Open Letters to Administration, Staff, Faculty, and Students at Minnesota State University/Mankato
The open letters covered in this article at
those for administration, staff, faculty, and students at Minnesota State
University/Mankato, including the following.
To get a sense of the contents of these
letters, my letter to Edward S. Inch, President, Minnesota State
University/Mankato, is given; others may
be viewed in the Appendix.
Administration,
Staff, Faculty, and Students at
Minnesota State
University/Mankato
Edward S. Inch, President, Minnesota State
University/Mankato
David Hood, Minnesota State University/Mankato
Provost and Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs
Pieter deHart, Associate Provost for Research
and Dean of Graduate Studies, Minnesota State University/Mankato
Mwarumba Mwavita, Dean of the College of
Education, Minnesota State University/Mankato
Roshit Niraula, Student Government President, Minnesota
State University/Mankato
Rebecca Jay, Student Government
Vice-President, Minnesota State University/Mankato
Dwayne Megawu (General Manager, KMSU Radio)
Kimberly Chavez and Lina Wang, Teachers of
Tomorrow, Minnesota State University/Mankato
Faculty and Staff in the College of Education
(total of 101 members, including 53 faculty),
Minnesota State University/Mankato Provost and
Vice-President for Academic Affairs
…………………………………………………………………………….
An Open Letter to
Edward S. Inch (President, Minnesota State University/Mankato)
>>>>> Natalie Rasmussen Must Issue a Public Apology for Having
Served as Chair of the Committee that Passed the Wretchedly Written
Dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams
Colleges and universities are inspiring places
that help reveal our students’ tremendous potential to address the world’s
greatest challenges and opportunities. I am passionate about supporting
our students' success; they will be the leaders and thinkers who create
our future, address the challenges our world faces, and explore the
opportunities that emerge.
My career has been guided by the principle that students are our mission, and
supporting their success is our obligation. Ensuring access to an
equitable education empowers students by helping them think critically,
problem-solve in teams, thrive in multicultural and complex settings, and find
their voice while instilling in them the confidence to use it.
This core belief is why I competed in and later directed speech and debate
teams for more than twenty-five years. Being able to advocate, dialogue,
manage conflict, and move people forward together is the power people find in
their voice. My work in the Balkans teaching students who had come
through a protracted ethnic war proved to me the importance of empowered
voices.
Higher education has tremendous potential and promise for every student.
Helping them unlock the promise of their future has been and remains my
inspiration.
Edward S. Inch
President, Minnesota State University/Mankato
April 2, 2025
Edward---
Yesterday I sent an email to Natalie Rasmussen
(Chair of the Minnesota State University/Mankato Department of Education;
dissertation adviser and chair of the doctoral committee for Lisa Sayles-Adams)
that began,
"You must issue a public apology for
having served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written
dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams."
I entered my communication with Rasmussen as
an open letter on my blog ( http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com ), and I also entered follow-up
email communications to Minnesota State University/Mankato Assistant
Provost for Research and Dean of the Graduate School Pieter de Hart; and
to Minnesota State University/Mankato Dean of the College of Education
Mwarumba Mavita on that blog. Similarly, I will be entering this email to
you on that platform, with an international viewership that includes nations as
far-flung as Russia, Germany, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Algeria,
Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
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 Rasmussen as dissertation adviser,
Candace Raskin, and Efe Agbamu.
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, 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.
I can imagine that you are offended by the
prevailing circumstances surrounding this dissertation, since your own academic
credentials are impeccable:
University of Washington
Ph. D., Speech Communications
University of Oregon
M. S. Biology, Rhetoric and Communications
Western Washington University
B. S., Speech Communications
.....................................................................................................
Readers of my blog 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.”
Natalie Rasmussen must issue a public apology
for having served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written
dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams.
And you, as President of the University,
should also make a public statement lamenting the bestowal of a doctorate
at Minnesota State University/Mankato on the basis of such an
insubstantial and error-ridden dissertation.
I would think, also, that you would dismiss
Natalie Rasmussen as Chair of the Department of Education at Minnesota State
University/Mankato.
As was the case with my email to Rasmussen, I
am entering this communication on my blog as an open letter.
Now is your chance to prove that your
idealistic rhetoric is merely an exercise in your selected field of
rhetoric/communications--- or if you really mean that you want
to ensure that your students become "leaders and thinkers who create
our future, address the challenges our world faces, and explore the
opportunities that emerge," that you want to impart an education to them
that "empowers students by helping them think critically, problem-solve in
teams, thrive in multicultural and complex settings, and find their voice while
instilling in them the confidence to use it."
Many people in public education advocate
"critical thinking" while never engaging in critical analysis or
providing an environment wherein students are actually encouraged to debate key
issues and come to original conclusions.
Please prove that you are sincere in your own
advocacy for critical thinking and ethical conduct by taking the action
necessitated by the situation I have described herein.
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)
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