John Sperling, University of Phoenix Founder, Dies at 93

 

 

 

I had the great good fortune to know Professor John Sperling, Cambridge don, when I was an undergraduate student at San Jose State University.  At that time, our campus was awash in great thinkers: visiting scholars Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts, and a host of other eminent faculty. I knew Sperling as a friend and mentor, and worked closely with John and my friends with the SJSU student government: Dick Miner, Peter Ellis and others, some of whom went on to work with Sperling at the Institute of Professional Development and later at the University of Phoenix. My fondest recollection of John was as the catalyst for our symbolic burial of an ugly yellow Ford Maverick on the first Earth Day.  John challenged us to define ourselves by what we would do to mark that day.  It has become one of the defining events of the first Earth Day.  But I also view John as the precursor of the current MOOC’s movement. John shook up the academic world with his revolutionary ideas about education.  John created immense controversy but he also spawned significant change. Regrettably, over the years, Phoenix has turned into a questionable “for profit” education mill, akin to Trump University, and now the subject of a federal lawsuit for defrauding military veterans.

From the Arizona Republic:

John Sperling, a virtual illiterate as a teenager, learned to love learning as a young adult and went on to revolutionize the business of college education and access to it by creating the for-profit University of Phoenix.

His death at 93 on Friday was announced Sunday on the website of Apollo Education Group, the University of Phoenix’s parent company. A cause of death was not listed.

Sperling, a billionaire with homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Phoenix, was remembered for his vision and his tenacity in support of adult education and numerous other causes that engaged his passion. Although he kept a low profile in Arizona, his philanthropy supported a variety of causes, from solar research to anti-aging efforts to the decriminalization of marijuana.

Sperling’s son, Apollo Group Board Chairman Peter Sperling, and company CEO Greg Cappelli said in the statement that “Dr. Sperling’s indomitable ideas and life’s work served as a catalyst for innovations widely accepted as having made higher education more accessible to adult students.”

Sperling founded the chain of schools in the 1970s and retired as executive chairman from its parent company in 2012. On his watch, the school grew from a small California operation to a publicly traded Fortune 500 company with 12,000 workers in Arizona. It established itself as the national leader in adult education and online classes.

Sperling’s schools often catered to older students wanting classes at more flexible hours. By tapping a demographic niche that traditional schools missed or didn’t want, Sperling elbowed the University of Phoenix into a lasting place in the often-staid world of higher education. But by the time he retired, the University of Phoenix had become a sometimes-controversial symbol of the rapid growth and excesses of for-profit universities.

The financial success of the University of Phoenix allowed Sperling to bankroll his social initiatives, from advocating medical marijuana to seeking to clone his dog.

“University of Phoenix is my proudest legacy,” Sperling said in a 2011 interview withThe Republic. “Knowing that over 1million staff, faculty and students have benefited in some way from the university is something I’m very proud of.”

“I think everyone will agree John Sperling really shook up the higher-education world,” said William Tierney, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and co-author of the book “New Players, Different Game: Understanding the Rise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities.”

“Sperling realized a need that the market had not thought about and the public sector frankly didn’t care about, and man, was he right,” Tierney said in a 2013 interview. “He really tapped into education as a needed commodity in a way that nobody else had done.”

A singular vision

Those who knew him well described Sperling as a man of generosity, curiosity, vision and grit.

“His focus was on bettering people’s lives,” said Jorge Klor de Alva, a former University of Phoenix president and Apollo Group senior vice president who knew Sperling for more than 40 years. “This university was focused on trying to help people succeed.”

Klor de Alva said Sperling, essentially shy, never backed down from a fight.

“He was always in pursuit of social-justice causes,” Klor de Alva said.

Grant Woods, a former Arizona attorney general and attorney who represented Apollo Education Group, said Sperling was ahead of his time with his views on many topics, including treatment for drug offenders, instead of incarceration, and the benefits of telemedicine.

“Professionally I was impressed with how visionary he was,” Woods said. “He was willing to be controversial, to fight the fights that most people wouldn’t fight. He was never afraid to put his money and his prestige behind them.”

Sperling invested heavily into causes including plant genetics and seawater agriculture, anti-aging medicine and drug decriminalization as opposed to treatment. He participated in efforts with fellow billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis to sponsor and pass citizen-backed initiatives in 17 states focusing on treatment and education, as opposed to jail time, for non-violent offenders, while decriminalizing marijuana, especially for medical purposes.

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Bay area resident, said in a statement: “John Sperling’s passion for education changed America. By improving access to higher education for thousands of non-traditional students, he created a movement and empowered a generation of working adults with the tools needed to provide a better quality of life for their families. His life story inspires us to see — and seize — opportunities.”

Humble beginnings

Sperling achieved his perch atop for-profit education after escaping a humble, sickly and unhappy childhood.

In his autobiography, “Rebel With a Cause,” Sperling wrote that he was the youngest of five children. He was born in a log cabin in Missouri and raised in a home that had a coal-burning stove and an outhouse. He said his mother was “possessively loving” and described his father as a “classic ne’er-do-well” who often beat him.

“I learned nothing from my childhood except that it’s a mean world out there, and you’ve got to bite and scratch to get by,” he told Fast Company in a 2003 interview.

Sperling joined the Merchant Marine in 1939, and one of his ship’s engineers befriended him, teaching Sperling to read. Sperling was spellbound by classics such as “Notes from the Underground” and “The Great Gatsby,” fueling a lifelong love of literature and poetry.

After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Sperling earned an undergraduate degree from Reed College on the G.I. Bill. He then attended the University of California-Berkeley, where he was awarded a fellowship to study at King’s College at the University of Cambridge. He earned his doctorate in 18th-century English mercantile history in 1955.

Starting in 1960, Sperling served for 12 years as a tenured professor of history at San Jose State University.

There, Sperling made a name as a union activist.

Popular program

While still teaching in San Jose, in 1974 Sperling won a government contract to develop coursework for teachers and police officers who worked with at-risk children.

According to New Yorker magazine, top administrators at San Jose State balked at the program. The University of San Francisco was more receptive, so he launched it there.

The program proved so popular that Sperling, working with business partners, created an adult-education program for 2,500 students with classes available at Bay Area colleges. It became known as the Institute for Professional Development and offered bachelor’s and master’s degrees for its students.

“He got this thing going, and it was making money. It was running a surplus,” said David Breneman, a University of Virginia professor who teaches the economics of education. “The regional accrediting body in California came down on him like a ton of bricks. They didn’t like anything he was doing.”

Sperling responded in 1976 by moving the IPD and renaming it after its new home: the University of Phoenix. Within three years, it gained grudging accreditation in Arizona.

Sperling told The Republic that Arizona attracted him because the state “had never gotten around to writing any regulations.”

With his background in economics, Sperling draped his university in pragmatic cost-consciousness. Instructors were drawn from the working world. Accountants, for example, taught accounting rather than decorated academics.

Students presumably benefited from the instructors’ real-world experience; Sperling and the students gained from the lower faculty salaries that went with it.

In 1981, Sperling formed the Apollo Group, the parent company of the university, and bought out one of his partners. Seven years later, Sperling bought out another partner to take full control of Apollo.

As the university fell under his full control, it also began developing distance-learning classes, a forerunner to the online courses that would help remake adult education.

For years, the University of Phoenix grew steadily, largely on the strength of an older student body looking to start new careers. At a time when traditional schools made students build schedules around faculty, Sperling built his no-frills school around the students.

In December 1994, the Apollo Group joined the Nasdaq Stock Market as a publicly traded company. At the time, it had 28,000 students. In some ways, it was a final vindication of Sperling’s unique approach to higher education. But some say it also put the school on a new path that inevitably led to a shift in priorities.

“They got pushed by Wall Street,” said Breneman, who co-edited the book “Earnings from Learning: The Rise of For-Profit Universities.” “They got into this rat race of having to try to grow 10, 20, 30percent every year, so they started dipping down into younger students.”

By 2000, enrollment in the Apollo Group’s holdings reached 100,000. Three years later, it was 200,000. By 2010, enrollment had mushroomed to 600,000.

At that point, more than 80 percent of the university’s revenue source was federally backed student loans. In 2008, for example, it collected more than $3billion in federal financial aid.

That attracted scrutiny from Washington. On Capitol Hill, the university and its many for-profit competitors came under fire for bringing in too many students ill-prepared for college who, if they graduated at all, found themselves saddled with high debt and poor job prospects. The high dropout rates were fueled, some said, by recruiters whose pay was effectively tied to enrollment, which would violate federal law.

In 2009, the Apollo Group settled a whistle-blower lawsuit against the university for nearly $80million to dispense with claims of recruiting commissions.

A two-year Senate investigation pointed out in 2012 that an online degree from the University of Phoenix cost six times more than a comparable degree from the Maricopa Community College system and that Sperling was paid $8.6million in 2009, 13 times more than the president of the University of Arizona.

“When the University of Phoenix was started in 1976, it pioneered an entirely new model of learning,” the report concluded. “That model revolutionized thinking about how to provide opportunities for higher education to underserved and non-traditional students. Yet in the 2000s, Apollo appears to have made critical decisions that prioritized financial success over student success.”

During the probe, Washington tightened lending rules to hold schools accountable for the degrees their students pursued, and the university made its own adjustments, though Sperling, with characteristic bluntness, disagreed.

“We don’t agree with the new regulations. We think they are stupid,” he told The Republic in 2011.

Operating under tighter regulations, an uncertain economy and intense competition from other for-profit schools and public universities that had learned from Sperling’s model, the University of Phoenix contracted. It has cut its payrolls by thousands, and degreed enrollment in May was 242,000.

Sperling left as CEO of the Apollo Group in 2001 and retired as executive chairman of the company’s board of directors in December 2012.

Variety of causes

In 1996, Sperling gained attention as a financial backer of medical marijuana in Arizona, something he favored during his recovery from prostate cancer in the late 1970s.

In 2000, he funded a biotech company to help clone pets. His dog Missy died in 2002 without success in cloning her. Four years later, the company was shuttered.

Between 1997 and 2013, Sperling made more than $700,000 in political contributions, according to federal records. Overwhelmingly, but not totally, he gave to Democrats. He wrote several books, some on education and one outlining his liberal views on political demographics.

Although he was often at odds with the establishment, most say Sperling left a mark on higher education.

“I think we need to give credit where credit is due,” Tierney said. “There are a lot of others out there, and they didn’t become the University of Phoenix. He had an American kind of can-do spirit.”

Sperling is survived by his longtime companion, Joan Hawthorne; his former wife, Virginia Sperling; his son, Peter; his daughter-in-law, Stephanie; and his two grandchildren, Max and Eve.

Strategic Inflection Point: iTunes University Transforming The Ivory Tower Whether We Like It Or Not

Seemingly unrelated disruptive events mark a strategic

inflection point for education, well beyond MOOC’s

Gigabit Fiber to the Home (FTTH)

Much noise is being made about Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC‘s), and the rise of organizations like The Khan Academy and Silicon Valley startup Coursera.  Universities, including this one, are scrambling to develop strategies to respond. While institutions like M.I.T. and Harvard have already embraced open, free education, smaller institutions see a catastrophe on their horizons.  IMHO, broader and deeper disruptive change is already occurring in all education, not only higher education.  The MOOC’s movement is but a small piece of the emerging new paradigm for education. A few months ago I was struck by the visionary predictions of Dave Evans, Chief Futurist, at Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley. Evans very intelligently strings together a vision of education well beyond the current discussion among educators. In Evans future, MOOC’s themselves will be completely obsolete. Google’s strategic initiative to deploy Gigabit fiber optic connections to the home, and to bring Internet connectivity to the farthest corners of the globe may have a greater impact.  I have written on this:

Read more: How Gigabit fiber to the home will transform education way beyond MOOC’s

Precursor event: John Sperling, the “new college” movement, and

the University of Phoenix.

John Sperling, Cambridge don, founder of San Jose State University‘s “New College“, and founder of The University of Phoenix

My university education included the experience of knowing and working with Dr. John Sperling. The California State University system was in its golden period in those days, which is why Sperling was attracted to teaching in northern California at SJSU. As a member of the student government at SJSU, we worked closely with John. One of my fondest memories is of John stimulating students to think about the first Earth Day, which led us to the now legendary burial of a Ford Maverick on the university commons. My friend and student body president, Dick Miner went on to Harvard, and later rejoined John.  I was a student in the nationally acclaimed Speech-Communication program, but my hometown roommate was a member of Sperling’s “New College.”  Sperling had created a completely unorthodox educational program for students who could not otherwise meet the university’s admission requirements. Sperling fostered all kinds of cool and innovative things at New College, and faculty from all disciplines fell all over themselves to be a part of it. Before long, “new colleges” were popping up all over North America. The newest campus of the University of California, at Santa Cruz also adopted many of John’s ideas, and the two campuses cross-fertilized each other. It was a heady time in higher education.  Before long Sperling came up with the idea of a “massively open” for profit educational institution, well before the Internet. The University of Phoenix has had a chequered history, with equal amounts of scathing criticism and high praise. It has now embraced the online world as well. John is now a retired Billionaire who  lives very reclusively in San Francisco.  But it dawns on me that the current strategic inflection point in education actually began with John and the “New College” movement at San Jose State.  It took the Internet to push it into orbit, and now the Internet is taking it well beyond the orbit of Massively Open Online Courses, and into interstellar educational space.

 

Academic establishment rearranging Titanic’s deck chairs.

Despite Sperling’s innovations 40 years ago,  all of the signs  on the road, the flow of money to this change, and technological advances, I sense that many university academics are still carrying on as if nothing has changed.  This is classic strategic inflection point behavior. Andy Grove described a strategic inflection point as a hiker on a trail, who suddenly realizes he is lost, but has no idea when or exactly where he became lost. I see academics pursuing their traditional behaviors, and worst of all, their petty politics of ego and power instead of embracing the changes, as if they were Andy Grove’s hikers who have not yet realized they are lost.  Some academics characterize themselves as agents of educational change, but in actuality they are merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. A few months ago, someone I know had sat through a meeting with UBC President Toope, and came away with the impression that Toope was resisting, and not at all onboard with the coming changes.  I read this recent article below by Toope with some interest, as it seems that he may have rethought his position, a hopeful sign. But we are still a very long way from iTunes University.

Universities must give up control: UBC president

STEPHEN TOOPE

Contributed to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Oct. 24 2013, 7:00 AM EDT

The common denominator, the phrase associated with every recommendation for change in universities, is the necessity for radical transformation. Whether it’s government asking us to ‘tweak’ our research agenda to speed up commercialization; industry questioning our ability to meet the need for skilled workers; grantors placing geographical limits on eligibility for funding; or students wondering why our entire course calendar and library system aren’t online yet; we are getting it from all sides.

MORE RELATED TO THIS STORY

We do need to change, we need to change a lot, and we need to change fast. But “vital change’ is not the same as radical transformation. ‘Radical’ means ‘root.’ It means changing in essence. And if we do that – and some of us are already making moves in that direction – we’ve lost.

I have one change driver that you can use as a lens to look at all change drivers; and one criterion you can use to evaluate every next step. The common denominator of every driver of change, from digitization to climate change to global mobility, is direct experience. Universities arose out of an ecclesiastical culture that presumed a responsibility for mediating its followers’ experience of the sacred. That paternalistic dynamic stayed with us even after our transition to secular institutions, and has perpetuated that ‘ivory tower’ reputation among those we’re meant to educate and serve that persists to the present day.

Other sectors have led the way for us, demonstrating both what to do and what not to do. The music industry now has its iTunes, and the film and video industry, its Netflix. In both cases, the end user has access to all available content at any time and in any way she wants it. The business model is both economical for the user and profitable for the owner.

The proprietary, exclusionary control of content is obsolete. Every change, from the ones that are upon us to the ones we can’t see coming, is going to be driven by people’s desire for ever more direct experience.

It is a university’s job to lower barriers that limit or disallow direct experience. I’m talking about the invisible barriers between individuals of different backgrounds, cultures, and orientations on our campuses; I’m talking about the borderlines we’ve drawn between our campuses and the communities we serve; the boundaries between disciplines, fields, and faculties, and those between our institutions that exist because of geographical distance or philosophical difference or market share competition.

Why are our undergrad students left to make so many of the connections themselves? To do the integrating and synthesizing? Why do young professors with joint appointments fear they won’t get tenure? Why do so many of our funders limit the grants and scholarships available to international scholars, and so limit the nature of study and research partnerships? Why do so many of our staff see themselves as ‘supportive of’ rather than ‘integral to’ our mission and vision?

I’m also talking about the barriers – from financial to political – that keep too many local students and scholars homebound and too many would-be international students and scholars locked out. We claim to be graduating global citizens, but how many of them have traveled? How many have had a transformative encounter with someone whose views and beliefs differed markedly from their own? How many, actually, have left our campuses after four years without ever having thought seriously about how their fields of study – whether music or mathematics or marine biology – relate to the fundamental challenges of our day?

I will say that universities’ failure so far to fully democratize access to direct experience – whether it be information or intercultural encounters – is based in fear. Our fear – of losing control. Of being irrevocably and detrimentally altered.

So what do we do? Is there one magic criterion by which every decision in the difficult decade to come may be safely gauged? I believe there is …Be yourself.

Universities have a mission that is unique in all the world: to serve the world, through the preservation and dissemination of knowledge, and the creation of new knowledge. That is our task, and our task alone. Our survival rests in holding to the unique and necessary role we carved out for ourselves 800 years ago. Our challenge lies in the fact that we are no longer optimally organized to fulfill it.

We’re nation-based, and our national systems do not fully support our need for mobility. The classrooms in our older buildings are physically structured for a hierarchical and passive dynamic of pedagogy, and don’t reflect what we now know about how people best learn. Our most important funding mechanisms are inwardly focused. And we are often preoccupied with superficial measures of reputation, short-sighted research funding, and commercialization over sustainability.

We have forgotten the value of the core service we provide. Four years ago, UBC launched the most ambitious fundraising and alumni engagement campaign in Canadian history, with parallel goals of raising $1.5-billion and engaging 50,000 alumni annually in the day-to-day life of the university. With two years still to go, we’re already approaching both targets, and I believe it is because we are better serving our alumni and because we have opened up meaningful opportunities forthem to serve.

Show – don’t tell, show – your political leaders of every stripe the economic long view, and your place in strengthening it. Offer your faculty members incentives for crossing barriers of discipline and geography. Reward your staff for the ways they contribute to sustainability, intercultural understanding, international engagement. Expand free access to course content. Add online components to your face-to-face classes, and vice versa.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Know yourself. Know your value. Let your barriers down and invite in the messiness of transformation. Change structurally if you must, but don’t change radically; keep your medieval roots.

My New “In Focus” Profile

Read more: In Focus.

In Focus posted October 8 2013

In Focus | David Mayes

David Mayes is an advocate for change. However, he is not just someone who shouts slogans from the sidelines, but has actually rolled up his sleeves to see change happen. Whether it is working with coalitions to influence global policies or teaching the next generation, David has had a chance to make a difference for the future. He currently teaches Entrepreneurship at UBCO where he has brought his experiences working in Silicon Valley to bear. He is known for being down to earth, easy to talk to and very friendly. Today David Mayes is In Focus.

Where do you work? 
Faculty of Management, University of British Columbia

How do people connect with you on Linkedin? 
ca.linkedin.com/in/mayo615

What is your Twitter account? 
@mayo615

What do you always find yourself saying? 
The harder I work, the luckier I get

If you could spend one whole day with anyone in the world who is currently alive, who would you select? 
Vandana Shiva, Indian environmentalist

If you were to receive any existing public award, what award would you like to win? 
Online News Association Award for Investigative Journalism

If you could spend a day with any historical figure, who would you choose? 
George Orwell

Who inspires you? 
David Suzuki, a kindred spirit

What are 3 things on your bucket list? 
Flying a P-51 Mustang, spending serious time in India, and sailing the Pacific Cup race from San Francisco to Hawaii.

If you had an enormous yacht, what would you name it? 
Existentialship

If you could foresee a single day of your future in its entirety, what date would you select? 
Any Saturday

What are you passionate about? 
Gaia, economic empowerment for those needing “a hand up” not a “hand out”, teaching and learning

What has been your favourite day of your life, up to this point? 
With my wife Isabelle in her birthplace, the village of Valensole in Haute Provence.

What has been your proudest accomplishment? 
Being thrust into the extraordinary role of leading a coalition of high tech execs from Compaq/HP, Intel and Microsoft to create a global standard for broadband Internet access, with the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva. Whew!

If you were trapped in an elevator with several wealthy investors from any field, which field would you want them to be experts in? What would say to them/talk about? 
I would want the investors to be Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB), Steve Saltzman of Intel Capital, Mike Satterfield of Yaletown Ventures, and Rolf Dekleer of Growthworks Capital, Ltd. All of these guys are experts in clean technologies, and renewable energy.

I would want to talk with them about pursuing BIG IDEAS, cultivating private equity venture capital ideas that will solve our major global problems, not more Web apps.

Where is your favourite place to dine in Kelowna? 
Bouchon

What is your favourite activity in Kelowna? 
Myra Canyon

Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?
My goal in ten years or less is to retire to a modest villa in Haute Provence near my wife’s birthplace, joining other well-known American expats in the south of France, taking pot shots at American politics, and climate change deniers.

What are your favorite books or the top books that have most influenced your life?
Many of Paul Theroux’s travel books fueled my love of foreign travel. Michael Lewis is a big favorite, author of Moneyball, and many important books on the financial meltdown. Lewis’ first book, Liar’s Poker, about his experience in the mortgage securities business at Solomon Brothers in London in the mid 1980’s, reads like Animal House, and was a true to life early warning of the financial catastrophe to come twenty years later. John Le Carre’s spy novels.

What do you value most in people? Friends?
Personal integrity, trustworthiness, and a devious sense of humor to compliment my own.

Tell us about a defining moment in your life.
At university one day, sitting on the grass on the commons, I realized that I no longer cared what other people thought about me. I cared only about what I thought. This was a major break with my adolescence, and defining moment that some people never achieve.

What makes you successful? Tell us about it.
People skills. I think interpersonal communication and public speaking skills, essentially selling myself, are the most important factors in my success. My best example of this, is of receiving a call from a friend to help his company with an Internet connectivity idea. Simply through my networking and people skills, it quickly mushroomed into a global consortium of high tech companies that solved the problem. That said, I am probably like many in business who have effective people skills, but are also a bit introverted.

If I could change 1 thing about Kelowna, it would be: 
I would like to change the utter vacuum and absence of a comprehensive vision for the economic future of Kelowna. Despite years of frustrating community meetings and planning the community has failed to articulate an economic vision for itself beyond gated communities and minimum wage seasonal tourism jobs. Some in the community seem to prefer doing nothing at all.

What do you think makes Kelowna great? 
The geography here, its challenges, limitations and its unrealized potential.

My choice for the Kelowna In Focus spotlight is: 
Keith Culver, Director of the Okanagan Sustainability Institute at UBC Okanagan

Some general comments I would like to share are:
I parachuted into the Okanagan a few years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area. It has been an eye opening adjustment.

In Focus is our gift to the community. A way for us to help show our recognition for the people, businesses and organizations that help make our city great. The team at WelcometoKelowna.com is passionate about this community and the people that make it amazing. We want to show our friends, neighbours, family and colleagues that we notice them and the fabulous things that they do. We encourage you to leave your comments and words of support below, and submit your own nomination by clicking HERE. You are also welcome to submit a form of your own by clicking HERE. Thank you, Kelowna!