Of Groups and Labs at Baylor

You might wonder whether Prof. Robert Marks is the only faculty member at Baylor who has a “group” or a “lab” not blessed by Baylor administration. The other day I mined a bunch of cases here at UD where the terms “group” and “lab” are used at Baylor, almost certainly without the Baylor administration’s blessing or knowledge. Here’s what I wrote:

(1) Robert Marks has another research entity on the Baylor server: “The Baylor University Time Scales Group” (note the Baylor URL: web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/marks/Research/TimeScales). This research group (a collaboration between engineering and mathematics) has been allowed to proceed unimpeded by Baylor, using its name and absent any disclaimer. Is Baylor now, to maintain a foolish consistency, going to take down that site as well? Is it going to require disclaimers when previously it didn’t? Note that Prof. Marks, by way of compromise, was willing to rename the “Evolutionary Informatics Lab” the “Evolutionary Informatics Group,” but this too was unacceptable to the Baylor administration.

(2) Many other labs and groups associated with Baylor scientists have websites on the Baylor server, and none of them carries disclaimers. Here are some that I found in a few minutes of googling the Baylor server: (i) The Robert R. Kane Research Group (chemistry); (ii) Rene Massengale Research Group (biology); (iii) The Klausmeyer Research Group (biochemistry); (iv) Jeffrey Olafsen’s Nonlinear and Nonequilibrium Dynamics Group, aka Nonlinear Dynamics Laboratory (physics); (v) The Stanford Lab (Matthew Stanford’s lab in neuroscience).

Well, there’s more:

**”The Baylor University Time Scales Group” (note the Baylor URL: web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/marks/Research/TimeScales) just got a big NSF Grant and is finishing another. No one with that group ever asked anyone at Baylor whether it was okay to form this group or put it on the Baylor server. It’s something research groups do. And no one at Baylor is upset about it.

**Robert Marks has another research group on the Baylor server with Randall Jean: The Microwave Applied Metrology Lab (note the Baylor URL: web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/jean). Prof. Marks does research with Prof. Jean. It has been posted with no changes since the first year Marks got to Baylor — 2003.

**Prof. Marks’s new department chair (electrical and computer engineering), who started this fall 2007, is Prof. Kwang Lee. Prof. Lee moves to Baylor from Penn State where he ran The Power Systems Control Laboratory (www.ee.psu.edu/faculty/lee/lee1.html). It’s still at Penn State. Given what Baylor did to Prof. Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab, why should Prof. Lee risk moving his lab to Baylor? Question: Was that lab okayed by Penn State? I’ll bet it wasn’t.

**At the University of Washington, where Prof. Marks was on faculty for 26 years, he ran The Computational Intelligence Applications Lab (note the acronym: CIA Lab). Prof. Marks ran it, with no approval from anybody, with Mohamed El-Sharkawi. They wrote numerous papers together and got millions in grants for this lab. El-Sharkawi still runs the lab at cialab.ee.washington.edu. Here’s the kicker: When Prof. Marks first came to Baylor, he called his research effort “The CIA Lab” — it’s still mentioned at web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/marks/Marks/Bob/Bob2004.htm. Note that Baylor and The CIA Lab are listed right next to each other. Prof. Marks used “CIA Lab” as the entity under which he conducted his research at Baylor for several years. You’d think if Baylor got mad at Prof. Marks for anything, it would be for placing his research under “The CIA Lab.”

THIS IS WHAT RESEARCH PROFESSORS AT RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES DO!!! To attract funds, research professors form groups and labs because there’s a synergy in numbers that enables research to attract funding and flourish. That’s how the game of “supply side academics” gets played. Interestingly, no one publicly criticizing Prof. Marks at Baylor (President, Provost, Dean) has ever attracted a cent of research funding for their own scientific work/scholarly activities. (Prove me wrong!) The President, John Lilley, is in music. The Provost, Randall O’Brien, is a Baptist Pastor. And Prof. Marks’s Dean, Benjamin Kelley, has a teaching, not a research, background. In particular, Kelley has admitted that he does not understand the work of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab.

It’s infuriating that none of the critics of the EIL at Baylor has offered a single comment about the substance of the papers they removed from Prof. Mark’s server. NO ONE!