My A.T. Still University Experience : vegan

Happy Belated Birthday, Mahatma Gandhi

SteveFoerster — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:23:00 GMT

“I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.” — Mohandas K. Gandhi

The second of October was the 140th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, best known for leading India in its nonviolent campaign of resistance to British rule and to the independence of modern India, and for promoting the principles of ahimsa, or nonviolence, and satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance to oppression. He is revered as a national hero in India, and has had profound influence internationally as well, for example, his writings and tactics inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. during the American civil rights movement. His birthday is observed in India as Gandhi Jayanti, and is recognized worldwide as International Day of Non-Violence. And while he never received the Nobel peace prize, it is widely understood that the reason the prize was not awarded in 1948 was that it is not awarded posthumously and Gandhi had been assassinated before his selection could be announced.

Gandhi resonates with me because he understood that one cannot be truly committed to nonviolence without also being a stict vegetarian. It's not that animals should have the right to vote, or are the equal of people, and I don't see any reason why well-treated animals shouldn't be used for things like plowing, horseback riding, etc. (although there are some animal rights activists who disagree). But all of the research I've done for my dissertation has reaffirmed that there's no nutritional need for animal products, even for kids, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and others with more delicate nutritional needs. Given the lack of need, meat is nothing more than a lifestyle choice — and it's a choice of violence.

I also appreciate Gandhi for being a philosophical anarchist. He thought that the less government there was the better, hoping that people could become sufficiently enlightened to resolve conflicts nonviolently on their own, making government unnecessary. While he was famously opposed to the partition of India into Hindu and Muslim countries, he preferred largely autonomous communities to gigantic bureacracies. He had experienced firsthand the power of government to oppress, and did not wish that India would followin that tradition. I find that this too is an inspiring political philosophy, and while realization of it may seem far away, one cannot progress toward a destination, even a distant one, without knowing what it is.

To tie all of this back to my A.T. Still experience, ultimately these beliefs tipped tha balance on why I chose that institution. I was pretty firm when it came to my ethical motivation, but I wanted to be a bit stronger when it came to the health aspect of things. ATSU gave me the leeway I needed to incorporate that unusual interest within their program.

I only wish it weren't so unusual. Anyway, happy belated birthday, Bapu!

Tomorrow I'll explain what took me so long to get this particular entry online, but to give you a hint, I have come to dislike my local phone company, but the real enemy are the squirrels.

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I have a committee! Well, almost....

SteveFoerster — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:09:00 GMT

“I get by with a little help from my friends.” – The Beatles

Previously I asked for help finding people with doctoral degrees and academic research experience who might be willing to serve as external reviewers on my committee. I'm pleased to announce that I've found two people who are more ideal than I could have hoped, and they're agreed to serve in this capacity.

The first is Liane Summerfield. Dr. Summerfield is Associate Vice President of Academics at Marymount University, where I work. She's perfect because she currently directs the DISCOVER project at Marymount, which is our new initiative to increase undergraduate students' involvement in scholarly research. Not only does she have a doctorate in the subject, and a strong research profile, but she literally even wrote the book on nutrition. I'm very pleased to have her in my corner. She's also a vegetarian, so she can understand my motivation for this kind of research.

The second is Amy Joy Lanou. Dr. Lanou is an Assistant Professor of health and wellness at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She also serves as a senior nutrition scientist for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that promotes preventive medicine, especially better nutrition, and higher standards in research. Not to be outdone, she too has written an excellent nutrition textbook, one that focuses on a plant-based diet as a way to raise healthy kids. She's a fellow vegan, and I know her help will be invaluable.

Weirdly, the only thing I'm missing now is an actual chair for my committee. The way that A.T. Still does things in this program is that one will be assigned to me. Evidently, however, all the people who typically do this are already overseeing as many students as they can handle, so I'm waiting to see who I'll get, or whether I'll have any sort of selection.

In the meantime, there are only two weeks to go in the term, so it won't be long before I'm giving a post-mortem on this first of eight semesters. Whew!

Next up, when problems are good.

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Is There a Doctor in the House?

SteveFoerster — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:39:00 GMT

“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 1937 Nobel Laureate for Medicine

So far the term's going pretty well, I'm trying to log in as often as possible so I don't lose momentum. I've run into something where I could use some help, though.

One very unusual aspect to the Doctor of Health Education program at A.T. Still University is that the research is contained within the coursework. That means that starting with this very first semester I'll be working on my dissertation. That's exciting, but it also means that I have to start assembling my committee right away.

ATSU provides a committee chair, who oversees the part of the process in which my research and dissertation will adhere to the university's standards. But I'm to recruit two subject matter experts from outside the university who can

First, they must have a terminal degree, whether a research doctorate or a first professional doctorate: PhD, DO, MD, JD, etc. Second, they must have research experience beyond just a completing a dissertation. This means they must have published articles and be familiar with research processes. The criteria say that presentations are acceptable to meet this second requirement, but then add that if the person only has presented workshops and not also published papers or at least posters, then they won't meet the criteria.

The documentation says that external committee members are supposed to be supplemental, and shouldn't expect to spend more than a total of thirty hours reviewing materials over the course of my time in the program. Alas, there's no stipend, although any volunteers would earn considerable goodwill from me.

I need to have two people on board in a matter of weeks, so I've begun asking colleagues and acquaintances who they might know who would be ideal. Because I plan to research the education on nutritional aspects of a vegan diet, I'd like to find committee members who are vegan themselves. I know a number of vegans, but none who meet ATSU's professional criteria.

So, if anyone out there knows someone ideal, please have them contact me? I can best be reached at steve@hiresteve.com

Coming up, I report on my first completed week in the program.

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Discovering A.T. Still University

SteveFoerster — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:49:00 GMT

"There’s no place like home" – Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz

After a long and arduous search I thought I had settled on doing a research-only PhD through India’s Indira Gandhi National Open University. I knew someone there from my volunteer work in international education who was willing to connect me with the right people, it was very inexpensive, and since my family and I were ultimately planning to return to live permanently in the Caribbean, the international aspect wasn’t a drawback.

Meanwhile I had dismissed all the American programs I’d considered because they were too expensive or required inconvenient residencies that would have required me to use too much of my vacation time to attend. (That’s right, I work for a university, but would still have had to use annual leave to attend a doctoral program residency. And help with tuition was out of the question. Go figure.)

But there was one other option I hadn’t yet researched. One of the other hats I wear in life is that I help moderate the forum here on eLearners. It’s a great online place where anyone with questions about distance learning can ask in a friendly environment, and get an answer back from knowledgeable people within a short time. We don’t only recommend eLearners partners on the forum, but since eLearners only works with accredited schools and many of them are really good choices for a lot of students, I’ve become familiar with them over time. One day I was looking through our database trying to help out someone who’d asked a question, and I realized that I didn’t know that much about A.T. Still University, one of the few that offer a doctoral program.

So I started reading about them. The program they offered was different from the others in that it wasn’t generic education, it was Health Education. At first I thought that wouldn’t be a good fit for me. I’m an educational technologist and administrator; I haven’t done anything in the area of healthcare, other than providing support to students and faculty in allied health and nursing programs. But then I realized that it might be an interesting way to combine my interests in educational technology and distance learning with another aspect of my life.

You see, about two years ago or so, I changed to a vegan lifestyle. That means I don’t use animal products. Like vegetarians, I don’t eat meat, but I go beyond that, avoiding other animal products in food, like dairy and eggs, and also avoiding animal products that aren’t food, like leather and wool. My motivation was that I’d read and seen what sort of wretched lives and gruesome deaths those animals endure, even the ones not used directly for food, and I just didn’t want to be a part of that system anymore.

So I came to wonder whether researching and teaching on the nutritional aspects of a vegan diet would qualify as “health education”, and contacted the school to ask them whether that would interest them. It turned out they were enthusiastic about that topic, and as I learned more and more about the program I found that the coursework revolved around higher education administration, and it was mainly the research and dissertation that were health based.

The program also had a number of other interesting characteristics that I liked. The most important was that the tuition rate was very reasonable for an American program. I also appreciated that there weren’t any required residencies. It’s not that I don’t recognize the potential value of an in-person meeting, but from a practical standpoint in my life I knew traveling for school would be very difficult. Another really neat aspect to the program was that the research and dissertation writing weren’t a separate phase from the coursework. In this program I would be working on the research for my dissertation from the very first course, and conducting it and writing about it would be central to the coursework. That meant that once I would be done with the coursework, I would be done with the program, a very attractive feature, and one I’d only seen in one other program (the Executive Doctor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, a great program for those who, unlike me, can afford its $110,000 price tag).

So I liked the program, but what about the school? A.T. Still University is a medical school in Kirksville, Missouri that was founded in 1892. For over a century all they were was a medical school, but in the last few years they’ve added a School of Management that offered the Doctor of Health Education program. I thought that was a really interesting pedigree. Moreover, ATSU is different from most medical schools because it’s an osteopathic school. That means that their programs, while comparable to other medical schools, have a more holistic view of healthcare that looks at the wellness of the whole individual rather than looking at individual maladies as problems to be solved on their own. I really liked this attitude toward the whole person, and decided if this education program includes that perspective that it would be an excellent fit.

Next up, my experience with online orientation.

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