Reprinted by permission from the Chronicle of Higher
     Education.
 
     By the end of this month, a two-year controversy over an
     article in a Canadian physics journal may come to an end.
 
          At least, that's what officials at the National
     Research Council of Canada hope as they publish a monograph
     designed to refute the article's unusual claim: that the
     rise in cheating among undergraduate chemistry students in
     Canada is tied to a decline in moral values caused by the
     neglect of children by working mothers.
 
          The article in question, "Kinetics of nonhomogeneous
     processes in human society: Unethical behaviour and societal
     chaos," was written by Gordon R. Freeman, a chemist at the
     University of Alberta, who developed his thesis from
     interviews with his students. It was published by the NRC's
     Canadian Journal of Physics in September 1990, and has since
     generated a continuing furor among the journal's 1,200
     subscribers.
 
          One of the most enraged was Bruce P. Dancik, chairman
     of the department of forestry science at Alberta and editor
     in chief of journals at the NRC. He first saw the article
     while flipping through the publication's table of contents
     and wondered what a paper under the heading "sociology" was
     doing in a physics journal. When he read it, he says, "I was
     astounded and outraged. There was no study design, no
     interpretation, no documentation."
 
          Mr. Dancik apologized for the article in two issues of
     the journal and asked the journal's editor, Ralph Nichols, a
     physicist at York University, to resign. "Some people wanted
     us to recall the journal and republish it without the
     article," Mr. Dancik says. But he refused. "It was a
     mistake," he says, to publish the article.
 
          Senior officials at the NRC, who were deluged with
     hundreds of letters, telephone calls, and petitions about
     the article, later decided to publish the monograph, which
     will be sent this month to the more than 5,000 subscribers
     of NRC journals. It will feature an explanation of how the
     offending article was published, rebuttals by leading
     Canadian psychologists and sociologists, a selection of
     letters to the journal, and a personal apology from Pierre
     O. Perron, president of the NRC.
 
          Says Mr. Dancik: "Here we were trying to encourage
     women into our programs and then you get something stupid
     like this. I don't think anyone took the article seriously,
     but then you never know."
 
          Mr. Freeman has no apologies. He thinks the public
     discussion about feminism and child rearing generated by the
     controversy has been healthy and demonstrates "that the
     public at large is on my side." "I'm just sitting back and
     letting it fly over my head," he says. "This thing has
     developed a life of its own."