In Memoriam - Raymond Spencer Rodgers

Raymond Spencer Rodgers, founder and president of Vancouver University Worldwide, died in June. A notable educational innovator, he took VUW (a private global consortium university operating according to non-traditional principles) to international recognition, including the position of runner-up in the American Association of University Administrators' Khaladjian Award for Innovation in Higher Education in 1997.

In contrast to earlier times, when prominent BC politicians were happy to endorse VUW's work, much of Rodgers' last years at VUW were taken up with fighting political opposition to VUW from its commercial competitors and left-wing government appointees who were determined to falsely discredit the university (Canada's only private secular university), ride roughshod over its legal authority, and drive it out of existence. They did not succeed. At the time of writing, VUW continues in operation both within British Columbia (delivering theology programs) and outside the province (all other programs).

Rodgers summed up these problems as follows,

"In recent decades the unions of the BC bureaucracy, and certain post-secondary faculty and journalist union members, have mistakenly believed that a public-sector monopoly of post-secondary education could be maintained inter alia by stunting BC's domestic independent secular Vancouver University.

Throughout this period, since the commencement of the Vancouver Institute of Post-secondary Studies and Point Roberts WA Institute in 1970, Dr Rodgers has endeavoured to explain the folly of this strategy. He has also for decades urged the few struggling domestic BC independent institutions to network for collective strength, and to express appreciation for exceptional public sector individuals who at times tried to put broad social benefit above petty, narrow, public-sector-union covert bully tactics.

The BC governments (Social Credit Party) of the Seventies and Eighties could have provided the basis for a healthy domestic independent post-secondary sector in BC [and an example for all of Canada] if they had extended their partial funding of non-profit independent schools to the secular non-profit post-secondary sector.

The failure to do so set the ground for the unhealthy contemporary state of the post-secondary sector in BC: one in which the public institutions and bureaucracy have generally denigrated domestic BC independent post-secondaries and thereby unwittingly invited a flock of satellite programs to parachute into the province from abroad. [A collateral problem has been the self-defeating habit of the few BC independents themselves snidely denigrating each other]."

The obituary published by the AAUA reads as follows:

"Raymond Spencer Rodgers, long-time member of AAUA, member of the Board of Directors, and site-host for the 2006 AAUA Summer Assembly departed this life on June 5, 2007.

British by birth, Raymond was adopted during World War II by his American step-father and then spent most of his life in Canada. After serving in Canada’s military, parliamentary press gallery, and government—and following the completion of his Ph.D. degree in government from Columbia University—Rodgers began life as an academic. He taught for a short time at the University of South Alabama prior to his appointment as an associate professor at the University of Louisiana Lafayette (then the University of Southwestern Louisiana). Alarmed by Louisiana’s lack of attention to preserving its French language heritage, Raymond initiated a much publicized challenge to Louisianans for the preservation of their heritage cultures. Those efforts, and his subsequent efforts to help found the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, led to him being recognized as a important figure in the French preservation movement of the late 1960s and to his informal designation as the intellectual father of the Cajun revival.

After returning to Canada, Raymond expanded his interests to focus on the educational and cultural impacts and potential benefits of technology. In his 1971 book, Man in the Telesphere, he specifically predicted the development of an “electronic web” (the Internet) and discussed the social and educational impacts of such a phenomenon. Connecting with his other interest—the preservation of French-Cajun culture—Raymond cited Acadians as an example of dispersed cultures that could be revitalized into living communities by means of “electronic presence.” (Today we would refer to this as an Internet-based virtual community.) Clearly, Raymond was a pioneer thinker in the potential uses of electronic modalities to enhance education specifically and life in general.

At the time of his death, Raymond was serving as President of Vancouver University Worldwide, dubbed by the Vancouver Sun as the world’s first global university consortium. Consistent with the creative and intellectual leadership he had demonstrated during the early decades of his academic life, Raymond was a catalyst for the expansion of access to university degrees through consortia-based programming. His continuing efforts to challenge bureaucratic constraints and to confront traditionally held limiting perspectives resulted in a vigorous extension of the British university model to settings previously not considered.

Raymond was appreciated by his AAUA colleagues for his insights, intellectual vitality, challenging perspectives, good humor, and generosity. Through his work as a member of the Board of Directors he helped to significantly advance the organization. He is survived by his wife, Lola, who is known to many AAUA members through her attendance at past assemblies."

Rodgers summed up a number of the issues regarding the recent conflicts involving VUW in a discussion at Inside Higher Education in January where he defended VUW's policy on the award of prior credit for educational experiences outside the classroom, and pointed out VUW's pioneering role in that process. Here, as so often, the private sector was leading the public sector, but saw the proper credit for this pioneering action stolen by aggressive public sector supporters.

"Worldwide (adjective) Vancouver University has granted credit for credible prior learning assessment for 36 years. We actually commenced a few months before Excelsior (then Regents) and Thomas Edison State College, etc. The credibility of our programs is to be readily noted at http://www.VancouverUniversity.ca/alumni.php Our problem, however, is summarized in the third text paragraph at http://www.WorldwideUniversity.edu/worldu.php

Because of this problem, we are regularly defamed by people like [Alan] Contreras [administrator of Oregon's "Office of Degree Authorization"], [John]Bear [distance education writer], and public-sector union activists in Canada. We get silly remarks like one in Wikipedia saying that we have been controversial in the “national” (i.e. US) media — when in fact all that happened in that context was that USA Today simply parroted Contreras’ ODA list. It later published a correction — but only in print, not on-line! The copy-cat process in the United States means that Contreras’ list is repeated by various state and other agencies, without any research into how valid or invalid it is to defame us insuch context.

We have supported PLAR for 36 years. We would like a little support back in turn.

Raymond Spencer Rodgers PhD"