About Us
Our Background
THE WEBSITE, the Declaration Era Educational Press (DEEP), an affiliate of Emily E Press, is the website for the Research and Publication Division of the Maury Seldin LLC. The founder, Dr. Maury Seldin, established it as a follow-on to an exploratory wiki derived from a Homer Hoyt Institute research program initiated because of the subprime crisis and capital market freeze. That research program evolved to become known as the “Homer Hoyt Institute Research Initiative.” A one-page description of it is on the web; but there is substantial detail in the several pages of end notes.
The website is a vehicle for an innovative educational approach that is rooted in the idea of facilitating an increase in the productivity of motivated learners by providing options for delving deeper to satisfy critical thinking, and by framing presentations in a fashion that facilitates using a lens of complexity. The lens of complexity focuses on dealing with uncertainty when the system contains nonlinear relationships among choices made and outcomes. The uncertainty exists because of choices made by others in the changing environment and because of contingencies. The approach calls for strategies such as a minimax approach in which the decision-maker seeks to maximize the benefits of outcomes within the constraints of tolerable unfavorable outcomes.
Personhood
The Maury Seldin LLC is a company endowed with corporate personhood. As such it has some of the same rights that are possessed by natural persons. Included in such rights are the rights to enter into contracts and the rights to author and publish educational material. The Maury Seldin LLC is such a company, the nature of its business is to serve as a vehicle for innovative education by integrating development and dissemination of knowledge that would contribute to societal self-organization so as to lead to the evolution of a societal structure to better facilitate progress toward the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
Maury Seldin, the author of the trilogy, American Democracy Endangered, of which this is a part, has sold his authorship rights in the trilogy and the vast amount of supported material which he has authored to the Maury Seldin LLC that is designed to be a selfsupporting entity capable of continuing the development and the dissemination of knowledge that emerged in more than a half century career of personal contributions to the arena of education development and dissemination, in which Maury Seldin as a person contributed with working with others. Such cooperative efforts were not only in co-authorships and teams for research projects, but also through stimulating the self-organization of institutions.
Dr. Seldin, a chaired professor emeritus of the American University School of Business Administration, was the founding president of the Homer Hoyt Institute created to serve as the research arm of two of the school’s programs. He is Chairman Emeritus of the Homer Hoyt Institute (HHI), founded in 1967 and Chairman Emeritus of the Maury Seldin Advanced Studies Institute (ASI), founded in 1982. Dr. Seldin served as leader and then co-leader of the Seminar on Strategic Decision-Making at ASPEC (Academy of Senior Professionals at Eckerd College), an interest group that he founded in 2002 and that in recent years has focused on applications of complexity science to a variety of strategic decisions ranging from personal health to organizational management and societal issues.