Article: 'Tabula Rasa' celebrates a triumphant experiment at UMass.(Arts and Lifestyle)

Imagine a university where doctoral candidates are faculty, graduate students have no course requirements and a single dean makes the admissions decisions.

Sound like an educational disaster?

Many say it was was anything but.

Those unorthodox practices allowed the University of Massachusetts' School of Education to award more doctoral degrees to students of color from 1968 to 1978than all other colleges and universities in the nation combined.

"At the time, people thought we were a loosey-goosey bunch of educators," said Dwight Allen, the former UMass School of Education dean who launched the unorthodox reform initiative. "But we ...

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