After seven years, I reached the dissertation stage in the CityU of Seattle doctoral program in Higher Education Leadership. My chair reviewed the draft prospectus for my topic as “unique,” “interesting,” and “relevant.” He left CityU the next week.
My new chair was not chosen for his knowledge of my topic area. At out first meeting, he told me to restart my prospectus from the beginning. My chair’s reasoning was that the faculty would not be able to understand the computer-based statistical methodology of my topic. He told me that my topic was better suited to a Harvard student not a CityU doctoral student. He repeatedly pressured me to strip everything “unique” and “interesting” from my topic in favor of a simplistic manual methodology.
That began a struggle to make progress on my prospectus against my chair’s repeated discouragement. After five months, I managed to submit the prospectus for review. My chair approved my prospectus. The methodology reviewer approved my prospectus but with heavy restrictions. The imposed restrictions would have forced me to drop my topic in favor of what my chair had been insisting on.
in the face of my chair’s efforts to
, I reached the dissertation stage. During literature review, I found a topic that interested me and suited my skills. My first chair described my topic as “unique,” “interesting,” and “relevant” before leaving CityU the next week. My next chair was not chosen for his knowledge of my topic area but because he was available. He immediately set out to change my topic to use a manual methodology that was mundane and unpublishable. After resisting his efforts to undermine my topic, he turned to other program faculty who proceeded to denegrate my character and scholarship and threaten me with dismissal. When the provost became involved, he backed the faculty and told me that the CityU system was purposely designed to prevent student complaints. After the provost’s admission, I revealed something to him that distinctly, and without question, demonstrated his and the faculty’s duplicity and incompetance. The provost dismissed me from the program in his next email.
Instead of a dissertation, I turned my efforts to documenting what the provost and faculty had done to con me out of tuition, time and the opportunity to write a dissertation that could have led to my graduation. In dismissing me, they also rejected the opportunity to raise CityU’s academic reputation