Journal of Case Studies in Education
Dissertation Leadership Knowledge Transfer, Page 8
11.
Howard Richard Roberts, Ph.D., 1962,
Some Results in Life Testing Based on
Hypercensored Samples from an
Exponential Distribution
Weida’s eighth doctoral student
(McCall) continues the advisor genealogy of
this paper.
Chester Hayden McCall Jr.
Chester ‘Chet’ McCall was born in
Vandergrift Pennsylvania on August 6, 1927
and passed away on Thursday, March 3, 2011
in Los Angeles California. Park (2011) nicely
summarized his early career that brought him
to Pepperdine University.
After receiving his graduate degree in
statistics at The George Washington
University, McCall consulted for the
military and aerospace industry for 13
years working for Booz, Allen, and
Hamilton. While he loved the intense
interaction with other leaders in the
field, something was lacking. He
decided to shift gears and consult in
the transportation, education, and health care industries and was employed at CACI,
working with the Federal Transportation Department in Boston. While consulting in Los
Angeles, McCall saw an ad for a one-day session at Pepperdine University in institutional
management. He could not attend the information meeting so he sent a letter to the
program director, Dr. Terence Cannings, expressing interest in enrolling in the program.
To his surprise, a short while later, Cannings called his home requesting not an
application, but a copy of his resume. After interviewing with Olaf Tegner, who was then
the dean of GSEP [Graduate School of Education and Psychology] and Michele Stimac,
then associate dean of curriculum, McCall joined GSEP as an associate professor in
1982, teaching management and statistics. (p. 1)
Education
McCall received his A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. from the George Washington University in
1950, 1952, and 1957 respectively. The title of his 90-page master’s thesis was The linear
hypothesis, information, and the analysis of variance.
The title of his 140-page dissertation was
On sequential analysis as applied to the Poisson and Pearson Type III distributions.
A copy of
his dissertation’s title page can be seen near this paragraph. Frank Weida was McCall’s advisor
for both the master’s thesis and the doctoral dissertation (GWU, 2011; ProQuest, 2011). Other
Journal of Case Studies in Education
Dissertation Leadership Knowledge Transfer, Page 9
members of his doctoral committee were Florence Marie Mears, Everett Herschel Johnson, and
Solomon Kullback (Weida’s first doctoral student in 1934).
Research and Teaching
McCall’s biographical sketch in his dissertation lists his job history in 1957 as: graduate
assistant in statistics (1951-52), instructor in statistics (1952-56), Assistant professor of statistics
(1956-), consultant to the Army Logistics Research Project and Historical Records Project
(1956-), and consultant to Corn Industries Research Foundaton (1954-) (McCall, 1957, insert
before page i).
Park (2011) writes that Chet:
… was one of three faculty members involved in the [School of Education’s doctoral]
organizational leadership program, which was then called the institutional management
program. That year, they decided that a program director was needed, and the other two
faculty voted McCall to the position while he unsuspectingly left the room during a
meeting. McCall was the program director of organizational leadership for 13 years
(1982-1995), during which time he was a source of inspiration to a great number of
GSEP students. He is known for his unwillingness to settle for anything less than
academic excellence, his open heart, and a fierce support of students’ success. (p. 1)
Chet wrote several books including: Optimization Techniques for Computerized
Simulation Models
(1975), Sampling and Statistics Handbook for Research (1982), and
Understanding Statistical Methods: A Manual for Students and Data Analysts
(2000). Chet also
dabbled in the real estate education field in the 1960s and 1970s when he wrote classics like:
Complete guide to turning objections into real estate sales
(1968), How any real estate salesman
can turn himself into a selling giant
(1969), How to use showmanship to multiply success at
every step in selling
(1974), and the ERC Real Estate Sales Course (1978).
Doctoral Students
Chet had over a hundred dissertation students between 1984 and 2008 (Appendix B).
Many of Chet’s students have gone into higher education, have been on doctoral committees, and
have had their own dissertation students. Chet’s students who have become professors include
(in order of graduation) Drs. Kay Davis, Lois Blackmore, Farzin Madjidi, Donald Chick, Evelyn
Robertson, Leo Mallette, and Mark Lieberman; and probably others. Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr.
received half of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics and, in his autobiography for the Nobel
committee, stated:
I have greatly enjoyed my years as a teacher and research physicist and continue to do so.
The research collaborations and close friendships with my eighty-four graduate students
have given me especially great pleasure. I hope they have learned as much from me as I
have from them. (Nobel, 2011)
The author agrees with this symbiotic, bidirectional, learning relationship and he believes
that Chet would have had similar sentiments. Chet’s dissertation advisor genealogy is shown in
Appendix C.