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Winter 2002

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UMASS GATHERINGS: The Ed School Marathon
No fear or loathing in Amherst (Or, What really happened back then)

by John Stifler '92G




	SYNONYMOUS WITH AN ERA: Dwight Allen, left, with Barbara Love '72G and Ken Blanchard. (For larger view of Ben Barnhart photo, click in right navigation.)

BETWEEN 1968 AND 1975, THE UMass School of Education achieved celebrity and notoriety unparalleled in the annals of the university, and probably in the annals of schools of education everywhere. The rising tide of encounter groups and questioned values didn’t merely lift all boats at the School of Ed – it flipped them over. A radically innovative approach to what a school of education might do, and how it might do it, attracted scores of faculty members and hundreds of students, while the rest of the campus scratched its head and tried to figure out what those people in Furcolo Hall were up to.

At the center of the whirlwind was the man whose name is synonymous with the era: Dean Dwight W. Allen. Hired from Stanford with an offer he couldn’t refuse – freedom to hire large numbers of new faculty, admit students with unconventional credentials, and act on other conditions he set to make sure he’d be able to do what interested him most – Allen brought extraordinary people to UMass. Together they created an environment in which you didn’t merely think outside the box: There was no box.

That is the story as you hear it expressed positively by alumni and faculty who returned to UMass last October to celebrate the Allen years. As those attending were well aware, there’s an alternative view of the era. There are those who still believe that the School of Ed in that era was a school for prolonged adolescence, a secret or not-so-secret enclave of the Baha’i faith, a degree factory where people got credit for anything, even a criminal operation. Once, sure enough, Amherst police led Allen out of Hills South in handcuffs. When Allen resigned in 1975, tongues clucked, heads shook, and, depending on whom you listen to, it was either 10 years or the twelfth of never before the Ed School regained normal stature at UMass.

TO MANY FROM THE ALLEN years, the critical view is not only skewed but has prevented a recognition and validation of what went on during the Allen years. “It’s time to honor Dwight,” said former faculty member Ken Blanchard, author of the best-seller The One-Minute Manager. Others agreed, and on October 18-19, the School of Education hosted a conference partly as a tribute to Allen, partly as an opportunity for veterans of the education wars to reunite, exchange hugs, and issue challenges in the face of continuing educational crises.

The title for the event was “A Marathon Conference.” And that phrase was meant to resonate: In the early ’70s, “marathon” was the term for open-ended, all-hours discussions at the school. At this conference, upwards of 200 people assembled to hear from such holders of the UMass Ed.D as former U.S. ambassador Cynthia Perry ’72G (see profile, page 45) and National School Boards Association head Anne Bryant ’74G, and such former faculty members as Blanchard and Manufactured Crises author David Berliner, about the obstacles they see in the path to a more compassionate and socially viable education.

At lunch the first day, Allen spoke at length – always one of his greatest talents, everyone will tell you – about how the school disrupted, confused, annoyed, or thrilled nearly everyone during his tenure. One story among many: Given the opportunity to create new courses, Allen and his faculty proposed 285 of them. Strictly speaking, he was following standard procedure, but politically speaking such a move was outrageous.

Subsequently, upon discovering that approval by the Faculty Senate was not required to cancel courses, the school did away with 284 of them, and for a time offered only one: Education 386-686, Special Problems in Education, which students could take as many times as they wished, for any number of credits.

AT DINNER, EVERYONE ELSE TOLD the stories. Stories of chartered airplane flights to Brooklyn, where the UMass-staffed Career Opportunity Program helped train paraprofessional teachers, most of them from minority groups, so they could be certified as regular teachers. Of teaching a statistics class in China, asking the Chinese students to guess how many seeds were in a watermelon, then having everyone eat the melon and count the seeds. Of Allen’s hiring promises: “I’ll overpay you, give you free rein, and surround you with capable, exciting people.”

Of unending differences in philosophy. “I was never in Dwight’s camp,” said Ron Hambleton, a longtime School of Education professor whose expertise in statistical research is featured elsewhere in this issue (“Only a Test,” page 24). “Dwight said to me, ‘The only time I’m going to call you is when I want something objective!’” says Hambleton. “I’m thankful to him for not dictating to me.”

Says Allen,“Some people liked to check off boxes, and some liked to look deeply into each other’s eyes. What we didn’t have here was any requirement that the people who liked to look deeply into people’s eyes also had to check off boxes.”

Nobody in those days thought free rein meant free ride, said veterans of the period last fall. Faculty member Pat Crosson ’72G, ’74G recounted how, following allegations that the Ed School was running a diploma mill, the state brought in a blue-ribbon committee to investigate.

“They looked at everything,” said Crosson. “They read dissertations, they talked to faculty and students, and they concluded there was no evidence of failure to do serious academic work.”

ON THE CONTRARY, IN CROSSON'S view, it was remarkable how hard people were working at the time: “From dawn until well after dark, every day. The faculty were around all the time; the students saw that Dwight’s energy was shared by so many people.”

“People said we were revolutionary,” Allen observed. “But everything we did was inside the system.” The handcuffs? The crime was an unpaid parking ticket issued in Somerville, when Allen was out of the country and an assistant had borrowed the car.

Nevertheless, allegations about mismanagement, even embezzlement, persisted. Allen allows that times were
wild. “Forty people here were supposedly packing heat,” he said. “There were rumors I was going to be assassinated.”

The FBI investigated possible misuse of over a million dollars in grant money. In the end, one junior faculty member pleaded nolo contendere to having skimmed off $18,000, and strictly speaking, that was the extent of any legal trouble.

Establishment insiders felt angry and threatened, however, and the walls were crumbling. Allen resigned, partly because he was occupied with other educational projects in Africa. But looking back, he says, “Resigning was a stupid thing to do. The press took it as admission that I’d done something wrong.”

LAST FALL'S CONFERENCE MADE IT clear that he’d also done a whole lot of things right, and so had everyone else at the gathering. Amid recollections and renewals of acquaintance, speakers at the marathon repeatedly alluded to what the participants have accomplished.

Allen himself continues to wrestle education’s alligators in a job he’s held ever since his departure from UMass: professor of urban development at Old Dominion University in Virginia. With characteristic disregard for traditional practice, he teaches freshman English composition.

“People ask me, ‘Why are you wasting your senior status on undergraduates?’ I say, ‘You don’t get it.’”

Big, silver-haired, comfortable and animated, his hands moving constantly as he talked, Allen covered a lot of ground in his remarks at the conference. He spoke of his involvement with the Baha’i faith, in which he was raised, and of the connection of spiritual life to education: “The highest any human being can get is to be of service to another human being,” he said at one point.He spoke of the town of Amherst: “A place frozen in time, with all the charm and the village inefficiencies that idea connotes. It was also an irresponsible cousin to South Hadley, Holyoke, the other towns that have the commerce that Amherst doesn’t allow.” One of the Ed School’s responses to Amherst’s elegant isolation was to create teaching projects in those poorer cities nearby, as well as in larger cities and developing countries. “Dwight didn’t recognize the boundaries of the Valley,” observed Crosson.

THE CONSENSUS SEEMS TO BE that Allen-era orneriness and pride in nonconformity are no longer among the obvious features of the School of Ed.

“The school has matured,” said current dean Bailey Jackson ’73G, ’76G. “And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. The school has grown and changed. “I think of those years as having opened up the system. Then it shut down. Now it’s a matter of opening it up again.”

One “thread I’d hold on to,” said Jackson, who headed the school’s social justice program before becoming dean, “is the commitment to social justice and diversity.” That this commitment endures is evidenced by the people gathered in the Campus Center last October.

“We have the most marvelous naturalistic experiment you could imagine,” Allen told those assembled. “We awarded upwards of 800 doctorates, about half to people who did not meet standard criteria for admission. We didn’t have any marginal admissions, but we had plenty of alternative admissions.

“And now,” he concluded, with a gesture embracing everyone in the room, “look at this group here.”

[top of page]

UMass Gatherings: Ed Marathon

GATHERINGS: larger images

MARATHON LIST: Ed School Alumni at the Reunion

SOUVENIR: testing into Mass Aggie

PROFILE: Cynthia Shepard Perry '72G

PROFILE: Kathleen Mitchell ‘79

MEMOIR: Todd Russell Hill ’90

MONUMENTAL TEACHERS: your memories of professors

MOVING ON: faculty retirements

NO PLACE LIKE HOMECOMING: alumni at the ’70s reunions

UMASS MEDIA: Bruce MacCombie ’67, ’68G and Taj Mahal ’63S