November 1st, 2001
Roy Lisker
Council of Alternative (sic) Scholarly Support
Dear Roy:
It is 6 months since you kindly wrote to me about the Council for Scholarly Support . This letter is to let you know that I would like to utilize the process that you suggest. Here is what I propose: I am going to write you a letter about my background and my body of work. I have isolated three areas that I believe represent my unique scholarly contributions :
** The praxis of knowledge architecture and its grounding in second order cybernetics.
** The biology of poiesis and its relationship to autopoiesis.
** The epistemology of the imagination and its relationship to the biology of cognition.
These all have major instantiations that range from functioning 'knowledge networks", to commercial software ,to macrolevel strategies for countries, to novels and screenplays. I will identify these instantiations. I will also provide a current CV listing over 50 academic papers in a number of disciplines, reports, books, poetry, novels, screenplays, plans and strategies. I may have to provide this on a CD as it is extensive.
If you feel that this fits the criteria of the CASS, then , with your support, I will write a letter to the following people and, based on the representative work in the package I intend to provide for you, ask for their endorsement to address myself as "Kathleen Forsythe, Doctor of Knowledge Architecture. " ....
She listed the names of several persons she intended to call upon as referees for the quality of her work. She also sent me an extensive curriculum vitae and a zip disk containing excerpts from a wide variety of writings.
Upon reception of these materials the following letter was sent off to the board of CASS. besides myself these are Howard Zinn, writer and political scientist ; John Harbison, composer; Louis Kauffman, mathematician; Jim Geiser, computer scientist; Rickie Solinger, historian; Henry Bass, economist and film maker; Kenn Thomas, editor Steamshovel Press. Here is an extended extract from that letter :
"...........The C.A.S.S. has received a letter from a Ms. Kathleen Forsythe of Vancouver, Canada, with the request that she be considered as candidate for the degree of Doctor of Knowledge Architecture. It is the Council's function to bestow such degrees. At present this is its only function. Historically only one such degree has been bestowed. Even as Plato's Academy, the prototype of the university came out of the execution of Socrates by the Athenian polis, so did CASS arise from the doctor's degree granted to its president in February of 1996. The board of directors of the nascent organization was former from the scholars who'd signed on to his right to call himself "Doctor", and also expressed an interest of being on the board.
The motivating philosophy of the CASS is just this: that scholars and other persons of intellectual accomplishment are at least as qualified to judge the merits of a doctoral candidate as any accredited university. In many cases they are more qualified. Candidates for a CASS degree must demonstrate that they have done work of such a caliber that no thinking person of any integrity would dream of denying them the right to entitle themselves a doctor.
The initial assessment of the candidate's worthiness is made by myself. Then the evidences by which I justify my endorsement are then sent, with a cover letter , to all of the board members. It was our original intention that approval should be by consensus. However because the board members are notoriously slow in responding, ( encumbered as they are by their many works and excessive burdens of fame) , we have adopted the policy that endorsement by 5 members of the board in addition to myself, without dissenting votes, will be sufficient.
Within a reasonable interval of time the candidate is expected to solicit and received no less than 5 affidavits from persons actively working in the field in which the doctorate is sought. These should state that, on the basis of their knowledge of said candidate's achievements, his or her right to employ the entitlement of "doctor" of their field should not be withheld . All the referees now become eligible to join the board of directors and are encouraged to do so.
All affidavits, together with the endorsements from the board now become part of a permanent record, kept in storage in the Records Office of the CASS. They will be kept available for inspection by interested parties ( for a payment of $50 to cover photo-copying and mailing costs) for an unspecified period of time to be decided by common consent and the vagaries of history.
All the necessary prerequisites having been established, a date will then be fixed for the CEREMONY OF INVESTITURE . From that moment forth they have earned the authority of the CASS, to exhibit and maintain their new entitlement on all occasions, private, public, professional and personal, against all challenges and throughout the known world, as they may deem fit. In this package, in addition to this cover letter, you will find:
I remain, as ever, the trusted conservator of our distinguished institution ,
Yours Sincerely,
Roy Lisker, Ph.D.
President, CASS, etc.
Everyone responded within a few months. All except Henry Bass approved of Kathleen's qualifications for a degree from CASS. Henry was concerned that she might use the degree to find a job, which could lead to lawsuits. Given that Kathleen is a member of the class of the 'over-employed', there was little danger of this. However, even Henry did not dispute her right to the title.
The process adopted by the Council for Alternative (sic) Scholarly Support is an unusual one -one appropriate for unusual work and for unusual scholars. It is important to find ways to recognize and celebrate the subtle nature of innovative and integrative work....
My own conventional Ph.D. is in theoretical chemistry... After the completion of my thesis my interests in irreversible phenomena, dissipative structures (Prigogine) and autopoesis ( Maturana and Varela) were propelled into quite new directions by my developing conviction that self-organization did not just apply to physio-chemical systems but also to ecological, socio-cultural and economic systems. I began to call these ideas "organomics", as a reflection of the pivotal importance of dynamic organization in systems as opposed to their structural instantiations. ... As a result, my own professional path passed through positions and projects in philosophy of science, systems ecology, environmental and technology assessment, natural resource management, urban planning, and computer-and-network-mediated learning and training to knowledge architecture....
I take Knowledge Architecture to mean very generally the understanding and support of the social-linguistic interactions that generate meaning for its participants.... Knowledge architects, like their structural and landscape colleagues, create spaces that support meaningful activities for those that enter those spaces. But rather than working with building and plant materials, knowledge architects use computer and telecommunication technologies, institutional structures and financial instruments to support the co-creation of meaning among the participants.
I welcome the opportunity to acknowledge her achievements by being able to address her as Dr. Forsythe. And I hope that her designation as the first Doctor of Knowledge Architecture will help open doors for her as she continues her amazing career and to stimulate the development of the field of Knowledge Architecture itself. As well I trust tthat this designation will enhance the role of the Council for Alternative (sic) Scholarly Support in supporting unconventional scholarship.
This writing is in reference to the application of Ms. Kathleen Forsythe for the degree of Doctor of Knowledge Architecture. I have examined Ms. Forsythe's portfolio covering her work from 1981 until the present. Her strengths lie in her analytical and organizational capacities to present complex work in organizational learning. Her writings demonstrate a tenacious and mature scholarly acumen. Hence, without reservation. I affirm that Ms. Forsythe should be granted the Doctor of Knowledge Architecture degree.
I remain, Your colleague
Dr. Ely Dorsey
I am writing to recommend that the degree, Doctor of Philosophy in Knowledge Architecture be awarded to Kathleen Forsythe, based on a body of work conducted over the past twenty years and contributing to the formulation of "knowledge architecture" as a field.
I first met Ms. Forsythe in the mid-eighties at a conference of the American Society for Cybernetics in St. Gallen, Switzerland. At this time I came in contact with her ideas for the first time. She had established herself as a poet over the previous decade and had worked in distance learning projects. She was asking this question: "Where does newness come from?"
Her poetry and her work in cybernetics are all of a piece. From her deeply considered and reasoned position, there is no meaningful distinction between art and science, and this includes the methodologies of each, which are standardly described as procedurally different. My interpretation of her work, as epitomized by her paper "Cathedrals of the Mind", is that the function of metaphor is fundamental, and that it operates at its most fundamental level as "isophor", the experiencing of one thing in terms of another. Thus, Forsythe presents a holistic description of metaphor which explains winderanging features in communication, emotion, imagination and the mechanics of explanation itself. Her conceptualization of the imagination is unique. In it, she brings together indisciplinary elements including adventurous hypotheses from Maturana and Varela's "autopoesis" and from david Bohm's holographic model. In my estimation, Forsythe's work is especially important in reconciling Maturana's and Bohm's views. Ms. Forsythe's thinking is not only insightful and well-reasoned, it is courageous as well. While, operating outside of academia, she has not risked an academic career, I believe she has always risked more than career, reputation and financial security. Kathleen Forsythe has labored consistently in what is often the isolation of an extremely original thinker who includes the use of her own life as a field for experiment. I have invited Ms. Forsythe to speak with faculty, administration and students at the University of the Arts and to speak with students at UCSC. She has stimulated and impressed these audiences. I have used Ms. Forsythe's "Cathedrals of the Mind" as a regular reading in my graduate seminar Metaphor and Structure , which I taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in the early to mid-nineties. I have used this same paper as a reading at UCSC in a seminar in Design, Planning and Cybernetics.
Since first coming into contact with her and her work, my work as a painter, including my decision on what I intended my art to mean, has been influenced by her ideas and by her poetry as presented in her book of poems "Warrior of the Gentle Passion", which, setting her theory in aesthetic motion, is still as fresh and full of epiphany as it was when I read it nearly fifeteen years ago.
Her work has stood the test of time.
Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to support Ms. Forsythe's intellectual and artistic achievement as justly deserving recognition by way of this doctoral degree
.
Sincerely
Frank Galuszka
I have taken quite some time to respond to Kathleen Forsythe's request for an affidavit in support of her petition for the designation "Doctor of Knowledge Architecture" to be endorsed by the Council for Alternative (sic) Scholarly Support. My tardiness is based on other demands in my life, and I did not wish to respond to this request in a superficial manner. Although I have worked with Kathleen for almost eight years, and am intimately familiar with her competence, I also wanted to review the extensive package of materials supplied by her as evidence.
I have now looked at all the materials provided, including books, technical papers, fiction, poetry, and multimedia, as well as the practical proposals and designs based in her praxis of Knowledge Architecture. I found it particularly interesting to trace the genesis of this notion of praxis, as well witnessing the progress, in terms of extension and deepening, of many of the ideas that now inform her work. As is appropriate for a poet, Kathleen appears to grasp the "shape" of a concept in a manner that allows her to both express it metaphorically and to operate with it before she is able to fully explicate it.
When I was asked to write this affidavit I had some concern that I would find it difficult to distinguish the professional relationship entailed in my initial response of "Oh yes, of course!" from a professional evaluation. I have thought about this matter for some time now, and realize that my friendship with Kathleen is grounded in the quality of thinking and the quality of "doing" she contributes to our relationship. In the collection of materials presented she did not even include several substantive projects in which i sought her participation precisely for the substantive knowledge and inspiration she provides.
Kathleen was key in the creation of Future Quest, an educational CD-ROM simulation model and generative story-game - as well as the technical, administrative, financial and publication procedures which were required to realize this work. Similarly she contributed to the conceptualization of the People's Earth Monitoring System and to its incarnation as an educational theme park with a participatory telemetric data base and simulation model. There have been many further collaborative projects: proposals, courses, papers... and considering all this I am now tranquil that my support of her petition is grounded in substance not just liking; and that this in no way diminishes my liking. Though our friendship and our professional relationship are in living inextricable, they are each fully valid.
One concern remains, and that is the nature of the title which Kathleen seeks, namely "Doctor of Knowledge Architecture" . In our culture there are, to my knowledge, currently four different titles that are spoken of as "Doctor": Doctor of Medicine, Doctor of Law, Doctor of Theology and Doctor of Philosophy, and each has its proper abbreviation. ( MD, LL.D., DD., and Ph.D.) . I do not think the petition entails creating a new category parallel to the above, nor do I think it is a good idea to do so - it would be both confusing and confounding. Rather I support the notion that Kathleen en entitled to the appellation of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Knowledge Architecture. That would be parallel to the current practice of Ph.D. in Mathematics, English, Zoology, Chemistry, etc.
Finally, I find the reflection of her praxis in the current situation delightfully appropriate. Clearly, we the scholars, are being asked to make an evaluation of knowledge based on adequate conduct. This is indeed one of the notions that Kathleen has brought into use in the domain of education, namely in the design and implementation of the "Observing for Learning" approach, software and presentation.
In conclusion I wish to affirm that in my professional opinion, based on both personal experience in working with her and the review of her portfolio, that Kathleen Forsythe has demonstrated adequate conduct that the entitlement of Doctor of Philosophy in Knowledge Architecture should not be witheld from her.
Sincerely, Pille Bunnell Ph. D.