Is Steve Levicoff ok?

If I recall correctly Bernie Sanders wife screwed up an institution due to bad financial decisions.

Unfortunate, for students and alumni. Especially sad as you think back to all of the work that was put into building an institution. I suppose somebody looks good on paper and manages to interview well and then runs the thing into the ground.

 

Mary Jane O'Meara Sanders was President of now defunct Burlington College (founded in 1972). I believe she was being investigated for financial decisions and the college lost accreditation and closed.

I was surprised to find that her PhD in leadership was from Union Institute and University.

 

Union was intensely creative on two fronts. A consortium of liberal arts schools in the Northeast (including--no coincidence here--Antioch College), the Union (soon named the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities) established University Without Walls programs at many schools--and ran one themselves. They also created the highly innovative (some say too much so) Union Graduate School. But their business practices were always poor. They were sued into bankruptcy in 1979 and hand their candidacy for accreditation pulled as a result. Eventually, as a free-standing institution, they were accredited, but always had shaky finances.

By 2002, the very powerful Ohio Board of Regents--never a fan of Union--decided to smush it, complaining that Union was awarding PhDs in just about anything (true) without sufficient core faculty expertise (true) and was seeing a wide range of dissertation quality (true), so they put their foot down. Union hired a new president, cut back the programs it would allow, built more structure into them, and got on a stable--if not solid--financial footing. (This was when I graduated--so I'm rooted in the old school but graduated in the new.) Anyway, the school did well until the president retired and they hired the current one, who ran the place into the ground.

I cannot fully describe what an innovative, creative, and fulfilling experience Union was. There was never another school quite like it (although a couple of '70s-era flameouts come to mind).

 

LOL. She should have gotten a business administration or public administration degree with actual courses - that involved looking at numbers.

 

Like the previous US Secretary of Education, who never spent a day in a classroom?

 

Arne Duncan had been CEO of Chicago Public Schools prior to his appointment as Education Secretary.

The other two? Agreed. But note that they were far more qualified to serve in the Cabinet than was Betsy DeVos, who was equipped only with an anti-education agenda.

 

One other thought. It took doing a nontraditional doctorate (incredibly nontraditional) specializing in nontraditional higher education for me to truly understand this field. It was so....nontraditionally meta.

 

To Steve's point, I don't think Arne Duncan was in the classroom. Looks like he had a friend who is an investment banker that made him the CEO of the Chicago schools. He wasn't actually a teacher. I'm going to have to give that point to Steve.

 

Now, we have educational administration degrees. That might not have been an option for her back in the 90s, but another administration degree probably would have been better than self-designing a PhD in educational leadership without knowing what would be best to include in the curriculum.

 

I miss the days when telemarketers couldn't even dream of calling me night and day from other countries.

 

I'd like to think we're not keeping score. And I'm not at all interested in anyone's concept of "winning."

My point: DeVos was utterly unqualified to be in the Cabinet anywhere, and had a particularly destructive approach to education.

 

I'm not sure how you can draw that conclusion. Did you read her Learning Agreement or Program Summary?

Union committees weren't just one person. They consisted of 7 people. The learner was the chair and nominated people to the committee, but even that wasn't without approval by the Dean's office. The committee members and roles:

Learner: Chair
Core Faculty: Advisor from the core faculty at Union. These were full-time faculty members expert in how a Union degree works.
Second Core: Another core faculty member. Didn't participate in the process. Instead, the Second Core reviewed and commented on all items produced in the learner's program. He/she was a quality control measure.
Two Adjunct Faculty: Subject-matter experts in one's field of study. Had to hold a doctorate and have extensive experience.
Two Peers: Current learners or graduates who provided support and guidance to the learner and had full voting rights on the Committee. Their input was typically on the process and it weighed equally.

All appointments had to be approved by both the Core Faculty member and the Dean (or Associate Dean).

Everything else was also reviewed by the Dean's office--changes to the committee, the Learning Agreement, the Program Summary, and the Project Demonstrating Excellence.

The Union PhD was Learner-centered, not "self-designed."

 

Too bad her learning agreement isn't public information. I think the public should be able to assess the academic credentials of someone leading a not-for-profit, public, or publicly-traded institution. With most people, you can just pull up a catalog to see the curriculum.

 

I hardly think the average person would be able to "assess the academic credentials" of someone who did a PhD by learning agreement.

Would you want to examine every term paper and exam an MBA grad took in school? I doubt it. It's absurd on the face of it.

I wrote my learning agreement in 1987. In all those ensuing years, no one outside of my committee and the Dean's office ever read it. Nor should they.

 

Assessing the academic credentials should be possible in such situations. Maybe not the learning agreement but one should be able to assess the academic credentials by knowing what kind of degree and from which colleges.

 

I think the way you assess a PhD is by reading the thesis.

 

And knowing quite a bit about the subject matter of that thesis.