"You must issue a public apology for having served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams."
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Aa I complete the second edition of my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect, the issue of reference has become an unexpectedly important topic of focus, the facts pertaining to which are conveyed herein.
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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 he Graduate School Pieter de Hart; and to Minnesota State University/Mankato Dean of the College of Education Mwarumba Mavita on that blog. I acted in like manner as follow-up to communications with Minnesota State University/Mankato Teachers of Tomorrow leaders Kimberly Chavez and Lina Wang; and with Minnesota State University/Mankato Student Government President Roshit Niraula and Vice-President Rebecca Jay. 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.
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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.
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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.”
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Institutional change only results from courageous in-person activism.
I write to you as the general manager at KMSU under the assumption that you or someone else at the station will want to interview me to get the matter of this academically insubstantial dissertation being passed in committee at the University of Minnesota/Mankato firmly before students and faculty; I would be glad to grant such an interview, either alone or in company with Natalie Rasmussen or others who might want to defend passing the Lisa Sayles-Adams dissertation and bestowing the ED. D. doctoral degree upon her on the basis of such a wretchedly written dissertation.
With best regards,
Gary
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph.D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
2507 Bryant Ave North
Minneapolis MN 55411
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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