At the age of 17, only a year after the United States entered World War I, Buckles lied about his age and joined the US Army.  Buckles volunteered as an ambulance driver and was sent to France where he found the suffering of the French people disturbing.  In a 2001 interview for the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project, Buckles said, “’The little French children were hungry….To me, that was a pretty sad sight,’” demonstrating his compassion for those living in the midst of the Great War.  During his time in France, he also escorted German prisoners of war back to their homeland after the signing of the Armistice. 

After the war, Buckles held various positions with shipping and steamship companies and was assigned to locations throughout the world.  During World War II, he was working as a civilian in Manila and was captured by the Japanese and held for 39 months in a prisoner of war camp.  In the mid-1950s, Buckles settled in Charles Town, West Virginia where he owned and ran a cattle farm.  Buckles remained quite active until his death.  Aside from maintaining his farm (he continued to drive his tractor until the age of 106), he advocated for a suitable memorial in Washington, DC to commemorate the sacrifices of those with whom he served in World War I.

In March 2008, Buckles visited the nation’s capital and was disturbed by the condition in which he found the World War I memorial.  The monument was dedicated in 1931 as a memorial to the 499 residents of the District of Columbia who gave their lives during World War I.  At the time of Buckles’ visit, no national memorial was in place for all World War I veterans.  Buckles made it his personal mission to change this.  After gaining the support of Senators John D. Rockefeller (D-WV), Jim Webb (D-VA), and John Thune (D-SD), Buckles testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks in December 2009 in support of Senate Bill 2097, the Frank Buckles World War I Memorial Act.  The act was passed and work began at a furious rate in hopes of completing the restoration project before Buckles’ death (Buckles was 108 when the bill was passed). 

Though the restoration continues and Buckles will not be able to see the product of his work to memorialize the efforts of World War I veterans, his efforts will not soon be forgotten by the descendents of those who served in The Great War.  Frank Buckles lived a long and remarkable life.  Even as he approached 100 years old, he continued to make public appearances in an attempt to keep the memory of those who sacrificed everything during World War I alive in the minds of a generation who may otherwise never have a firsthand account of that time.   To read about Frank Buckles’ life in his own words, visit his website.  Frank Buckles was a humble man, typical of many who risked their lives or sacrificed their lives to enhance our freedoms.  We will try to do our part to follow his initiatives to recognize the veterans of World War I. 

I attended a private school, McDonogh School in Baltimore, from seventh through twelfth grades.  There were two deans at the school who kept boxes of Crane & Co. note cards on their desks.  Whenever a student (or an alum) accomplished something notable, one of them would send a handwritten note.  Their penmanship was excellent and their ability to say something gracious and kind about your achievement was remarkable as well.

I don’t recall receiving similar notes when I attended college, but the decade of the 1970’s was a little tumultuous on college campuses.  Later, I remember a partner I worked for at Price Waterhouse who made it his practice to send handwritten notes to associates and clients at appropriate times.

Maybe it was the implementation of email, or perhaps voicemail that sharply curtailed the distribution of handwritten notes.  The dynamics after 9-11-2001 changed the way we correspond with government officials, leaving us with email or fax as the best option instead of a handwritten note that might take two months to go through special screening.  I opted not to contact the kind folks at Crane & Co. or look for confirming research.  That would have seemed too cold and impersonal.

For me, a handwritten note still conveys a personal touch and the implied message that the sender took the time to remember me for something I did.  Oddly enough, most of the notes that I receive these days are from colleagues in the education field.  Critics of our education system might say that this habit reflects the dynamics of an unchanging industry.  I choose to think that it reflects the ingrained nature of an educator to recognize that simple recognition of accomplishments can inspire all of us to achieve our potential and beyond.

As you know, we have no physical classrooms at AMU and APU.  Our campus consists of 15 administrative buildings for our leadership and staff in Charles Town, West Virginia and Manassas, Virginia.  Over 90 percent of our students are not first time freshmen transitioning from high school to college.  Yet, for some reason, many of our adult students choose to come back to college in the fall.  Even though we accommodate the schedules of many working adults with 12 monthly semester starts, the fall is usually a busy time of the year for us.

Hosting a back-to-school picnic or cocktail party is more than a little difficult for a university with students in all 50 states and 100+ countries.  Virtually, I welcome you to our university and hope that you will find our continuing efforts at academic and social integration helpful.  As technology changes and improves, effectively shortening the distance between people, we hope that our abilities to integrate students academically and socially improve as well.

Welcome back and thanks for making us your choice for college.

Meanwhile, students, alumni, and friends who are members of the Coast Guard, please accept my apologies.  Please also accept my sincere thanks for the many efforts that you engage in daily to keep our nation’s ports and waterways safe for all.

Several years ago, I heard about a doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education that was designed for people who were employed full-time in higher education.  The doctorate was in higher education management.  With an ongoing interest in learning (what else is lifelong learning), I engaged in a dialogue with the Board of Trustees of the American Public University System (APUS) and the Board of Directors of American Public Education, Inc. (APEI) about the merits of enrolling in this program if I were accepted.  Both of the boards were supportive of my interest.  The primary question was related to timing.  I applied and was accepted.  There were several doctoral programs around the country designed for people working full-time, but the program at UPenn was the one that I wanted to attend.

I started the program in August 2008, a member of a cohort of 22.  Part of the uniqueness of the program is that we had to submit five suggestions for dissertation topics at the start of our program.  As the months progressed, we tackled courses with subjects like Qualitative Methods, Public Policy in Higher Education, Quantitative Methods, Institutional Governance in Higher Education, Strategic Management in Higher Education, History of Higher Education, Community Colleges, International Higher Education, Enrollment Management, and Small Colleges.  At the same time, we continued to progress toward our development of a topic and ultimately a proposal for our dissertations.

I successfully defended my dissertation proposal in May.  Courses have continued through the fall and will conclude in February.  Meanwhile, the chapters of my dissertation continue to take shape, along with data collection and analysis.  As those who have gone through this process know, the last few months are the most intense, requiring a lot of writing and rewriting.  Mixing a more casual style of writing into my more structured research writing has been more difficult than I had imagined.

I am not sure how often I will submit articles for the blog.  I may find a guest author or two.  I might even post a few videos of professors and students at APUS; a project that we have been developing over the past few months.

Meanwhile, I can relate to the challenges of going back to school for a degree when you have a full-time job and a family.  My family has been very supportive and I thank them.  I look forward to being able to spend more time with them, but the most important activity in my spare time will be finishing this dissertation and defending it successfully, sometime this spring.  The opportunity to do this has been wonderful.  I have enjoyed the program, the faculty, and my cohort classmates.  I think I know how an American Military University (AMU) or American Public University (APU) student feels when the finish line is in sight.

One of the tangible actions to which APUS committed when I signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) in September 2007 was a policy of building all new campus construction projects to LEED Silver standards.  The newest addition to the APUS Charles Town campus will meet or exceed those standards.  Environmentally friendly elements of the building will include solar panels on the roof which should provide some 30 percent of the building’s energy needs, bike racks to encourage employees to cut down on commuting by car, parking spaces for energy-efficient vehicles, highly efficient insulation and windows, a modern variable refrigerant HVAC system, and lighting controls to manage energy use, to name only a few.

As APUS has expanded its campus to house a growing staff tasked with accommodating the needs of our increasing student body, we have remained mindful of our responsibility to our Charles Town neighbors as well as our environment.  The new building will blend old and new, traditional and modern in an attempt to keep it similar in character to the historic nature of Charles Town’s other buildings, most of which were constructed in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. 

Joining me at Thursday’s groundbreaking ceremony in addition to APUS staff were various members of the local Charles Town community as well as several state representatives.  David Lloyd, Director of the EPA’s Office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization, was also in attendance and expressed his approval of the planned construction and use of the brownfields site for this purpose.

Please see below for a photo gallery of images from the ground breaking event.

[Show as slideshow]

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My time off from the blog occurred because my wife had knee replacement surgery, and I no longer had the luxury of writing a piece or two in the evenings after the evening rush hour in our house had settled down.  I gained an appreciation for the things that my wife did for us when I had to take those over too.

In thinking about the chores that I took over, it really wasn’t the work that I minded at all.  In fact, I never once said to myself that I shouldn’t be doing the additional work because I knew that my wife would have done the same thing for me.  But, I missed the time that I had previously dedicated to either writing pieces for this blog or reading.

Giving up sleep to find more time in the day wasn’t an option.  Taking vacation wasn’t an option, particularly since I promised my wife we would take a family vacation once she had recovered from the surgery.  So, I gave up my writing, and my reading (mostly).  I have a gap in my postings, but I think I emerged much more refreshed.  I haven’t returned to my previous pace of three postings a week, but I hope to reach that milestone soon.

With the advance of technology allowing all of us to be connected through cell phones, blackberries, pda’s, or the internet, the pace has quickened and the separation between professional and personal time has narrowed.  In my case, I created a couple of hours every night to write and read and that kept the gap from narrowing further.  I’m glad to say that I’m working the gap back into my schedule.

My first suggestion is that, in the case of most classifications, the term “for-profit” be removed as a separate distinction. This term refers to corporate structure and institutional governance, neither of which is of particular relevance in describing contemporary American higher education. Also, and unfortunately, the pejorative innuendo and labeling associated with the term are not warranted or representative of the academic quality and educational impact associated with many for-profit institutions; moreover, the term does not provide a meaningful form of differentiation between institutional types.

“Private” refers to non-public institutions, and that term works for me. If someone is looking for a more distinct separation between the private, non-profit and the private, for-profit, I suggest that we use the terms “private, taxpayer subsidized” institution, as differentiated from “private, tax-paying” institution. It is noteworthy that tax-paying institutions increasingly appear more effective at responding to the educational needs of underserved and often overlooked populations than many taxpayer subsidized institutions, particularly when considering that the latter have a competitive edge in that they do not pay taxes on most or all of their operating income, or on income generated from investments in their endowment funds.

The other classification that I would like to propose is “adult-serving institution.” This classification would be applicable regardless of whether an institution is a two year college, a baccalaureate degree granting institution, masters degree granting institution, or a doctoral degree granting institution. The current, standard definition of college students was crafted with the traditional, 18 to 22-year-old individual in mind. As the numbers increase of adults returning to college seeking a first-time degree or additional credentials, the time available to them necessary to complete the degree exceeds traditional norms and expectations. An adult-serving institution should be measured on the percentage of its students who achieve their stated goals, be that certificate completion or degree attainment. How long it takes them to complete their goal is irrelevant compared with the typical expectations of and resources available to traditional, full-time students.

Lastly, open enrollment is an admissions policy that over half of all American colleges embrace. It usually pertains to institutions that accept everyone who meets a certain minimum standard, such as graduation from high school. SAT’s, ACT’s, and GPA’s are usually not considered for admission. Many, but not all, adult-serving institutions have open enrollment policies. There are many studies of student retention in higher education that demonstrate that the more selective a school is in its admissions standards, the higher its graduation rate. These studies also demonstrate the corollary – that is, the lower the selectivity, the lower the graduation rate. Studies typically rely on averages, and not all institutions are the same, just as not all students are the same. Our institution has had an open enrollment policy for all of our undergraduate programs since its founding. We maintain that policy, while at the same time embracing the objective of working with all of our students to achieve their individual goals, whether it be certificate, degree attainment, personal growth, or preparation for transfer to another institution.  Since many adult-serving institutions are open-enrollment, I propose that those with selective admissions policies be labeled as “selective,” thus making it possible to group adult-serving institutions according to their respective missions, and to measure their effectiveness against comparable institutions.

I make no claims to being a writer, professional or amateur.  I do not publish academic research at the present time.  However, I have enjoyed reading since the beginning (first grade for me), and the enjoyment of reading has given me an appreciation for the quality of writing.

During my elementary and secondary years, I benefited by having dedicated teachers who guided the development of my writing through the typical structural development prescribed in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  By the time I reached high school, we focused less on the structure of a sentence (no more sentence diagramming) and more on the prose itself.  As a precursor to college, my high school classmates and I were given a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White and were told that everything we ever wanted to know about good writing was contained in that book (William Strunk was a professor at Cornell University who began his guide for writing in 1918 and E.B. White was an editor at the New Yorker who studied under Strunk.  White revised Strunk’s guide in 1958).

As a freshman at Duke University in 1972, I suffered through the standard required English composition class in which little guidance was given about how to write other than analyzing the literary context of the novel and writing argumentatively.  The course was graded on a C curve and those of us who achieved an A or B were grateful that we did not receive a C and were perplexed given the limited opportunity to receive personal advice about our writing.  When I decided to be a liberal arts major, most of my subsequent courses required writing papers and making educated arguments about the assigned readings.  Education about writing had ceased with English composition.  It was expected that your writing would improve as you continued to progress (and write) in your upper level liberal arts classes.

When I attended graduate business school at Tulane, there was little room for the type and style of writing embraced in history, philosophy, and English classes.  Analysis was best when it was brief and to-the-point.  That same style of brevity was important for writing memos throughout much of my business career.

After a long respite from being a student, I entered a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania.  One of our professors recommended that we read a book entitled Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott.  Lamott’s lessons are less about the techniques of writing and more about the importance of writing often, in essence practicing and perfecting the art of writing.  The title of her book stems from an incident in her childhood when her brother complained that he did not know where and how to start a paper about birds.  Her father, a writer, instructed her brother to write about the birds, “bird by bird.”

I shared my thoughts about Bird by Bird with a friend of mine who teaches English composition in high school.  He recommended Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.  Roughly two-thirds of the book is autobiographical, but the middle section provides some good tips on writing.

While Bird by Bird and On Writing provide coaching tips and ideas, they are not as instructional as The Elements of Style.  I agree with King’s and Lamott’s advice that the more you write, the easier it will be to write.  That does not necessarily mean that the writing will be better.  Few writers are gifted enough to write a flawless novel or article at one sitting.  I review and edit until I am comfortable with the flow of the document.  In some cases, I ask someone to review it and provide me with edits or comments.

Alex Reid, the author of The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition, recently commented on his blog, Digital Digs, that “The more we write and the greater variety of genres in which we write, the better prepared we will be to write in a variety of genres in the future.”  Reid’s post is a response to an article by Josh Keller in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which Keller reports about longitudinal studies at Stanford and Michigan State that explore whether the internet makes students better writers.  Reid bills himself as an academic writer, and his conclusion is similar to the tips from Lamott and King who are professional writers.  Reid not only comments about the importance of writing frequently, but also about the importance of writing frequently in multiple genres.

Whether writing at work, at school, or on the internet, I agree that the frequency of writing should improve the quality of your written output.  Constructive criticism from bosses, professors, or friends is helpful as well.  If you feel uninspired during your next effort at writing, read Bird by Bird or On Writing.  Good luck and good writing!