Tag: HUX

Happy Birthday, plus some updates

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Hi folks,

Apologies again for yet another long absence from this space. Work, family, and travel are all keeping me busy, and as the to-do lists grow the need to update the blog falls further and further down the priority queue. Nonetheless, it is my Grandpa Luckett’s birthday today (he would be 104 years old), so it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity to wish him a happy heavenly birthday!

In any case, as long as I am here, I might as well update you on some of the things happening in my personal and professional life, and hopefully soon I can get my act together and begin elaborating on some of these things:

Grandpa’s Letters update: Good news . . . we have a publisher lined up for Grandpa’s Letters! Last fall I received peer reviews for the manuscript, and my goal is to get my edits done by Memorial Day. I don’t know if it will come out next year at this point, but if the edits are accepted and the contract is finalized then it will probably be approximately a year or so before the book becomes available. More information when it’s ready, but I am looking forward to sharing the final product with the world!

Other writing and research projects: I have not been consistently updating my blog, but that doesn’t mean I am not writing. I have been working on some other things as well, including two journal articles and a book chapter for an upcoming prison education collection. I have already submitted drafts for two of those items, and the third should be finished this summer.

I am also collecting research materials and reading foundational literature for my next scholarly book project, which will explore the cultural history of punishment in Hawaii. As with my approach to horse stealing in Never Caught Twice, I like to tell chronologically sweeping stories: this book will cover the history of punishment on the islands from Polynesian settlement up through the recent reboot of Hawaii 5-0. I’ve been working on this since last summer, when I presented a paper on Queen Liliuokalani’s famous Iolani Palace quilt and its place within the praxis of carceral education at the Pacific Coast Branch meeting of the American Historical Association in Honolulu. I don’t have a timeline for completing it, but I am excited to continue working on it.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that part of the reason why I wanted to focus on Hawaii for my next book is that my family and I enjoy spending time there, but overall it is an appropriate area to combine some of my passions: prison education, cultural and legal history, my family’s attachment to Pearl Harbor and the community we share with other survivor families, and getting a sense of place when I write about something. I felt like I successfully accomplished the latter when I wrote about Nebraska, and I want to replicate that experience with Hawaii.

HUX Program: This probably warrants a separate post, but I have some good news/bad news about the HUX Program.

Let’s start with the bad: due to our university’s budget struggles and my program’s higher-than-average staffing requirements, we have decided to close the program after teaching out our remaining students. This was an incredibly difficult decision for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that as the inheritor of a program that’s over five decades old I am in the strange and sad position of closing it down a second (and most assuredly final) time. This fantastic program, which has functionally been a stand-alone department since its inception in 1974, has graduated over 5,700 students over the years. Moreover, the newest iteration of HUX—the prison education program—will graduate as many as 18 students by this summer. It has a deep, rich legacy that long predates my tenure as program director, and I wish that there was a scenario in which we could realistically keep it at CSUDH.

Well, that was pretty bleak . . . but there is light at the end of the tunnel. The good news is that the administration and I are working together to try to find a new institutional partner for some version of HUX, which I hope will not only continue to operate as a Humanities MA degree, but will help it grow and evolve in other ways that make humanities graduate education more vibrant, desirable, necessary, and urgent. In my mind, 2025 is nothing if not an indictment of the myopic mind . . . K-12 students and adult learners alike need to learn critical thinking, information literacy, civics, and a host of other soft skills that the humanities have historically excelled in teaching. Although I am passionate about prison education for its own sake, my ulterior motive is to help make my carceral classrooms a proving ground for what intelligent, capable, efficacious, and empowered students can accomplish under even the most stark of circumstances. Once these students show the world what they can do, I hope that the world will take notice of what they learned to get to that point.

Besides relocating the program, I am also hard at work doing something that I probably should have been doing a better job of all along: fundraising and finding scholarship opportunities for my students. When we relaunch the HUX program (or when someone else comes along to offer their own MA), I intend for every student to have access to a larger funding ecosystem that does not rely on one basket of money or another. I’ve already laid some of the groundwork, and there will definitely be opportunities for readers to contribute to this effort! More information will be posted here when it becomes available. But for now, please keep it in the back of your mind, and remember that 100,000 people donating ten dollars apiece raises the exact same amount of money as one person writing a check for a million bucks.

The MFT Program: I am almost done with my counseling degree! It has taken me twice as long as everyone else in my original cohort, but pursuing one graduate degree while running a graduate program elsewhere is no easy task. In terms of how I am going to use it, well . . . I already am! Counseling has given me much deeper insight into some of the problems my students face, both before and since their incarceration, and it provides perspective and training on how trauma-informed education can transform outcomes for our students. Some of my recent (yet to be published) scholarly work on prison education pedagogy reflects this new positioning.

Although I am not considering a path towards licensure as a therapist at this particular time, I have recently begun training for and learning about the world of professional mediation. In many ways, this path echoes and builds on the work I have already been doing for years as both a historian and as a prison education program director. However, the addition of my counseling background combines my penchant for systems thinking and creative problem solving with a therapist’s ability (as one of my professors at CSU East Bay would say) to “enter [the] client’s world.” To that end, I recently completed my training to become an officially licensed mediator in California, and this fall I will be teaching a course for the Negotiation, Conflict Resolution, and Peacekeeping (NCRP) program at CSUDH. Even though we academics are living in increasingly uncertain times, I hope that between my writing, my prison education work, and my growing experience in conflict resolution and mediation, I will be able to evolve and adapt as needed.

Travel updates: It has been a very busy travel year so far for the Luckett-Wall Clan! In April we visited London and Paris for spring break, and this week we just got back from a brief trip to Fairbanks, Alaska and Denali National Park (my forty-ninth state . . . look out, North Dakota, I’m saving the best for last!). We booked both trips using airline miles (I use The Points Guy and The Thrifty Traveler to get updates on credit card offers, conversion opportunities, etc. . . . pro-tip: if you have to pay for your own tuition for grad school, you can open a new card, charge your tuition to it, collect the bonus points, pay off the card, and then fly your family of three roundtrip to Alaska during the offseason for next to nothing 😁). Later this summer, we will be traveling to Newfoundland for a wedding, and in July we will be driving the Golden Circle around Iceland with the grandparents!

Anyway, they say the best part about traveling is going home, and that definitely rings true for us. We are very privileged and fortunate to be able to have so many adventures, but it is always lovely to come back home and see how excited our dogs are to see us. 🥰

Thanks for indulging me on this long, overdue post . . . and Happy Birthday, Grandpa! I will have some cookies in your honor.

A picture of our two dogs snuggling. Scruffy, on the left, is a shih tzu, while Eddie (on the right) is a dark gray miniature poodle.

Scruffy and Eddie, snuggling after a long day of doing nothing.

Introducing: The Five Sunset Rules

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Over the next two weeks, I will be publishing a series of blog posts entitled, “The Five Sunset Rules.” These rules are based on a presentation I recently made at the annual Association for Continuing Higher Education conference in Palm Springs. I argued that while there are many resources for administrators who are interested in creating new academic programs, there are very few available for those charged with closing them out. However, I believe that the story of our HUX Reboot offers an opportunity to grapple with this topic, since we were ultimately able to rescue and salvage many components of the Legacy HUX MA program and repurpose them for the new program. We also employ several faculty who taught for the older program (whom I refuse to refer to as “components” here), so it is indeed possible to sunset or teach-out a program while looking for ways to make the experience more positive or even constructive.

I hope that this blog series will serve as a useful and perhaps even inspiring resource for any folks out there who have been charged with closing a program. I can tell you that it is solitary and usually unrewarding work, but that does not mean it has to be lonely.
– Matt

As a rule, endings are harder than beginnings. We celebrate birthdays and mourn death days. Pet adoptions are Instagrammed, while trips to the “upstate farm” are not. Buying a new car is easier, safer, and much more fun than selling—or totaling—one. And as a homeowner who is now in his family’s second house, I definitely prefer the excitement of closing on a property over the nervous anxiety (nine months of it in our case) that goes into selling one.

Academic programs are no different. Opening a new one is a cause for celebration, but the process of closing one creates at best mixed feelings and at worst controversy. However, most non-endowed programs have their own life cycle: they are born, they grow, they mature, they educate, and in time students (or administrators) lose interest, which prompt their closure.

Consequently, there are a lot of important resources out there for administrators and faculty who are interested in creating a new program. There’s even an entire job classification dedicated to it: “academic program developer.” A recent web search of the term showed that, as of October 31, 2024, Indeed.com listed nearly 1000 job positions matching that title.

This is from a web search showing that there are 996 academic program developer jobs available.

Conversely, there is no such title reserved for those whose job it is to close, teach-out, or “sunset” an academic program. There are few, if any, resources on how to do this. It is dour, hidden, yet necessary work, because programs close all the time. And with traditional undergraduate enrollments expected to decline by as much as 10% within the next 13 years, there are going to be a lot more of them.

I recently presented about this at the ACHE Conference in Palm Springs. Entitled “The HUX Reboot: Teach-Outs, Redesigns, and Reflections on the Lifecycle of an Academic Program,” my talk listed some of the lessons I learned while teaching out our Legacy Master of Arts in Humanities (HUX) degree from 2016 through 2021. However, several other attendees at the conference seemed disappointed when I told them that I would be primarily discussing the program we taught out, as opposed to the successor program (HUX Reboot) that we created in its place.

Program sunsets and teach-outs are non-violent affairs, but as a ranching historian I can’t help but think of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men and his terrible, yet anodyne captive bolt pistol. Program closures might offer financial rewards for the administrators who order them, but for all those people who learned, taught, or worked in that program over the years, they represent a far greater—and incalculable—loss. Perhaps I’m being melodramatic, but as the person who sent the first email to our students in 2016 announcing Legacy HUX’s imminent closure, I can assure you that I felt the gravity of that decision with every shocked, angry, and sad reply I received in the hours that followed.

Of course, the HUX story has a happy ending, at least up through the present time.

Screencap from the movie No Country for Old Men
This scene in No Country for Old Men still give me the creeps, so it isn’t surprising that so few academics are willing to take a deep dive into the process of phasing out a program, even though it is a common task that needs to be done methodically and with great care.

My teach-out story has a feel-good, phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes quality to it, which makes it ideal for this conversation. After all, who wants to read about dying programs? HUX’s subsequent reinvention and relaunch gave it new life, but most programs are not as fortunate. They close and then they fade away, turning into paper ghosts that haunt old catalogs. Federal privacy laws and institutional retention requirements usually subsume whatever historical files remain, consigning them to industrial-sized shredders or deep storage vaults, like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. From a historiographical perspective, dead programs are extraordinarily difficult to research for the simple, yet understandable reason that no one wants to be reminded of them.

However, even though we’ve enjoyed a lot of success thus far with the Rebooted HUX, I don’t want to leave the Legacy program in the dust. For 42 years, HUX educated students throughout the world, training professors and prisoners, educating journalists and journeymen, and helping people of all ages and backgrounds achieve their goal of earning a Master’s degree. Numerous “Thesis of the Year” awards testify to this impressive and long track record.

HUX graduates lining up for commencement (circa 2006)
HUX graduates lining up for commencement (circa 2006). Photo by Dr. Jim Jeffers. HUX Digital Archives.

I have a lot of ideas for celebrating Legacy HUX and integrating its story and community into the HUX Reboot we launched just over a year ago. But I found myself wanting a lot more time to talk about the teach-out experience during my recent presentation, so given the dearth of resources on program closures I decided to turn it into some blog content.

In the next couple of weeks, I will be posting my “Five Rules for Teaching Out a Program.” If you are an administrator who is thinking about closing a program, or you somehow drew the short straw and are now tasked with leading the effort to phase it out, these posts are for you. My contention throughout both the Legacy HUX teach-out and the posts to follow is that a program closure can be an opportunity to learn, evolve, grow, and even celebrate.

Have you ever directed a teach-out? What are some things you learned while doing it? If it is something you may be directed to do in the months to come, what questions would you like to ask? Leave a comment below!

Today is Toro Giving Day

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Hi folks,

I’m sorry for not being more active on this space . . . it’s something I am working to rectify as my new program direction duties become a little less chaotic and my attention starts to swing back towards research and writing. So instead of promising to write things and not doing it, I am writing things and hoping to release them in multiple posts later on. My first series should be ready soon. A lot of my writing is going to cover prison education, the humanities, and graduate education in general, but I do plan on doing some “grandparent” stuff as well. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I wanted to let you all know about Toro Giving Day. My university, California State University Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), is one of the highest-ranked schools in the United States for social mobility. One of the best (and possibly few remaining) values for a student’s tuition buck these days, CSUDH offers a wide range of programs, from business and STEM majors to theater and history. The school itself was founded during the aftermath of the devastating Watts Riots, and ever since the school and its community have been hard at work educating waves of first-generation college students and creating opportunities and wealth in one of the Los Angeles basin’s most historically neglected regions.

Although I no longer live anywhere near campus (I moved to Sacramento six years ago), I still visit often, and I try to keep abreast of all that is happening down there. It gives me great pride to be a part of this community and to share in the University’s important mission.

CSUDH Homecoming Celebration.

Unfortunately, while schools like CSUDH offer a better value (and an extremely comparable education) for students when compared to almost all of the more expensive private schools, it is also far more susceptible to variations in the state budget. One of the sad ironies facing state colleges over the past few decades is that they have survived despite declining state support and rising tuition costs, while more prestigious schools like Stanford and UCLA (which, admittedly, I attended for my PhD) raise hundreds of millions of dollars for capital investments and donor-specific causes. As a result, CSUDH’s endowment is woefully inadequate to the University’s – and its students’ – needs, and with the looming budget shortfall in the State of California is seems likely that the people most likely to suffer are the students, faculty, and staff whose hard work is critical to making CSUDH such an amazing place. You can learn more about what our Toro friends are doing here: https://www.csudh.edu/.

Toro Giving Day offers us an opportunity to balance the equation just a little bit by supporting this dynamic and vital academic community. I often hear from my former students there, and they are doing all sorts of incredible things: practicing law, teaching, starting businesses, and even serving in state and local government. CSUDH is one of the reasons for their success, just as I would be ill-equipped to do what I am doing today if not for my baccalaureate education at Southeast Missouri State University.

Here is the link to the Toro Giving Day fundraising site: https://fundraise.givesmart.com/e/gmh5Zg?vid=14hyx2&bbeml=tp-Gsq3bzpvZki81XX5qlVK3g.jHPwo2xbjykeGcfd0uThgtQ.rojgD_ZAtIE6miqy9YwXpPQ.lnDsV2vW350KQYfWUJclfPg

Students completing their work inside a prison. Image courtesy of CDCR.

One last plug: if you feel the urge, you can ask that your money be donated directly to my program, HUX. In the “If you would like to specify your gift designation other than the Toro Fund, please list below” box, type “Humanities External (HUX) Program (8410).”

The HUX program has long been the only graduate program of its kind for helping incarcerated students build better lives for themselves and their families. To facilitate our mission of empowering system-impacted learners through a Master of Arts degree in the humanities, we have built partnerships with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and other private and public organizations in hopes of ensuring the program’s long-term success. After completing our program reboot last year, we began admitting students in Fall 2023, and we are preparing to admit our next cohort for the coming year.

Although our students are currently receiving support from other sources to cover their tuition, they (and we) still have many unmet needs. Specifically, any donations made to the program will go to support future student scholarships and grants, books and reference materials (such as college dictionaries) for prison libraries, digital resources and subscriptions, emergency grants for students, and other items. All donations are tax-deductible.

To learn more about our program, you can check out an article in the L.A. Times last year that explores who we are and what we’re all trying to accomplish: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-03/california-prisons-higher-education-masters-program-degrees-dominguez-hills

Anyway, thanks for reading, and for bearing with me all these years . . . talk soon!

Matt