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Pleasures Are Like Poppies Spread
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Robert Lewis Stevenson
On July 8, 2024, we welcomed Cohort 1 for California State University Channel Islands’ first, stand-alone doctoral degree—the Doctorate for Educational Leadership for Equity & Justice (DELEJ)—for a three-year journey leading to the EdD degree. This letter, in part, was my welcome to our 27 new Dolphins.
I'm going to begin with a story. If you go to our website, you will see archived, close to 40 essays that I've written in my first two years as Dean of our School of Education. I have this unusual opportunity to teach educational leadership, to research it, as I am an active scholar, and to engage in it every day. Those essays chronicle my journey.
If you read some of the essays, you will see that I understand the complexities of what it means to lead in not just this space, but also the PK-12 system from where I came and in which I spent many years.
And I'm going to share with you a little story.
Does anyone know what this mask is? I'll pass it around for you to see it. [See photo above for a bronze of the doctor in his 17th century plague mask and protective clothing.]
This mask is from Scotland. It is a replica of a leather mask that a plague doctor wore in the 17th century in Edinburgh. His name was Gordon Rae. He was the second plague doctor because the first one died since he wasn't properly protected.
So, the purpose of wearing a mask like that, which actually was leather, along with the fact that it looks like something straight out of Scream or Halloween, was to protect him from what we knew in the 17th century as the miasma.
Back then, we believed that the miasma was what caused illness. Miasma is something in the air, a putrid smell, something that's uncomfortable. The idea was that to stay alive, Dr. Rae needed to protect himself when he would meet with plague patients, because the likelihood was one was probably going to die if one caught the plague.
The purpose of the long, ominous beak was that it would be filled with spices and rose petals, both to help mask some of the smells where he was working, but also to protect him from disease.
This huge, full-body outfit that he wore was not too different from what we have seen in the 21st century as medical professionals have dealt with our own plague, COVID 19.
If you come to my office, I have a collection of masks from all over the world. A walk-through tells you something about who I am: that I research leadership on the global stage. I have the privilege of working with groups of scholars and rising scholars, often doctoral students, on five continents. I have the privilege of interviewing leaders in many countries.
Most importantly, I have a strong commitment to the EdD. I have led doctoral education in the State of California for over 20 years, and it is my privilege to welcome all of you and to have you here because you are a dream come true, really, for all of us.
Why did I show you the plague mask? It is an invitation to you to consider how you will spend these next three years with us. In doctoral education, there are a lot of ways to do this work. You might get a research article from your professor, and you might be reading it and you'll notice at the end there are perhaps dozens of citations. That's an invitation for you to read: read further, read deeper, read broader.
Whenever I go to any country where I'm working, I seek to learn something about the context in which I find myself. You had an opportunity to meet Dr. Raudel J. Banuelos Jr. this morning when he was sharing with you about our Chumash heritage in this region—that we stand on sacred ground, unceded land, with a sacred mountain right outside the door of the library. And that is a reminder that we stand on the shoulders of great people and we may not even know who they are.
I was in Scotland to present at an international conference, the British Educational Leadership, Management & Administration Society (BELMAS). There were two research papers that I presented this year, but what I want to highlight is the one with Dr. Jill Perry. She serves as the Executive Director of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED).
We launched the study in Fall 2023 to look at the experiences of scholar practitioners, people like yourselves, who are part of CPED-influenced doctoral programs. And we wanted to understand what the experiences were of our students when they were both doctoral students and now that they are in the field, post-graduation, as scholarly practitioners.
How does the principle of justice and equity and ethics drive what they do every day?
How does the principle of theory and practice drive their thinking, influence their decisions, and inform how they lead their organizations?
There are four other principles besides those two that have served as the foundation of the program in which you will be engaging.
This design was very deliberate, very thoughtful, and fully research based. And we feel privileged to be able to say that not only are these principles a part of the design, but we actually have empirical evidence that suggests to us that we know this works—that we have 1000s of leaders throughout the United States and beyond who have participated in CPED- influenced doctoral programs that have made a difference not only in their lives, but in the lives of countless others.
And so, I invite you, as you engage in this journey with us, that you consider that there are many different directions this can take you and that we are here to help you carve that path.
Welcome, and best wishes during this first week together.
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In Scottish poet, Robert Burns’ poem, Tam o’Shanter, he wrote,
But pleasures are like poppies spread
You seize the flower it’s bloom is shed
We have, in our lives, moments where the joy is so profound that it can be as contagious as a plague. In juxtaposing the darkness we have all endured through the worldwide contagion with the prospect of future happiness with our new doctoral students, we see that the line between the dark of a plague and the light of blooming flowers is merely two sides of the same coin.
As we complete our summer and move into the fall and winter of 2024, we have the opportunity to reflect each day on how we find the poppies in our midst more than the plague, and we can pick the golden blossoms with abandon.
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I offer my sincere thanks to the many colleagues who made this doctoral dream possible and who are too numerous to list fully. Here are but a few in the CSUCI community of the willing and committed who worked with us:
Two years ago, our President, Richard Yao, and our Provost, Mitch Avila, trusted me to take the helm and to make the somewhat-Quixotic dream a reality. Behind the scenes, I knew I could always count on the support of and advocacy from the President’s Chief of Staff, Dr. Kaia Tollefson. Dr. Chuck Weis, an educational leader’s leader, spent countless hours in Summer 2022 with me establishing a team of stunning faculty leaders to do the heavy lift and to drive the program development. Drs. Tiina Itkonen and Annie White jumped on board right away, and by December 2022, we had secured our new Director, Dr. Andrea Bingham. On the journey, Lyzette Cornejo joined us as our Administrative Support Coordinator and she supported us in countless ways. Meanwhile, the labyrinth one must engage with, requires leadership beyond the School of Education, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Drs. Lina Neto and Jessica Lavariega Monforti who tirelessly moved mountains so that we could obtain our approvals with CSUCI, our Chancellor’s Office, and our accreditors, WSCUC.
For many fields of poppies,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth C. Orozco Reilly
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