Precise, critical thinkers have the ability to spot disconnects, anomalies, incongruities, etc., which act like bright yellow caution-signs that say, “Oh, oh, be careful; there’s something not quite right here.” It is this ability, and this ability alone, that makes a person enough of a critical thinker to avoid deception. In my short, one-month long association with the University of Phoenix, such disconnects popped up almost everywhere I looked, and when I began to question them, a University of Phoenix facilitator quickly severed the relationship, which was not a great tragedy or disappointment since as I verified the problems behind the disconnects, I would have severed it myself.

Until I began looking into a possible adjunct professorship at the University of Phoenix, all I knew about it was what can be gathered from watching its television commercials, and I must admit, I began looking into this possibility with complete naiveté. Even the most skeptical among us, it appears, don’t like distrusting everyone we meet. So I made no attempt to talk to anyone who had been associated with u-op or look for adverse comments about it on the Internet. I merely took it at face value.

The u-op, as you may or not know, is a private, profit making corporation that claims to sell adult education. Thus it passes itself off as an educational institution, and its people like to contrast it to “the traditional university.” U-op people are led to believe that the company has developed a unique teaching method, some amorphous combination of the traditional methods of discussion and group collaborative learning, neither of which is very new either separately or in combination. U-op people are also led to believe that the “traditional university” is somehow bound to the use of only one teaching method, although exactly what that teaching method is was never explicitly defined, but nevertheless different from the u-op’s unique one.

Of course, anyone with any long-term association with so-called “traditional” universities knows that both of these claims are pure hogwash. Furthermore, anyone with years of experience teaching students in university classrooms knows that there is no one teaching method that fits all subjects, all students, and all circumstances, and there will never be one such method. Teaching methods cannot be reduced to one size fits all ready-to-wear, and whenever this reduction is tried, the results in education are just like those in couture—nothing really fits anyone.

Oddly enough, this point is also made in one of the reading assignments prospective faculty members must read. “But the third and perhaps most serious barrier to taking learning seriously lies in our failure to take individual differences seriously,” (Cross, K. Patricia, “What Do We Know About Students' Learning, and How Do We Know It?”, Innovative Higher Education, Vol. 23, No. 4, Summer 1999).

I tried to point this out to my poorly educated facilitator (an undergraduate degree in marketing from the University of Arkansas and a master's degree in management from Webster University) who was trying to ready me for a teaching assignment. When I showed her a copy of “The Master Teacher and the Art of Teaching” (Coleman, John E., Pitman Publishing Corp., 1967) which describes about a dozen teaching techniques, all of which were acclaimed at one time or another, and all of which even today have a place in a master teacher’s repertory, she brushed me off with a comment that indicated that she was neither familiar with any of these methods nor cared to be.

No matter what a private, for-profit corporation or any other type of organization claims, it cannot even approach the status of an educational institution unless is has a unwavering commitment to the truth. Any entity that pretends to have the alpha and omega teaching method and that pretends that there is such a thing as “the traditional university” that is somehow handicapped by an adherence to some “traditional” teaching method is attempting to propagate a lie. This lie characterizes the University of Phoenix, which is just another ordinary American company selling products of dubious quality to unwary consumers who are desperately trying to better their conditions in life. As such it is not only not an educational institution but is an out-and-out immoral fraud.

©2007 John Kozy, Jr.