Academic freedom is a much-touted aspect of professorhood. Seen by outsiders, it is quaint, worth a good story, and fodder for movies and television. It is what young professors seek, those who have something to say. Most are bright and quiet, having learned in school that saying anything extra will cost you a grade point, or will require work (which will cost you a grade point). There is great silence. Most instructors want tenure, that protected status in the professor business, where loss of employment is rare. It is one of the strongest job securities. A few professors gain it and drop out, that is, do only minimum deeds and rarely participate in the life of the university. A few take it in stride, like changing rank in the army, or "going through the chairs " in a local citizens' group. You wait seven years, work hard, apply, and you get it. The application must show good, consistent work. The assumption is that such work will continue and improve. Tenure is protection and is basic to academic freedom. By providing tenure, society provides more than just freedom to lecture, freedom to say non-libelous things - a great gift - but it also states: we need people who profess. A type of social feedback, society pays dearly for tenure for professors to look at it, comment on it, and no matter how poorly, to speak up.

Not much speaking up occurs. Some goes on in classes. Even there, tape recordings are made, and efforts are made to control what professors say. Department heads still get letters from parents complaining about what their children tell them goes on in classes. Few faculty among 2,000 can list five or ten colleagues prone to speak out on major issues. They are labeled "the radicals " and most people in the university wish they were less conspicuous, and suggest that they really should be working "within the system. " People who practice being quiet, who are removed from much social involvement and who reach superior academic levels, are quiet. Some people, having gained a place in the university and see how to get tenure, actually talk about being quiet, not "rocking the boat. " After years of intensive practice at holding-your-tongue, few talk. Tenure no longer serves its major designed function, academic freedom.

A wildlife agency might do a dumb thing. Such things have been observed! Should a tenured professor speak out against dumbness in a field in which he or she is not dumb? "Shut him up " comes the word in various ways. Hints about loss of support are not subtle. "Support " is not like parental encouragement, but it means grants for graduate students and contract research (which produces papers that are stepping stones to advancement in salary and tenure, if not already assumed). Support allows ideas to become real. It doesn't require much pressure. A professor, three to five years into a research project with three to five dependent graduate students, speaks of his jeopardy if the outspokenness continues. What is the outspoken person to do!? To a friend, office mate, committee person? There is much silence. The risks are too high; the probability of effectiveness in causing change too low.

Academic freedom is almost meaningless, not because of quieting advice and subtle pressures, but because of the funding carrots dangling before professors of ecology and natural resources in every university. Mules used to be encouraged along their way by dangling a carrot from a stick in front of them. Professors can be stopped cold by withholding food, that is, research money that produces papers, which seem to be the major quota that pass administrators' skulls at annual salary and promotion meetings. If not stopped cold, as by withholding any available local funds, then the threat or actual refusal to sign a proposal going to a potential grantor is nearly equivalent. Such proposals usually require four or more signatures and no upper-level person is likely to sign unless the proposal has lower-level blessings. It is a hidden control, a barrier that can be crossed, but at great cost, frustration, and personal and family cost. The lower-level signers, perhaps thwarted, are those who recommend promotion, tenure, and annual salary adjustments. If not withheld, carrots can be used to direct research. Don't do what you've done for ten years, do this or that. Here is some money to go down this pathway. Society pays professors to pick pathways best for society. Others easily entice or bump them down other pathways.

I write about these observations for information and insight for others. It is very real and very personal. To tell names and events would only make me appear hurt, complaining, or weaker than I presently rationalize myself being. The professor business is interesting; few study it before entering. That, in part, is its weakness. It is merely the next step for people who take school-steps well. B.S., M.S., Ph.D. .... then what? Of course ... become a professor. Instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, professor ... then what? Steps are steps.

Carrotized, I sought a project that had the following criteria or objectives. I lecture about epistemology, the study of how you know ... know anything (Chapter 18). The criteria for knowing when I had selected a new good area of study seemed loyal to my lectures. I had just reluctantly left 15 years of work in computer-based environmental impact assessment, computer aided county-level planning, large-scale agricultural analyses, mined land reclamation and wildlife information systems. The criteria for the new work:

1. A semblance of classical, conventional wildlife management;
2. Local, as in "we respond to the needs of the local people; "
3. Local, as in "low travel costs; "
4. Of personal interest; a topic that does not produce ulcers;
5. Uses my library of 11,000 reprints and bulletins collected over the years. (Being broad in scope for potential students, the thing is hopelessly narrow.)
6. Uses my education, namely confidence in certain areas. (The datedness and quantity of what I know changes with reading. Confidence to read and practice is gained from formal education.)
7. Uses my past research, at least builds on it (I was 52 and too old to start over completely. "Too old " means not enough years until expected death at age 71, not some mental or physical limit.)
8. Possibly of lasting value;
9. Possibly of usefulness or relevance over much of Virginia, if not a larger region (e.g., the mixed deciduous forest region of the Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern U.S.);
10. Possibly of use in teaching my courses in senior-level wildlife management, a graduate course in wildlife management systems, and a junior level course in general systems ecology;
11. Possibly of use by my graduate students, both as taught and as a base of research operation;
12. Possibly of use in workshops, international programs, and seminars;
13. A place where I could experiment with ideas without risking that they be killed because of not getting approval, exposed before their proper emergence;
14. Esthetically pleasing;
15. Legal.

I made this long list of criteria. Some people say I am a "lister." I take making long lists of criteria or objectives as a responsibility since I have seen so many sub-optimum decisions. They result from achieving a few objectives and are judged inadequate or they ignore an objective, the failure of achievement of which cancels the others! I encourage making lists. In computer work, their omission usually results in conspicuously different solutions being produced. Computers are notably affected by small omissions. They are the evidence for thoughtful, comprehensive exploration of an idea. The quantity of items is usually the point of the critic. The dominance of a constraint, the magnitude of effect, the power of the people that are affected if an objective is achieved or not ... these are so much more important than the number of items. I persist in listing, convinced that achieving the hidden objectives is the path to natural resource successes. Listing increases the chance of exposing the hidden objectives or criteria for success and allowing them to be addressed in solution systems.

I began pondering the action or set of actions to allow me to begin to achieve them. Most people do not realize that stated objectives do not have to be achieved, only that they be achievable. "That a person's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for? " quizzed the poet of the past.

My heaven turned out to be the Havens Project. The outline of topics I intended to study personally and with graduate students is shown in the Appendix. In part, the project was designed to require me to think through the things a wildlife manager really needs to know to do an effective job as manager of a large public wildlife management area (called, variously: parks, refugees, sanctuaries, reserves, preserves, forests). I wanted to re-examine some old ideas, to question some "principles " and to build into computer systems the methods, ideas, etc. that I found useful and hypothesized would be useful in other forested mountainous wildlife areas. If successful, I felt I might influence the management of forests and wildlife on about 20,000,000 acres. If successful, not a bad decade's work.

The Havens concept cannot be described in an orderly manner so will not be published by any scientific journal that requires order. At one level, the concept is simply one of asking for, requiring the manager to be a good field person. It is an assertion that it is essential for the wildlife manager, any wildlife manager, to be an excellent naturalist. You have to know all about all of nature! No one can do so, but the manager has to have the child-like ability to pretend that he or she might learn it all and to act like it. This may mean simply to have curiosity, but there is more. It requires enthusiastic curiosity. I remember well my former professor, Dr. Robert Ross, jumping into a knee-deep stream excited by the glimpse of a certain minnow flopping in a sein held by two students. That memory from 1954 still lingers with me. Here was a brilliant, formal professor who really was excited! That act still inspires me.

My son-in-law, on seeing a thin white worm in mud in a pond below the Peculiar Manor cabin that we were cleaning out, jumped into the pond and said, "Let's get it!" At age 55, I was still learning from him about childlike excitement. The worm is in my collection now. It was a Nematophera, a horsehair worm, sometimes seen in so-called gordian knots of several worms. I had never seen one, learned that their taxonomy is scant, and that almost nothing is known of their ecology. We held it in mud on the blade of a shovel and it arched exactly as a snake about to strike. This white thread, well-named a "horsehair worm, " had a sense organ and ability to "strike, " a most peculiar behavior for environments of fresh water springs. It struck at our fingers; it did not strike at grass or sticks. Here was more evidence of the infra-red world of nature, a world we can only barely understand and only perceive well with instruments. Callahan (1974) helped me see this new world. The horsehair worm told me of sense organs for the murky, below-surface world that we ignore because we cannot see it in the visual light spectra of the surface.

The Havens concept is one of restoring the naturalist, lost from university programs with the rise of cellular biology. The ecology movement, had it lasted, would have helped because people doing environmental impact studies rapidly learned that the plant and animal information well from which they were supposed to dip was shallow. They kept going to the same well and returning with a teacup full of information, and even found the cup had a hole. The taxonomy was changed, the observer flawed, the record lost, and libraries were throwing away books because they were out of shelf space.

The Havens concept is for the neo-naturalist. It speaks of doing surveys, forming lists, developing checklists of what is present and capturing that information in computer format. The reasons: (1) reduced loss, (2) transportability to others since modern scientific journals have relinquished that responsibility and right, stating a policy of only taking "new knowledge, " (3) ease of use, (4) ease of studying correlations and discovering relations useful for management.

Plant A is collected at site B. Of 50 collections, 45 are from sites with the same characteristics as site B. The novo-naturalist learns this from a computer run (15 minutes, rather than 15 hours of sorting field notes in the old-fashion way), then makes computer maps of areas with the same characteristics. So that is where plant A can be found! Then, in a systems mode, the next time the wildlife manager is in area C (shown on the map), the area is checked out for plant A. Sure enough, there it is! This helps confirm the plant-environment relations. The study of relations is the essence of ecology. There is never certainty. There is never enough money to study plant A alone. There are 2,200 plants in the Eastern U.S. needing individual projects of three years each at an annual cost of $50,000 per plant per year. I'd rather bet on anti-gravitational aids for frogs than those studies every being done.

Sequential, "clinical " improvement in the knowledge base cannot be gained entirely as private knowledge as done by naturalists of yore. Computer data can be exchangeable. Wildlife information systems already exist; the fields of information are set for common sharing among wildlife managers. Similar plant information systems are needed and some are underway.

The difficulty in describing the Havens concept is that we are all educated to think in sequences. First this, then that. People who deal effectively with natural resource systems, forests and things, have to think of simultaneous action. Martin Luther, in a like vein, suggested the need for writing theology, not as a string of pearls, but as a rosebud. In natural resource work the need is to deal with everything almost at once. The search for hierarchy (Allen and Starr, 1982) in the natural resource management arena is almost meaningless, at least diversionary. The nature of realistic, out-of-the-textbook decision-making is not top-to-bottom, but sideways and overlapping, diagonally and simultaneously.

I labor to pull my students from their micro-world. They want to know how to manage grouse (Bonasa umbellus). I want them to think about how high-technology wood veneer processing influences the price of hardwood, the acres cut, and thus the grouse habitat affected. They can influence wood prices or taxes and have far greater impact over more acres on more grouse, for at least the duration of a timber rotation, than by working all of their lives on creating little nice places for the bird. Both have to be done, but I labor to get equal time for each. The focus is invariably on the micro. There really is no choice, no "either-or, just "both-and, " but the awareness is hard to create. The Havens concept is one of simultaneously working at a micro- and meso-scale. I want to look at, re-study, re-think things known at the lower levels - like what are the habitats of the Tabanids, the horseflies? What are the strata in which each snail species lives? And how do skunks find beetle larvae under four inches of soil? The questions need asking. We know a great deal; the answers need capturing. A manager needs to know everything. That is too much, impossible. Things known need to be put in a useable form. Data need to be processed and converted to information.

Information is the stuff of decision-making, a high level energy input. Information needed is that useful in making the difficult and large-scale decisions of the land manager. If a decision requires p, q, r, and s, then that information is needed - not t, u, and v, although these other values are interesting. If q is not known, then (a) it needs to be processed from available data, or (b) data need to be collected and processed to produce q, or (c) a first guess must be made, an approximation, then progress made.

The Havens concept is one of developing a computer system for aiding area managers. This includes the Guidance concept , that of a dynamic computer-aided planning and prescription system for wildlife and similar management areas. Beyond Guidance, though, is having an area that forces questions out into the open, a trick that areas play on ivory-tower model and system builders. Beyond having a computer system working, there is also need for having an area for taking people and showing them real trees and dirt, real data, and real computer outputs that say what to do on a piece of land where the skeptic stands. The computer system under continual development captures the results of studies on the Havens state wildlife management area. The more general-purpose, "general systems, " the better; the less the modifications are needed for other area and regions.

Part of the Havens concept is that new means can be found to reduce the number of inputs made to the computer systems used for managing an area. I had long ago discovered the dozens of relations in the literature. If you know a factor like elevation, then equations (called "regressions ") can be used to estimate another variable. You enter elevation for a site, like 2010 feet for E, and some other factor (y) can be calculated, as in:

y = 2.6 + 0.32E.