Regent's Report
December 14, 1997
Kevin Langdon P.O. Box 795 Berkeley, CA 97401 (510) 524-0345 [old e-mail address]
In my opinion, the Triple Nine Society faces a very real threat to its existence from a handful of people who are attempting to politicize high-range psychometrics, rearrange TNS without regard for its Constitution and established procedures, and keep the membership in the dark. There has been a fierce struggle in the ExCom, generating over 300 pages of e-mail and a considerable amount of telephone contact among the most active players. There is major controversy and there have been major changes in personnel.
At the present time, there are two different sets of officers claiming to be the legitimate Executive Committee of the Triple Nine Society, but there has been progress toward reunification. Six of the nine positions on the ExCom are now undisputed.
Please bear with this long report covering the events of the past six months.
Resignation, Removal, and Appointment of Officers:
Members-at-Large Laura Lansberry, Larry Jess, and Wilson Ogg, and Psychometrics Committee Chairman Julia Cybele Cachia (followed by new Chairman Greg Grove) have resigned their respective offices (Larry Jess was subsequently reappointed Member-at-Large; more recently James Poukey, a member of the ``reform'' ExCom, was appointed Member-at-Large). Elections Officer Ray Suttles was replaced by the ``reform'' ExCom (apparently in the mistaken belief that he was involved in TNS politics one way or the other) and we went along to avoid further divisiveness. Dennis subsequently resigned.
Jacquelinne White was removed from office by the Executive Committee on August 2. John Hook has stubbornly maintained that there was never a motion to remove Mrs. White. This is belied by the following excerpt from an e-mail message from John Cooper:
Date: 30-Jul-97 18:48 PDT
From: John Cooper
Subj: TNS AffairsKevin, As far as removing JW from office, I see no justifiable reason to do so, and vote against the motion. At least she tries, and, although she is a little hard to get along with sometimes, she does nothing which hurts the society. To be honest, you, Bob and I would really do a lousy job at the level of recruiting new members.
I'd like to thank all these former officers, on behalf of the Triple Nine Society, for their service to the society. Regardless of what you've read in Mr. Hook's Vidya, the members of the official ExCom are Dale Adams, John Cooper, Loren Harris, Larry Jess, Bob Kopp, Kevin Langdon, James Poukey, and Heather Preston.
Attempts to Work Out a Compromise
All attempts at compromise to date, including one worked out by John Cooper and me calling for an immediate election to resolve our differences, have been approved by what I consider to be the the real ExCom but rejected by the ``reform'' ExCom. My associates and I remain open to finding common ground.
The compromise worked out by John Cooper and me was contained in the following e-mail message:
Date: August 10, 1997
From: Kevin Langdon
Subj: TNS Business; Compromise Agreement[Paragraphs dealing with details of the situation in August deleted.]
You have all received the messages from John Hook in which he announced a completely different sequence of motions leading to a significantly different list of ExCom Members.
In my opinion, none of these motions is valid, for two independently sufficient reasons: 1. Neither Larry Jess nor Jacquelinne White was eligible to vote at the time of the motions (Larry was reappointed Member-at-Large in a later vote); 2. Votes were not sent directly to the Regent, whom the TNS Constitution provides is Chairman of the Executive Committee.
John Cooper and I reached the conclusion that the only way to sort this out is to submit it to a vote of the membership. Here is the compromise agreement we worked out.
[Out-of-date paragraph deleted.]
For publication in the ExCom Memo and Vidya #167:
A Joint Statement from Kevin Langdon, Regent, and John Cooper, Financial Officer
As you will note in the statements from various parties to the current controversy in TNS included in this issue of Vidya, there is sharp disagreement regarding the basic principles involved in our present situation and even who is a member of the Executive Committee. Two groups of members with opposing views have coalesced. You will have little difficulty distinguishing who is in which camp.
The authors of the present statement found themselves on opposite sides of this battle, but relying on our past working relationship and a residuum of goodwill toward one another, we have worked out a compromise which places the choice of which direction TNS is to take now in the hands of the membership, where it belongs.
We ask all parties to the disputes which have arisen to honor this agreement.
With the present uncertainty of who ``is'' and ``is not'' on the ExCom, we came to the conclusion that the ExCom membership should be decided by a vote of the membership. Therefore, the ExCom of the Triple Nine Society, in the best interest of serving the membership's needs, has decided that a general election ballot for all elective officers will be distributed in the next issue of Vidya (#168).
All elected and appointed positions of the Society will expire as soon as the ballots from Vidya #168 are counted. The postmark deadline for ballots shall be 30 days from the date that Vidya #168 is mailed to the membership. The Elections officer shall allow seven days for ballots to reach him through the mail.
All members interested in running for the offices of Regent, Ombudsman, or one of the four Member-at-Large positions may submit in writing to John Hook a one-half page ``Statement of Candidacy'' by 9/15/97. The tenure of those currently occupying the appointed positions of Membership Officer, Financial Officer, and Editor of Vidya, by the reckoning of either ``side'' in the current dispute, will expire when the new ExCom is chosen and makes those appointments.
To avoid misunderstanding, and even the possibility of litigation, TNS funds will be withheld from both sides (except for the routine expenses of the officers charged with the day-to-day business of the society) and immediately turned over to the newly-appointed Financial Officer after the election. A final Financial Statement from John Cooper will accompany these funds.
Details of the compromise:
John Hook is appointed as guest Editor for two issues of Vidya: #167 on approximately 8/25/97 and #168 on or about 9/25/97. The Financial Officer is authorized to pay Mr. Hook for those two issues of Vidya, provided they are produced in the following manner:
The first issue (single issue #167) shall contain:
1. This compromise statement.
2. A statement of up to two pages from each member who cares to submit his or her views for publication. The topic is to be ``MY VIEW OF THE SITUATION IN TNS, AND WHAT I PROPOSE TO DO ABOUT IT.''
Mr. Hook shall keep all statements received confidential until publication of this issue and shall neither reply to anyone else's statement himself nor allow any other person to do so.
No other material shall be allowed in this issue of Vidya except a one-half-page, non-partisan announcement from Kevin Langdon regarding the 1997 annual meeting in October.
The second issue (single issue #168) shall contain:
1. Under each office, a listing of candidates and their statements of candidacy.
2. A sample ballot and a separate ballot not bound into Vidya, which are to follow the format outlined in the Constitution. Ballots are to be returned to the Elections Officer, as provided in the Constitution.
Mr. Hook shall keep all candidacy statements received confidential and shall neither reply to anyone else's statement himself nor allow any other person to do so. (Candidacy statements may include replies to the statements printed in Vidya #167.)
Mr. Hook is welcome to include whatever other material he wishes in the second issue, except that no other material regarding TNS' organizational affairs is to be printed in this issue.
No unproven accusations of criminal activity may be printed in either issue of Vidya.
Ray Suttles is currently TNS Elections Officer. He shall be consulted regarding his willingness to suprvise this election. If, for some reason, Mr. Suttles is unable or unwilling to conduct this election, a neutral party shall be appointed Elections Officer following consultation with members of both factions.
The Elections Officer shall report the number of votes received by each candidate for each office; for the office of Member-at-Large, the number of first-place, second-place, third-place, etc., votes for each candidate shall be reported, as well as the weighted sum of votes received.
The normal term of office, according to the present Constitution, is two years. The Constitution calls for statements of candidacy to be submitted by December 15 and new officers to take office on April 1, every two years. Thus the question arises as to whether we are electing officers to serve for approximately half a year until the next election or for two and a half years, until the following regularly-scheduled election. It seems reasonable to us to split the difference and allow the officers elected in the present election to serve a year and a half, with statements of candidacy for the next election due December 15, 1998.
Kevin Langdon, Regent
John W. Cooper III, Financial Officer
The requirement that each side be given equal space to present its views was apparently unacceptable to the ``reform'' group. They passed a motion to reject this compromise.
Furthermore, John Hook failed to print this official statement by two officers, as required by the TNS Constitution.
Later, Mr. Hook and his allies attempted to present the idea of an accelerated election schedule as if it were their own--but Mr. Hook made sure that the other side would not have an opportunity to present its proposals in that election or to comment on his own proposals.
The Cancelled Election
One of the blessings of democracy is a certain deliberate speed, slow enough that a man can attend to his other responsibilities and not lose his rights by default. The unseemly haste of Mr. Hook's attempt to conduct an ``election'' and the complete absence of any opportunity for the membership to submit arguments against the proposals advanced by Mr. Hook resulted in findings by the Ombudsman and the Elections Officer that the election was improper and invalid.
Mr. Hook's ``election issue'' did not contain any mention of the fact that the Regent, the Ombudsman, and other members of TNS disagree with his interpretation of the TNS Constitution and his exclusion of dissenting views from the issue announcing this election, which the Ombudsman and the Elections Officer declared to be in violation of the TNS Constitution.
Reply to Material in Vidya #167:
In her ``Message from the Membership Officer,'' Jacquelinne White wrote, ``Obviously, we cannot cooperate with plans to break the law.''
Following his success in getting the California Medical Board/Board of Psychology to open an investigation into my testing business, Paul Maxim is now claiming that it's illegal for TNS to use my tests and Ron Hoeflin's for admission purposes. There is no evidence whatsoever for this, but this has never stopped Mr. Maxim before.
Like Henny Penny, Jacquelinne White apparently believed our own Chicken Little. The likelihood of serious consequences to TNS or its officers from the state of California taking an interest in the affairs of the society is as ridiculous as the idea that the sky is falling.
This society is governed by its membership, its Constitution, and its Executive Committee, to which certain powers have been delegated by the Constitution and the membership, and not by the laws of any particular state or nation. If the state of California should attempt to dictate which tests we use for admission, we can simply move all operations out of California.
In response to Mrs. White's objection to using the existing TNS brochure (as recently updated to remove the tests deemed to be inappropriate for admission purposes by the PsyCom), Greg Grove prepared a brochure with the LAIT and the Mega Test removed from the list of qualifying scores-- which Mrs. White has apparently been using in responding to inquiries about TNS.
(Later Dr. Grove's prepared a second revised TNS brochure [printed in Vidya #168] which, in addition to omitting the LAIT and the Mega Test, tripled the list of supposedly acceptable tests, including a number of very obscure tests and childhood tests which correlate poorly with tests of adult intelligence.)
It is not up to the Membership Officer to overrule the Psychometrics Committe, which has been charged by the Executive Committee with the task of establishing TNS' qualifying scores. (Dr. Grove's appointment as ``Psychometrician'' by the ``reform'' ExCom is illegal and unofficial.)
The California Medical Board has contacted me regarding my mail-order testing business and has alleged violation of section 2903 of the California Business and Professions Code. Although I disagree with the Medical Board's current interpretaiton of the statute, I have agreed to suspend my testing operation while considering my legal alternatives. Dr. Hoeflin has also been contacted by the Medical Board and warned not to distribute his tests in California nor to score answer sheets from California residents (the Board is clearly exceeding its jurisdiction here; Dr. Hoeflin is a New York resident who does not do business in California).
The Medical Board has not contacted me as Regent of the Triple Nine Society, although the Regent is the Chairman of the Executive Committee, the legal address of TNS is the Regent's address, and the TNS Constitution provides that only the Regent may speak for the society. They know where I am and could easily have contacted me in my capacity as Regent if they intended to allege a violation of the statute on the part of TNS. Such a course of action would raise major first-amendment freedom-of-association issues.
Section 2903 provides that engaging in certain activities, including the construction, administration, and interpretation of tests of mental abilities, for a fee constitutes the practice of psychology and requires a license. The Triple Nine Society does not charge a fee for evaluating the credentials of prospective members, nor is there any interpretation involved in comparing scores submitted with a set of qualifying scores.
Officers of a membership organization cannot be expected to violate the law but they cannot place farfetched speculative interpretations of the law above their duty to uphold the Constitution and lawfully-established procedures of the society.
Tests of the new type exemplified by the LAIT and the Mega Test are highly g loaded, yield respectable statistics, and are undoubtedly more accurate at the 99.9th percentile than the standard tests, as this level is close to the middle of their range and every test discriminates better at mid-range than at its range's extremes.
The attack on high-range testing is a threat to the very existence of the high-I.Q. societies with cutoffs above that of TNS (currently the Prometheus and Mega societies), for which the standard tests lack sufficient ceiling. It would be most dishonorable for the Triple Nine Society to fail to support the Prometheus and Mega societies against the forces which would destroy them.
John Hook wrote:
At the time he pressured Mrs. White to send out the brochure he knew of the violation and as a result could be charged with a criminal offense under California law.
This is a crock. Jacquelinne White was always free to resign her office, but as long as she was an appointive officer of TNS she had an obligation to follow the admission standards established by the Psychometrics Committee appointed by the ExCom. As the action I required of Mrs. White, on the authority of the Executive Committee, is not illegal, there is no crime--and I would remind Mr. Hook that such allegations of criminality are actionable.
One possible source of misunderstanding is the following language from the letter from Lorna Clark of the California Medical Board, in response to a complaint by Mrs. White, quoted in Mr. Hook's ``Reports'': ``The Board encourages you not to seek further services from Mr. Langdon thereby aiding and abetting the unlicensed practice of psychology.'' This shows that Ms. Clark was unaware that the Langdon test TNS uses for admission, the LAIT, is no longer scored; use of this test does not involve any activity on my part nor result in any revenue to me, so there is nothing to aid and abet.
Reply to Material in Vidya #168:
On page one of this issue, Mr. Hook wrote:
ABOUT THIS SPECIAL ORGANIZATIONAL EDITION OF VIDYA... It is strictly organizational, of sixteen pages only, without the usual departments, to hold it to these sixteen pages and get it mailed out as soon as possible.
...and without the reports from the Regent and the Ombudsman submitted to Mr. Hook by Dale Adams and me--or a single word about what's going on in TNS from anyone not allied with Mr. Hook.
Mr. Hook boasted of a large number of membership renewals and attributed this increase to approval by the membership of the changes in Vidya under his editorship. But Mr. Hook's Vidya was anything but non-adversarial. People renewed on the basis of a promise which has not been kept. Vidya #169, which contains mostly non-adversarial material, is practically devoid of intellectual content. (I wrote this paragraph before the publication of Vidya #170. Fairness requires me to note here that Vidya #170 contains more substance than the three earlier issues published by Mr. Hook.)
Mr. Hook wrote:
A petition offered by John Hook was sent to e-mail addressees and telephoned to other selected members. This was not at all intended to ``disenfranchise'' members who do not have e-mail, but speed was very necessary to meet a deadline for publication of the subsequent Proposal for Contitutional Amendments, in this September _Vidya_.
Article IV, Section 2 of the TNS Constitution provides that:
Petitions for initiatives and for Constitutional amendments may be sent to the Editor at any time during the year. The Editor will publish such a petition within three months. However, the Editor has the option of not publishing a petition that seems unduly lengthy or frivolous, but he must obtain the approval of a majority of the Executive Committee to exercise this option. The petitioner whose petition has been rejected for publication may distribute it to members at his own expense. Whenever the Elections Officer certifies that a sufficient number of Triple Nine members have signed a petition, the Editor shall call for a final vote, simultaneously publishing any germane comments on the petition that have reached him from members.
Obviously, the framers of the Constitution intended for the membership to have the opportunity to be heard on matters to be voted on; they just failed to consider the case where proposed initiatives or amendments are circulated only within a limited circle.
However, Article I, Section 3 provides that:
All members shall have equal rights to vote, hold office, and participate in the affairs of the Society.
Participation in the affairs of the society obviously includes the opportunity to comment on proposed initiatives and amendemnts before they are voted on.
The Removal of John Hook
Mr. Hook has talked out of different sides of his mouth to different people and repeatedly lied about his plans. He has repeatedly offered opinions about other people's motives without evidence. His constant name-calling and his total refusal to allow his critics space to reply to his adversarial remarks in Vidya led a majority of both "ExComs" to the conclusion that he was out of control.
Excerpts from two recent messages sent by Mr. Hook make this quite clear. (The second message was sent by Mr. Hook in response to the original draft of this report.)
Message #1:
Date: 09-Nov-97 19:34 PST
From: John Hook
Subj: Re: Vidya[quoting John Cooper:]
> (5) The permission to allow you to keep the receipts and still have
> money to work with was to cover the time lag so you could be given
> an advance before you had to send in the full amount of receipts,
> and rather than sending them in one at a time. Greg Grove had a
> policy of sending me receipts for $4 and $5 at a time, and I told
> him the same thing, although he has not requested any reimbursement
> for about a year. I have been very good about getting you the
> money, but you have not held up your end in the slightest. I do
> not want you to have to be out of pocket, but as steward of the
> finances, I will not allow another (as Barry Zaslove told me) ``we
> just allowed ourselves to get carefree and reckless, and I don't
> know where the money went'' (on tape when he was explaining away
> $11,000). Not on my watch!JHH: All of the above sounds reasonable on the face of it, and I do not
fight it because, as I have written, I WILL get the journal out on time,
whether with my money or that of a friend, and there is not one damned
thing you can do to block the publication.
Message #2:
Date: 11-Nov-97 15:53 PST
From: John Hook
Subj: Re: Regent's ReportBOTTOM LINES.
This so-called ``Regent's Report'' is crammed with demonstrable falsehoods. You might rejoin that the _Regent_ decides what will go into a Regent's Report. Right. And the Editor can perceive whether or not it IS an honest and valid Regent's Report. This one is, demonstrably again, NOT.
You waited until the deadline to submit this, perhaps believing that I would be out of time and forced to print such crap. Wrong, and I'm way ahead of you, as always. The deadline is extended, not just for you, until the 15th. You have plenty of time to submit a non-insulting, non-lying report. It can be done in one or two pages, as opposed to the fifteen or more pages (before annotations) of this one. You really expect to get a fifteen-page, or ten-page, or even five-page, allocation for such rubbish? If you claim it is not rubbish, then SUBSTANTIATE in every instance.
If you think that you are putting me in a bind with this, think again. The Editor does not report to the Regent, but to the entire ExCom, although you apparently had Bob Kopp convinced otherwise. If you don't like my decision, take it to the ExCom. If a majority tell me that I have to print all this, I still won't. They can then remove me from office, and maybe appoint your puppet back into this position, and the lies and the quarrels will resume. I, on the other hand, would get some very welcome time off, and not have to deal with ... persons ... like you. It's a win-win situation for me.
John Hook.
Article II, Section 2 of the TNS Constitution provides that
The Editor shall publish a monthly journal for the Society, including therein all official announcements of the Society and such additional material from members and other sources as he may deem appropriate, and shall be responsible for the printing and mailing of copies to all current members and subscribers.
The Constitution does not give the Editor discretionary authority over publication of official reports. It should be clear that democracy is impossible when someone sets himself up as the arbiter of what is truthful and refuses to allow opposing views to reach the membership.
As for SUBSTANTIATION, the message from John Cooper quoted at the beginning of this report substantiates the principal point which Mr. Hook has denied: the motion to remove Jacquelinne White as Membership Officer. Further substantiation of the many statements contained in this report would extend its already considerable length, but all statements are borne out by the record of ExCom correspondence which has been posted on the TNS Web site [Currently located at http://www.triplenine.org (under "Samizdata," "Official TNS Correspondence Site"); this material is accessible only to TNS members].
Mr. Hook has invited members interested in the state of affairs in TNS to telephone him or his allies. I would like to extend the same invitation to those who have questions about my side of the story. My number is (510) 524-0345.