A Story of Courageous Leadership, Institutional Rescue, and Strategic Transformation
When the Dean of Arts and Sciences appointed me Department Chair in January 2012, she wasn't making a routine administrative decision. She was making an emergency one.
Park University’s Psychology and Sociology department — serving primarily active duty military, veterans, and their families across military base campuses and online — was in serious trouble. The previous chair had failed to fulfill a fundamental requirement of the role: annual assessment reports for each of the department's three degree programs. These reports weren't bureaucratic paperwork. They were the documentation that the Higher Learning Commission — Park University's regional accreditor — required to verify that the institution was delivering quality education.
Without those reports, the university's accreditation was at risk. And without accreditation, Park University could not operate. Students could not receive federal financial aid. Degrees would be rendered worthless. The institution itself faced potential closure.
There was a second crisis running beneath the accreditation problem. The department had an entrenched culture of underperformance protected by institutional complicity. Four tenured male faculty members had operated for years without meaningful accountability — deficient in teaching quality, research contributions, and departmental participation — because they had always reviewed each other and always given each other a pass. The culture they had built had driven out competent women repeatedly. I was the first female and the first distance faculty member to serve as Department Chair. I was not yet tenured when I took the role.
The risk was real. I took it anyway.
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“The department had a well-established reputation for driving out capable women. I was appointed to change that — and everything else that wasn't working.”
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The challenges were layered and interconnected — and each one depended on solving the others: