Integrity was written one weekend while I was a masters level graduate student. The motivation of this collection stands as an example of how I react to things that make no logical sense. In this case, what made no sense was how my research advisor at the time (who I later fired as an advisor and chose a new professor to work with for my doctoral program) who harassed not only me, but other students in our research group with petty things like reporting to the campus police department that things were stolen from the lab. These things never existed in our lab, so we wondered what was going on in our advisor's mind. Campus police began showing up to our student offices asking about these missing items until I asked them if our advisor had any receipts or evidence that the reported items actually existed. They didn't, so the police officers stopped coming by unless it was just to notify us that our advisor once again filed a report but that they were not following up any further.

It was clear at this point that we as students should have caught some of the early signs of issues with our advisor when he made odd remarks like "the campus police must do what I ask them to do. They work for me." But, as students, especially graduate research students, we don't usually have the time to spare on thinking about such things. We rarely have time to sleep or take up activities on student organizations, for example!

While I was still his student, the harassment grew in severity to the point that he shouted "I don't know why you have a 'Midwestern Conspiracy Theory' against me!" I was again confused by this guy's harassment and on yet another weekend, decided to create an online game titled "M.C.T.: Midwestern Conspiracy Theory." The game was to figure out what was going on inside the guy's head. A couple high school kids in Arizona or New Mexico (I don't recall which state) actually figure out the solution: uncooked chicken noodle soup. Of course, once he ranted about conspiracies against him, I immediately fired him as an advisor and moved up to a sane professor who I was warned against by the graduate coordinator at the time. He insisted that I not consider the professor I had in mind as "all the students hate working for him." Instead, he insisted I work with another professor who "will let you graduate without any real work." In this meeting, the graduate coordinator tried to wrap things up by saying "so, give it some thought over the weekend and come back for another chat on Monday." I stood up, shook his hand while thanking him for his time and said I was going to the office of my professor of choice "because he has integrity and can't be swayed by the bullshit" my masters professor was spreading. By this time I had already worked through the intricacies of integrity and knew how to identify people who lived by its code of ethics.

Integrity explored my thinking about people and how people choose to live as humane, professional, and civil human beings. My masters advisor was none of these things by any measure. Years after I graduated with my doctoral degree, I had visited campus to give a talk about my research work for a festschrift celebration of my doctoral advisor's life achievements in electrical engineering. Only during the scheduled time slot for my talk did my masters advisor show up to the lecture hall. He didn't know that talks were running about 45 minutes late, but it was something noticed by another person sitting next to me who knew of the harassment I endured. Imagine holding a grudge against a student you mindlessly harassed that you go out of your way to make an appearance at his talk nearly a decade later. After the workshop I went looking for my doctoral advisor and stumbled haphazardly into my masters advisor's new office and asked him if he saw my doctoral advisor lately. He was visibly shaken and fearful of my presence. He still had no integrity nor wherewithall to address his years of harassment.

An astronomer wisely stated to Rasselas who wished to study science, "Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." In my experience, a scientist having both integrity and knowledge has the capacity to shape a meaningful future for all humanity. However, a person boasting of either great knowledge or only good morals is at best a risk to his or her community. This latter is true by examples such as a particular former U. S. president (2016 - 2020) and many pseudo-Christian evangelist ministers.

Herein is the original version of Integrity. . .