This is Lawrence Krauss’s career now

He’s fallen far now, and seems to think that thrashing about in the muck will raise him up, rather than make him dirtier. He’s got an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal 🤮, titled “A Scientist’s Sexuality Shouldn’t Matter”. I agree, it shouldn’t, but we’re dealing with facts here rather than a disgruntled conservative’s feelings, and it does matter, unfortunately.

Krauss is upset because federal grant agencies ask applicants about various bits of demographic data.

The Survey of Earned Doctorates is an annual census of new postgraduate research degrees. The National Science Foundation, a federal agency, collects data on academic discipline, sex, race, ethnicity, debt burden, disability and citizenship. The results are used by government, universities and industry to track the demographics of women and minorities in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.

Well, yes, it’s a survey. That’s what surveys do. Krauss wants them to stop because — wait for it — sexism is over! According to a notorious sex pest, that is.

The sex and race data — the latter has been collected since 1975 — was initially useful in efforts to overcome barriers to women and minorities in academia. Those barriers have largely disappeared, yet quotas and preferential hiring have persisted. After such a concerted effort, demographic disparities are less likely to point to systemic biases in academia than to underlying societal factors.

That’s especially true when it comes to disparities of sex. Women earn a majority of postbaccalaureate degrees over all STEM disciplines in the U.S. Since female undergraduates outnumber male ones by about 3 to 2, this trend is likely to continue. Further, a recent large-scale study found that previous claims about sex bias in academic science were overblown. Tenure-track women and men in STEM receive comparable grant funding, journal acceptances and recommendation letters, and women have an edge in hiring.

What quotas? What preferential hiring? I’ve been in a lot of job searches over the years, and we’re told over and over by the administration that there are questions we can’t ask, and they’re all about avoiding bias. I’d agree that there are fewer biases in academia (but not no biases) because of policies Krauss doesn’t like, and that we’re dealing with larger societal factors, but academia is part of society, if you hadn’t noticed.

A good example of those societal factors: undergraduate women outnumber men, especially at liberal arts colleges like mine. Is this a good thing? Nobody thinks so. It’s not at all because we preferentially admit women — please, high school men, do apply and come to UMM, we love you all — but because when universities stopped discriminating against women, many women saw a college education as a tool for escaping traditional roles. Liberal arts colleges also actively encourage students to explore new ideas, which is appealing if you want something more than a fast-track to a job.

Of course, to a white man the barriers are invisible, so they don’t exist.

Such personal matters are irrelevant to science and essentially invisible. In my 40 years in academia, I have worked with all sorts of colleagues and students. Many were highly eccentric, but that didn’t matter if they were good scientists. As one colleague put it: “You are teaching a chemistry or physics course. Your lectures describe concepts and present equations. ‘Suppose a magnet is moving relative to a loop of wire.’ You barely know any of your students. You give tests and grade them. You have no idea, nor care about, the ‘sexual orientation’ of any of your students. . . . What career barriers are there?”

What a blinkered ass…you might as well say, “no one is trying to rape me, therefore rape and sexual harassment are not a problem anywhere.” Which is just what a self-centered serial harasser would say.

I’m also appalled at the idea that a professor just lectures and gives tests and grades them and doesn’t need to know anything about their students. What university was this at? Krauss should have mentioned it so everyone would know to avoid it. Of course we are and should be aware of our students’ lives, to a degree. We invite deeper interactions than just talking at and grading them — I listen when students are struggling and try to help them resolve conflicts and issues.

I don’t even understand this factory-style approach to impersonal teaching.

Asking respondents if they’re “transgender,” “gender non-conforming,” “nonbinary,” “gender-fluid” or “genderqueer” is patently ridiculous. These are subjective categories, unobservable by others unless the person in question makes it a point to label himself publicly. Most scientists, like ordinary people, couldn’t even define most of these terms, let alone use them as a basis for discrimination.

You don’t need to define the terms, you just need to categorize your students and colleagues as highly eccentric.

This is peak clueless offensiveness, though. Non-heterosexual identities are patently ridiculous and mere subjective categories? They matter to the people who have them, and what also matters is professors who so callously dismiss their lived identities. You know, the ones who think people who aren’t like them are not ordinary people.

Jesus. Krauss is making me aware that we do discriminate. If we were interviewing a job candidate and they spewed out that stuff about how teaching is just about giving tests and grading them, calling gay and trans students eccentric and patently ridiculous, it’s true — there’s no way we’d hire them. We try not to employ assholes.

Also, we’d rather not hire stupid people. Krauss even quotes the goals of these agencies, but doesn’t understand them.

What’s the purpose of all this? Nature magazine paraphrases a statement from the NSF’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Charles Barber: “Collecting these data will help the NSF and other agencies to analyse employers’ policies and procedures for addressing unintended barriers to employment, advancement and inclusion.” The magazine then quotes Mr. Barber: “This gives us an opportunity to create more opportunities and broaden participation to yield equitable outcomes for the LGBTQIA+ community and others.”

Yes. Collecting data to detect “unintended barriers to employment, advancement and inclusion.” How would you know if an organization discriminates, unintentionally or otherwise, if you have no information about the population of a class known to be subject to bias? How would you know if an organization has successfully knocked down all barriers to advancement if you don’t look? Krauss is advocating willful blindness to abuse and harassment and bias…unsurprisingly, for a guy with his history. If those meddling kids hadn’t noticed and reported his behavior, he’d still have a job!

Does that mean quotas?

No.

If so, how would one even go about determining the “correct” proportion of “queer” or “genderqueer” scientists? The percentage of the population that espouses these labels is so small that any data the NSF gathers will be statistically useless.

The correct proportion is one that roughly matches the proportion in the general population, because that would indicate that there’s probably an absence of selective bias. That wasn’t so hard, Larry.

It’s kind of astonishing to see a physicist dismissing an event as insignificant because the frequency is too low. What happened to 5-sigma, Larry? Does the Higgs boson not matter because it’s so difficult to see that you have to spend billions of dollars to detect it? Most of the stars in the sky are not exploding, so why waste our time looking for novas? The frequency of stellar class A stars is only 0.63% — can we just ignore them, then? Heck, our sun falls into a group that makes up less than 8% of all stars. Must not be important, then.

You know we can detect all kinds of numbers if we just look. Here’s a result of the US census — over a million ‘eccentric’ people live in same-sex relationships.

We also know, because people looked at the data, that over 1.6 million ‘ordinary’ people are transgender, and that the proportion is rising as social barriers fall.

A study published on Friday estimates that nearly 1.64 million people over the age of 13 in the United States identify themselves as transgender, based on an analysis of newly expanded federal health surveys.

The study estimates that about 0.5% of all U.S. adults, some 1.3 million people, and about 1.4%, or 300,000, of youth between 13- and 17-years-old identify as transgender, having a different gender identity than the sex they were assigned at birth.

I really don’t understand this frequency based argument. Can we just ignore 1.3 million people, or worse, oppress and discriminate against them? They’re statistically useless, you know. It’s just that they are people.

Wow, Krauss has become a right-wing cartoon at this point.

Everyone hates Elsevier

Everyone. For years. As a grad student I knew what a parasite Elsevier was. Librarians hate Elsevier. You should hate Elsevier, if you don’t already. It’s a company with their boot on the neck of scientific information, and they’re one of the reasons you can’t easily get past the paywalls limiting access to information you already paid for.

Some editors are taking a stand and walking out on Elsevier.

More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier.

The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage, including professors from Oxford University, King’s College London and Cardiff University resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.

In case you’re wondering why…

Elsevier, a Dutch company that claims to publish 18% of the world’s scientific papers, reported a 10% increase in its revenue to £2.9bn last year. But it’s the profit margins, nearing 40%, according to its 2019 accounts, which anger academics most. The big scientific publishers keep costs low because academics write up their research – typically funded by charities and the public purse – for free. They “peer review” each other’s work to verify it is worth publishing for free, and academic editors collate it for free or for a small stipend. Academics are then often charged thousands of pounds to have their work published in open-access journals, or universities will pay very high subscription charges.

That’s right. Somehow we all work for Elsevier. We reinforce that because we voluntarily make our volunteer work in reviewing papers for the publishing companies part of our praiseworthy work listed in our tenure and promotion reviews.

We have to laugh at our situation.

I predicted this

The president of the University of Minnesota, Joan Gabel, has decided to leave her $700,000/year position to get paid even more somewhere else. And no one wept.

However, now we begin the dance to hire a new overpaid administrator, and the first step is to hire an interim president for a year or so while we spend a lot of money wooing someone new. The Board of Regents presented us with a list of candidates, and I looked over that list with a cynical eye for the worst possible candidate, and predicted which one the regents would pick. Of course I was dead on.

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents on Monday picked former Hormel Foods CEO Jeff Ettinger to serve as interim president.

Ettinger is expected lead the U on a temporary basis while the Board of Regents searches for a new permanent president. The board looked for candidates for an interim who would not seek the position permanently.

Ten of the 12 board members voted for Ettinger, including Regent Mary Davenport.

“Ettinger is somebody from the outside, from a different point of view, a different walk in life who comes into higher education with some base knowledge, but brings something bigger,” Davenport said.

How could I know this was coming? Because I know our regents, and I just scanned the list for the businessman with no personal knowledge of academia.

Ettinger, who has a law degree, had the least amount of academic experience of the four finalists.

He told the board that his experience leading Hormel will translate well to the university.

Right. Hormel. The company that churns out processed meat, like Spam. Just like the university churns out meat for capitalism?

We’ll be rid of him soon enough, but we’re going to continue to be saddled with this inappropriate Board of Regents forever, and they’re going to pick the next president.

Maybe I’m being unfair. We just got a letter from the president of the board of regents, further explaining his background and experience.

Previously, he was the chief executive officer of the Hormel Foods Corporation in Austin, MN from 2005 to 2016. He ascended to CEO after 16 years with the company in roles including corporate attorney, treasurer and president of Jennie-O Turkey Store, Inc. in Willmar, MN.

Oh. President of the Jennie-O Turkey Store, you say? Eminently qualified to run an academic institution then.

The sheep look up

I teach. I’ve been at this university for 23 years, and I try to avoid the management side of things — I stay away from the administration building, I don’t even care who is the university president as long as they leave me alone. This may have been a very bad idea.

I got a notice from the administration that they are accepting applications for interim president of the university, because the last one is abandoning us after a short 5 years of employment (that’s not surprising, U presidents seem to flit hither and yon, another reason to ignore them.) But it meant I had to take a minute to figure out what’s going on.

Our outgoing president, Joan Gabel, is paid over $700,000/year. I don’t know that she is worth that much. Now I learn that she’s being offered an additional $260,000 if she stays through June. All right, that’s a pretty sweet deal she’s had. What is she being offered by the University of Pittsburgh?

She’s had a few scandals — the biggest being that she took a position on the board of Securian, a financial company that does a lot of money management for the university. This was a serious conflict of interest, not to mention that she’s getting paid a buttload of money to be the U president, and should be devoting full time to her job. The Board of Regents said it was OK, though, although our governor said it was not. She resigned eventually. Maybe she’s mad at us because we wouldn’t let her rake in more money with a side gig?

And then, the Board of Regents…every time I hear about them, the less impressed I am. These are a bunch of politicians and business people who don’t understand the purpose of an educational system. I’ve mentioned Sviggum before — the bozo who thought UMM was “too diverse”. Now I learn that the chair of the board, Ken Powell, was the disgustingly rich CEO of General Mills who made $24 million in the year before he retired. He is, supposedly, retired, but is now appointed to the chair of the Board of Regents — he’s the guy who thought is was no problem for her to work with Securian, who approved her exorbitant salary. The Regents main purpose seems to be to dip into the university till and give money to each other.

All I can say is that if I got paid tens of millions in my last year here, I would definitely definitively absolutely retire. I’d be done. I’d go relax with my grandchildren, and wouldn’t come back to plague my university for years to come, and I certainly wouldn’t be working hard to transfer money from hardworking faculty and staff salaries to serve the leeches appointed to administrative positions.

There’s no hope that I’ll get paid that much — that’s like more than my lifetime income — but here’s the deal. Appoint me to the interim presidency, pay me like a half million for my services, and I’ll try to keep the money going to the people who really deserve it, and then quietly disappear when my term is done. You can trust me on that. I was such a good boy when the regents visited my university in March, not confronting them at all and turning around and walking away when I saw them coming. I promise to ignore all of their blandishments in the future, as well.

Tough times for education

The universities in Minnesota are divided into multiple teams. My university is part of the University of Minnesota system, which has 5 campuses — it’s the smaller subsystem, but it’s also older and wealthier, founded before Minnesota had statehood, and it’s a little bit more independent for that reason. The real giant in this state is MnSCU, the Minnesota State College and University system, which is made up of 30 colleges and 7 universities. These campuses were explicitly set up by the state to provide educational opportunities to all of its citizens. Then there are all the private colleges, about which I’ll say no more.

They’re all good institutions, operating in parallel. My oldest son attended a MnSCU college, St Cloud State University (SCSU), the middle child went to school in Wisconsin, and my youngest went to a UM school right here at UMM, so we aren’t snobs about which system is better. Unfortunately, they’re all suffering right now, with painful declines in enrollment. SCSU has been hit hard.

The student headcount at St. Cloud State has dropped from more than 18,000 in 2010 to about 10,000 last fall. But not only are the numbers dropping, the students are changing: Nearly 50% of students are part-time, about 25% are under 18 and enrolled in postsecondary classes, and about 10% are 35 and older.

There are also fewer traditional students — recent high school graduates looking for a four-year degree — than in previous decades because of declining birthrates beginning in the 1990s, changes in perception around the importance of undergraduate degrees, and more education options such as for-profit and online colleges.

Yikes. SCSU is about 10 times the size of UMM, and while we’ve suffered substantial enrollment declines, I think that SCSU has been proportionally hit even harder. Their solution: put major programs on the chopping block.

St. Cloud State University will phase out six majors and cut three dozen jobs in the wake of a looming $18.3 million deficit projected for the upcoming school year, according to leaders at the central Minnesota school.

The majors to be phased out are philosophy, theater, nuclear medicine technology, real estate and insurance at the undergraduate level, as well as marriage and family therapy at the graduate level.

23 faculty and 14 staff are being laid off! I’m feeling the pain from here, a hundred miles away. My U hasn’t done anything quite that drastic, at least not yet, but we have been letting natural attrition of faculty take its course and avoiding some important replacement hires, but that has still caused serious difficulties. We haven’t been firing people or killing majors programs, but when staffing withers away and your department has one professor left, you’ve de facto closed off a major. You’re also going to exhaust that one overworked professor, who is going to be looking for jobs elsewhere.

These are terrifying times in academia. Enrollment dropping, the pandemic was a major strike, and then, of course, Republicans whining about ‘woke’ colleges. One of the things that has made Minnesota a great place to live is an outstanding educational system — let’s not throw that away.

Florida, again

Now they’re planning to destroy higher ed in the state by putting everything in the hands of the governor and his appointed cronies.

A bill filed this week in the Florida House would turn many of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law by limiting diversity efforts, vastly expanding the powers of university boards and altering course offerings.

House Bill 999, filed by Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, proposes leaving all faculty hiring to boards of trustees, allowing a faculty member’s tenure to be reviewed “at any time,” and removing majors or minors in subjects like critical race theory and gender studies. It would also prohibit spending on activities that promote diversity, equity and inclusion and create new general education requirements.

You want to read the whole bill? Here it is.

My sympathies to my colleagues in Florida. This is a terrible time to be looking for a new job — colleges everywhere are struggling — but do you really want Chris Rufo deciding whether to fire you or not?

The university administration is spooked

The Michigan State University shooting has our university officials concerned. I’ve been getting multiple emails from them telling us what to do if it happens here, which could very well occur, and that’s the first time that’s happened. This country has shootings every day, and finally, someone in the administration calls attention to our situation. We’re an openly liberal institution promoting liberal values — we’ve faced protests from outside because we support gay and trans students, for instance — and we’re imbedded deep in red state/Trump country. All it takes is one maladjusted hater to grab his gun and decide hunting season has opened on campus.

Unfortunately, the only advice I’ve seen is a link to this university page, with the advice to RUN-HIDE-FIGHT. Oh, yeah? Like I never would have thought of that. It is basically telling us the obvious, that we’re on our own and are desperately helpless.

I take that back. There are bits I wouldn’t have considered, like, when running, “Keep your hands visible.” Why? Oh, right, the other thing they tell us is that the campus police are around. We wouldn’t want to be shot by a cop while running away! Also:

How to React When Law Enforcement Arrives
Remain calm; follow officers’ instructions

Keep your hands up and out in front of you, assuring your hand are empty

Keep hands visible at all times

Avoid making quick movements towards officers such as attempting to hold on to them for safety

Avoid pointing, screaming and/or yelling

Move quickly towards the nearest exit or where directed to by police

Do not stop to ask officers for help or directions when evacuating

OBEY. DO NOT STARTLE THE POLICE. I guess that’s important advice. It’s the lengthiest section of the page.

Really, this advice is nothing but “try not to get shot by the shooter or police,” and none of it is particularly useful. When dealing with an active shooter, we should be thinking about active prevention, like with tighter gun laws. Instead of endangering the innocent, maybe the police ought to be confiscating guns from dangerous people, before the shooting starts. The Michigan State murderer had been found to have mental health issues, and had been arrested on a felony weapons charge…and the justice system had done nothing, letting him walk away armed. It’s time to end that.

I’m tired of seeing scenes like this.

At least one Michigan state representative has the right idea.

Some people finally noticed Bryan Pesta

Bryan Pesta no longer has a job. This is good news; Pesta was a professor at Cleveland State who was notorious for publishing racist ideas and promoting the work of his fellow racists. I wish that were enough to have gotten him fired, but it wasn’t — it took a lot of effort to expose him and discredit his work.

Publications like Pesta’s may fly under the academic radar, but can seep into popular misperceptions of race and lend them a scholarly veneer. Pesta was heavily involved, for example, in editing a 2010 version of Wikipedia’s article on race and intelligence, according to the site’s discussion-forum archives. At the time, the article cited both Pesta’s work and that of other “racial hereditarians.” The racist manifesto of Peyton Gendron, the man accused of murdering 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store this year, cited some of Pesta’s racial-hereditarian colleagues and predecessors.

Despite nearly a dozen publications over more than a decade arguing for the intellectual inferiority of Black people, Pesta earned merit pay for research and eventually promotion and tenure at Cleveland State. Finally, this year, after researchers at other institutions filed complaints, the university fired him.

But those complaints weren’t about the legitimacy of his research.

I knew about Pesta. RationalWiki had a short article on him (which needs to be updated, it still reports he is a professor). Is there just a tiny and frequently ignored minority of people who are aware of the hereditarian infection in popular science? It’s not as if he was subtle and hiding in the shadows.

Many of his papers about race ran in Intelligence, a peer-reviewed journal that has drawn fire for publishing other racial-hereditarian arguments. Three of his articles appeared in Mankind Quarterly, which a writer in The New York Review of Books once called “a notorious journal of ‘racial history’ founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.” Two were published in the Journal of Intelligence, an international, open-access periodical that advertises its quick review and publication process.

Many racial hereditarians present their claims as widely accepted but deliberately suppressed facts in the scientific community. They blame the political correctness of academe for their difficulty publishing in well-respected journals.

Publishing in Mankind Quarterly ought to be regarded as a great blaring klaxon alerting you that there is a huge fucking problem here.

Also concerning: Pesta has legitimate academic qualifications, “with bachelor’s, an M.A., and a master’s in labor relations and human services,” and also has a doctorate in psychology. Do you notice what’s missing? He has no background in biology or genetics, but he’s pushing radical distortions of genetics and using poor genetics methodology. From the description of his research, I’m unimpressed.

Pesta’s papers also consistently maintain that racial gaps in test scores can’t be explained by factors like discrimination or economic status. In 2008, for example, he published an article in Intelligence arguing that the gap between Black and white students’ IQ scores could be explained entirely by Black students’ lower intelligence rather than any bias in intelligence measures.

The article relied on a study of 179 students in Cleveland State’s introductory accounting courses categorized as either Black or white. Pesta’s co-author was a CSU accounting professor, Peter J. Poznanski, who has since retired. The university did not appear to be bothered by the article, even linking to it on its “EngagedScholarship@CSU” page. (After The Chronicle inquired about the paper, the university left up the abstract but removed the link.)

Wait, what? He makes sweeping conclusions that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people on the basis of a tiny study of his own students, categorizing them as black and white, and then…what? Assessing their intelligence on the basis of their performance in an introductory accounting course? That’s nuts. I wonder if the students knew they were being measured up as exemplars of particular races. Cleveland State seems to have had no problem with this kind of biased and inappropriate analysis.

Even if his methodology wasn’t weak and flawed, his ability to interpret the data ought to be called into question.

A 2014 paper Pesta published in Intelligence, “Only in America: Cold Winters Theory, Race, IQ, and Well-Being,” takes up the historically baseless theory that people who evolved in cold climates — Europeans and Asians — became smarter because cold winters made survival more difficult. Pesta’s paper finds that IQ and average temperature are correlated in U.S. states even though nearly all their residents are descended from people who came to America within the last 400 years, meaning the supposed difference couldn’t have been caused by evolution in place.

Instead, he proposes another hypothesis, the “founder effect,” arguing that certain types of people, genetically and culturally, were drawn to certain communities and areas — ignoring America’s long history of forced migration for people of color. He does add, though, that it’s “possible that significant historical events” — he mentions the Civil War but not slavery or segregation — could have also created regional differences in well-being and education. He also writes that his study doesn’t disprove the Cold Winters Theory, but shows only that phenomena other than evolution can drive geographic differences in IQ scores.

Wow. The reviewers were lying down on the job with that one — it should have been instantly rejected, unless the journal Intelligence just has appallingly low standards.

That didn’t get Pesta fired, though. What did get him axed was the discovery that he’d violated the terms of service in using (well, misusing and abusing) a confidential NIH database. Crossing NIH, from whom all blessings and large grants flow, is a really bad idea, not just for the individual researcher but for his institution.

Independently, Kent Taylor had a similar reaction to Pesta’s new work. Taylor, a molecular biologist and genomics researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, wasn’t familiar with Pesta but found the article methodologically shoddy.

More important, he couldn’t see how such a paper could have passed ethical muster with the NIH.

Taylor fired off emails to the NIH, Cleveland State, and the University of Minnesota* alerting them to the article.

Taylor’s letter to Harlan M. Sands, who until this past April was CSU’s president, was short and to the point. It called Pesta’s article “both a violation of the data-use agreement and unethical.”

That was the last straw. He’s outta there.

Cleveland State declared that Pesta had been incompetent or dishonest in teaching or scholarship; neglected his duty, and engaged in personal conduct that substantially impaired the fulfillment of his institutional responsibilities; and interfered with the normal operations of the university. The letter declared Bloomberg’s decision to fire Pesta.

Pesta was officially fired on March 4, 2022, two and a half years after his article was published.

Unfortunately, the lingering stench of his published papers remains, still being cited, still being trotted out in every pseudoscientific argument by a Nazi on Twitter.

* Unfortunately, one of Pesta’s co-authors, Jordan Lasker claims to be affiliated with UM’s school of economics. He is not listed anywhere in my university’s directories, and seems instead to be at Texas Tech University? All these guys seem dodgy to me.

Can you teach organic chemistry?

We’re hiring for a tenure-track position!

The University of Minnesota Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a tenure-track position in chemistry beginning August 14, 2023. Responsibilities include: Teaching a wide range of undergraduate chemistry courses including organic chemistry lectures and labs and an advanced elective; advising undergraduates; conducting research that could involve undergraduates; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the Chemistry program, the division, interdisciplinary programs, and the campus.

Applicants must hold or expect to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry or a related field by August 14, 2023. Evidence of excellence in teaching and mentoring undergraduate chemistry students is required. A minimum of one year experience teaching undergraduate organic chemistry is required; graduate TA experience is acceptable. Preference will be given to applicants with more than one year experience teaching undergraduate chemistry and with demonstrated research and/or teaching experience in sustainable/green or environmental chemistry.

(If you’re wondering why I, a mere biologist, am promoting a chemistry job search, it’s because a) we biologists depend on a strong chemistry program, and b) I’ve been roped into serving on the search committee.)