it, with a foreword by Kenneth Boulding.

Here's Boulding's Foreword, which explains a great deal about Jeff's work:

I have read this volume with great interest, and I have learned a good deal from it. As I see it, the work has two main objectives. One is to bring together a considerable body of fairly recent literature which has not been brought together before and show that, behind a good deal of diversity, there are a great many common facets. The core of this literature is a body of work which comes mainly from those associated with this group. Then there is a group of writers who might be described as forerunners or 'fellow thinkers' of the general systems group - Bateson, Dobzhansky, Prigogine, Schrodinger, L.L. Whyte, and Norber Wiener. Then there is a group of writers who might be called 'creative eccentrics' - Frazer, Koestler, Maslow, Jaynes, and others. The author gives a clear, sympathetic account of the work of those and other writers, and shows convincingly that this is a body of literature that has perhaps a somewhat eccentric and even dubious penumbra, but which nevertheless represents an important movement in the course of the last generation which is not usually recognized as such. To show this is a real contribution to the history of thought.

The author, however, has gone beyond this historical task to develop a synthesis of his own, which is largely taxonomic in nature. It is a brave effort, imaginative and far ranging. If I have doubts about it, it is because I have considerable doubts about any taxonomic scheme, for such always run into the temptation of imposing an order on the universe which may not really be there. However, as a taxonomic scheme it is certainly defensible and interesting, and adds to the value of the work. Even if the attempt at a grand synthesis is overambitious, I have no doubt that it will stimulate a good deal of thinking and research and that human knowledge will be advanced by it. This is a work both to be enjoyed and to be taken seriously.

I'm also appending to this post a paper that Jeff wrote on the potential of online education IN 1980! Jeff was a visionary and as such could peer so far into the future that some of us are still waiting for ideas like these to truly emerge.

Download HPI_GradNet_1980

 

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Saybrook University interview with Jeff Stamps

At least one good thing happens when you're in the kind of situation Jeff Stamps is in: people want to talk to you, say nice things about you, even publish interviews. Here's an extensive one conducted for Saybrook University by its alumni director, George Aiken, PhD '06, Wendy Thayer, and Dawna Perez, PhD '07. See "Saybrook Alumnus Jeffrey Stamps, PhD '80: An Interview with an Organizational Systems Pioneer," with its downloadable pdf.

Jeff received his PhD from Saybrook in 1980; his dissertation, Holonomy: A Human Systems Theory, was published by Intersystems Publications, with a foreword by Kenneth Boulding. For those interested in knowing more about how Jeff went from being a downhill racer and math and physics whiz to a general systems theorist to a man facing death... this interview will take you through the progression of his thinking and how his life has played out.

Thanks, George, Wendy, and Dawna, for making this happen.

Two passages to India

Interesting blogs from two friends, one recently, the other currently, in India.

Bombayva is the work of Ava Shapiro, who's there on an 11-month stay on American Jewish World Service’s World Partners Fellowship.

Andi.in.India documents Fulbright Scholar Andi Edson's five-week tour of India's primary education system this summer.

Both blogs educational and delightful.

 

 

Frontier 6 gets kudos in Times editorial

Today's NY Times lead editorial, "The Way Out," lauds Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell,  here before as Frontier 6, for the job he's doing as head of security force training in Afghanistan:

General Caldwell has brought a new coherence and purpose to the mission by revamping the Afghan Army leadership program and standardizing police instruction, among other innovations. And he has managed to double his number of trainers from 1,300 when he started to roughly 2,700 today. But he — more to the point, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General McChrystal — is having a very hard time getting the rest of NATO to deliver on commitments.

Editorial also cites the big challenges - not enough NATO trainers and an Afghan military culture that doesn't value training,

More here on what Caldwell did when he headed education and training programs at Fort Leavenworth. Same time that he started blogging as Frontier 6 ("Let Soldiers Blog, Post to YouTube.")

Nohria new dean at Harvard Business School

Harvard University President Drew Faust just announced that Nitin Nohria, an insightful academic who early on recognized the importance of networks to global business strategy, is the new dean of HBS. "He's an outstanding scholar, teacher, and mentor, with a global outlook and an instinct for collaboration across traditional boundaries," Faust said.

From the announcement* on the B-school's site:

A scholar of leadership and organizational change, Nohria has previously been the School's senior associate dean for faculty development and chair of its organizational behavior unit. Current co-chair of the HBS Leadership Initiative and a member of the HBS faculty since 1988, he will take up his new role on July 1.

Congrats, Nitin. Very happy for you, the institution, and for networks.

Virtual high school reunion?

My friend Bill writes, asking a question I'm also interested in as I can't make it to my important high school reunion this year. Anyone know?

Hi Jessica,
Have you ever heard of a H.S. class doing your virtual meeting kind of stuff in lieu of going to the expense of flying or driving from all over the place just to get to a disappointing town with few accommodations -- like Tenafly, NJ.?

Studying Facebook

Seriously. At Bowdoin College, College Offers Facebook Sociology Course.