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
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.
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:
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,
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