DL DBA's and tenured teaching positions

I am currently a class chair for one of Pepperdine University's Executive MBA classes and I was attending a comittee meeting yesterday.

While speaking to an old marketing professor of mine who has a DBA from USC I mentioned to him that I was in the process
( Have been for a couple of years now ) of deciding where to get a DBA.

He does not know the extent of my research into the subject and he quickly blurted out that there were two paths. The traditional B&M and the , as he put it, the " Pay the fee, turn in your paperwork and get your DBA" programs.

While he did not actually denigrate the DL programs and he actually said that this is good for the experienced professional who does not need the classroom setting he said that he has seen many applications for full time tenure track positions that had DL DBA degrees that had been turned down.

Now come on, Pepperdine is a good school and they are academically rigorous, especially in the EMBA programs but they aren't Ivy League. If this is the case at Pepperdine, imagine the bigger, better schools.

He was surprised by the snobbishness in the academic community. We all know that this is an ongoing fight and that the tide is turning ever so slowly but I was dissapointed by his comments.

I have no intentions of trying to go the full time tenure track but I am thinking about adjunct. I get the feeling and know that adjunct would be an easier, less snobbish route.

What can we do, and what are we not doing to change this perception on the part of academia?

 

Familiarity breeds acceptance

Only working with someone that has a DL degree that meets their standance will change their mind.

Part of this is self protection, they feel DL threatens their job security. Part of it is they feel that people need to suffer like they did. If they worked for years on an assistanship so should you. Personally, this is the weakest argument as it is not uncommon for people to finish their dissertation after they have left the actual college campus. Thus, for years PhD studies have been defacto DL to some extent. Some of it is pure human nature, people always like to feel they are special and that is why even people with B&M degree's you have the perceived elite and the run of the mill.

Only as DL degree's advance in the academic workplace to the point where people with them have influence in hiring decisions or where DL graduates are in general more common place will people begin to be more accepting of them.

 

I think that part of the problem is the amount of PhD and DBA graduates that DL schools generate. At my local University, they only accept one or two PhD candidates a year in a specific area, not so much because they cannot supervise but to make sure that the graduates could be absorbed easily by the market and avoid saturation. One issue is that DL schools need to graduate enough people to make programs profitable while in B&M schools PhD students are seen more like a cheap labour and not the meat of the business.

I can see a bias against DL schools if I would start receiving tons of resumes from the same school. It gives the impression that degrees are just being handed out without much effort. I think that is better to graduate from a unknown school that from one that everybody knows as a degree factory.

 

I was speaking this week with a dept head at a mid-sized university which has a nationally-known rep for DL, and she told me that the faculty position I was applying for in the SOM would actually benefit by having someone with online/dl experience. I'm currently pursuing my MBA online at a B&M, and she told me that would be a plus. This isn't a prestige, tenure-track position, but it is one that could turn into it. So long as you're looking at the right major school--say, one with significant DL offerings, like Mississippi State, UMass, Colorado State, Auburn, Florida, Clemson, Indiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, et. al--you might actually benefit from having an online degree, so long as it's from a school with some reputation in academia (I still think the UoP and Walden degrees might be at a disadvantage).

The times they might be a changin'.