An Open Letter to Natalie Rasmussen
An Open letter to
Natalie Rasmussen, Chair of the Department of Education at State University of
Minnesota/Mankato >>>>> The Imperative to Issue a Public Apology
for Having Served as Chair of the Committee that Passed the Wretchedly Written
Dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams
The open letter provided in this article is
that sent to Natalie Rasmussen, Chair of the Department of Educational
Leadership and Administration at Minnesota State University/Mankato; and chair of the committee that passed the
Sayles-Adams dissertation.
…………………………………………………………………………….
April 1, 2025
Natalie---
You must issue a public apology for having
served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written
dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams.
Yesterday I traveled to Minnesota State
University/Mankato to begin discussions with officials of the university that
will continue both in written and in-person form.
Attached to this email is the March 2025
edition of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research
from Minneapolis, Minnesota, in which I analyze the dissertation (African
American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their
Experiences in K-12 Leadership) of Sayles-Adams that astonishingly
passed the committee comprised of yourself as dissertation adviser,
Candace Raskin, and Efe Agbamu.
As you know, Sayles-Adams took the highly
unusual step of putting the dissertation on “embargoed” (delayed availability
to the public) status for almost two years after publication. The
dissertation became available in November 2024. I ran a hard copy of
the dissertation (downloaded copy also attached to this email) and read that
document thoroughly, multiple times. This doctoral thesis is a
confoundingly terrible presentation of research, full of misspelled words, word
usage errors, run-on sentences, and awkward syntax. Further, the
dissertation is gravely flawed with regard to structure, presentation of
findings, and analysis of data.
The dissertation that appeared to the public
in November 2024 should have never been approved by the committee.
In my own document, commencing with
“Introductory Comments” and continuing in successive chapters, I provide a
detailed analysis of the above-mentioned flaws and others. In doing so, I
analyze each of the five chapters in the Sayles-Adams dissertation:
Chapter I (along with “Acknowledgments” and “Abstract”), “Background of the
Problem”; Chapter II, “Review of the Literature”; Chapter III,
“Methodology”; Chapter IV, “Findings”; and Chapter V,
“Discussion.”
As of November 2024, continuing into February
2025, the "embargoed" status of the Sayles-Adams’s dissertation ended
and this doctoral thesis was listed on “Cornerstone: A Collection
of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato,” at
link, https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds/1266/ .
According to librarians at University of
Minnesota/Mankato, Sayles-Adams withdrew the dissertation from the Cornerstone
listing on 17 February 2025.
Readers of my blog ( http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com ), my Journal of the K-12
Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and
other platforms know that they may go to the above link to observe the current
"withdrawn" status of the dissertation.
The current unavailability of the
Sayles-Adams dissertation induces grave questions as to why Sayles-Adams is
unwilling to submit her dissertation for public review. This runs counter
to the very idea of doctoral dissertations, the purpose of which is to
contribute to the intellectual universe of public knowledge.
Readers know that in African American
Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12
Leadership, Lisa Sayles-Adams interviews five African American women school
principals with the objective of determining how these principals coped with
the challenges they faced because of their position at the intersection of race
and gender, especially with regard to interactions with white men.
Sufficiently discerning readers of Lisa
Sayles-Adams’s dissertation will readily observe the many flaws of English
usage, the structural problems of the dissertation, the poorly executed
interviews of the participant principals, the failure to follow up with
questions that could have produced material of considerable value in
understanding the experiences of these women, and the lack of any meaningful
contribution to scholarly literature.
As readers now know, the dissertation is
replete with misspelled and misused words, including a rendering of the word,
tenet, as “tenant” two times; presentation of the word, “rein,” as
reign; and the most brain-boggling of all: the four-times
misspelled pseudonym (“Marica” rather than “Marcia) assigned to one of the five
interviewees participating in this qualitative study; Sayles-Adams also
once renders another pseudonym, Gwendolyn, as “Gwendoly.”
You must issue a public apology for having
served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written
dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams.
Incumbent on you also is resignation as chair
from the Department of Education at Minnesota State University/Mankato.
I am entering this communication on my blog as
an open letter.
With best regards,
Gary
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph.D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
2507 Bryant Ave North
Minneapolis MN
55411
http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com
Author,
Understanding the Minneapolis Public
Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect (New Salem Educational Initiative,
second edition, 2024
Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts
Education (New Salem
Educational Initiative, 2022
A Concise History of African America (Seaburn, 2004)
The State of African Americans in Minnesota
2004 (Minneapolis
Urban League, 2008)
The State of African Americans in Minnesota
2008 (Minneapolis
Urban League, 2004)
Tales from the Taiwanese (Libraries Unlimited, 2004)
A Short History of Taiwan: The Case for
Independence (Praeger, 2003
Culture and Customs of Taiwan ([with Barbara E. Reed]
(Greenwood, 1998)
Agricultural Development and the Fate of
Farmers in Taiwan, 1945-1990 (Minneapolis,
Minnesota: Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1993)
A World History: Links Across Time and
Place ([with six
other authors] (McDougal Littell, 1988)
No comments:
Post a Comment