What Am I to Bid for This Fine EdD? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Superficially, this EdD machinery does look much like the actual processes that generate the scholarship of science, processes carefully developed over hundreds of years that laboriously produced genuine knowledge through a self-skeptical and rigorous method. This superficial similarity, intentionally contrived, gives the EdD cargo cult its power. It is the well-known power of mimesis. By crude mimicry of form, by guessed-at substance, and by rhetorical abstrusity, one can generate equally "respectable" and accepted results. In the vernacular, it is a counterfeit intended to gain the same results as the genuine article.

    In short, American education schools have organized a cargo cult of fakery to produce ideological bureaucrats. As long as the EdD was limited to a qualification chit for salary increases and promotions in primary and secondary schools, the fakery could be tolerated. But now, these pseudoscientific exercises have metastasized into dubious higher-education credentials in various campus schools, departments, and programs.

    It's time to unlock the closed kilns of education schools and expose the contents to the sunlight of scrutiny, debate, and-ultimately-dramatic reform. Much more is at stake than the egocentric preening of "Doctor" Jill Biden and her ilk.


    Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D., IMBA, is clinical full professor at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business. He is a former military intelligence officer with a Ph.D. from Duke University and has taught in Russia, China, India, Spain, and Colombia. He is the author of Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities.