Administrators Extern Program One of College's Most Successful Outreach Efforts

Although in the 1970s the irt was clearly the most widely known project in the college, it was by no means the only one of note at the time. The flood of baby boomers may have produced an oversupply of teachers, but schools were awash with young administrators eager for professional development opportunities. MSU had moved quickly to fill that void as early as the 1950s under the direction of the Department of Educational Administration’s first chairperson, Clyde Campbell. With Campbell’s support, professors Fred Vescolani and Byron Hansford had started the Administrators Extern Program. As the ranks of new administrators swelled through 1960s and into the 1970s, the program emerged as one of the most effective and successful outreach programs in the college’s history.

“There were just an awful lot of young administrators being hired the late 1960s and into the mid 1970s,” recalled Phil Cusick, who was a thirty-one-year-old assistant professor in 1970 when he first became involved with the extern program. “There was just a boom, and there were all these young people in their late 20s and early 30s being appointed principals.

“So the program was hugely popular. In Michigan, 70 percent of the school districts had fewer than 2,000 students. So we had all these schools in which people were somewhat isolated, and the chance for these young administrators to come together and meet others of their kind in similar situations was very helpful. Networks were created that are still strong today.”

 The program’s structure was straightforward. One weekend a month during the academic year the administrators and faculty would travel to one of three conference centers across the state at Tustin, Gull Lake, and Higgins Lake. The sessions would begin at noon on Saturday and end at noon on Sunday. After an opening luncheon, the educators would hear from a noted authority or national figure. Sometimes it was a politician or government official. Other times it was philosopher or social scientist. Then, participants would break into groups focused around particular jobs, such as elementary school principal, secondary school principal, business manager, superintendent, etc. Those sessions would focus on problems or issues of administration and would allow for free-ranging discussions and deliberations. The faculty involved in leading those discussions would relate the problems to theory and experience.

“It was a tremendous program and we had such a great time,” said Professor Emeritus Lou Romano, who first became part of the program in the 1960s. “We had people from all over the state, and we got to know them all and developed great relationships with those administrators.”

Many of the faculty in k-12 administration were involved the program over the years. Professors Archibald Shaw, John Suehr, and Sam Moore—as well as Cusick—all ran the program at one point or another in the 1970s and 1980s.

At the height of its popularity, the program had more than 500 administrators requiring as many as three extern groups operating at one time. With so many administrators, Cusick said that the diversity and camaraderie that developed was remarkable. In any given session, he said, there could be a Detroit administrator talking about issues with an administrator from a tiny Northern Michigan district.

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The program also spawned a support network for young female administrators. “They made it a habit of coming to the extern program,” Cusick said. “They had a network and this was part of that network.”

The program extended beyond the regular monthly meetings. Faculty also followed up with the administrators, visiting them at their schools. Cusick said that during his first year at MSU in 1970 he visited twenty-seven administrators all over Michigan. He would spend the day at the various schools, talking to the principals and learning about the student body. “It was great introduction to the state. I didn’t know where the U.P. [Upper Peninsula] was. So it was great for me.”

The Extern Program for Administrators was an outstanding example of the outreach emphasis that had been a guiding philosophy of the college from the days of Clifford Erickson. Everyone on the faculty in those days, Cusick said, was field oriented and attuned to the needs of practitioners. The staff who taught in the program also included officials from the state’s professional organizations. In fact, Hansford would go on to become executive secretary of the Chief State School Officers Association.

By the late 1970s, the decline in the student population began to reduce the numbers of new administrators, and participation in the extern program began to decline. Competition from other universities that started similar programs also took a toll. Although the program came to an end in the 1980s, it had helped generations of administrators over its thirty years of existence.