Pubdate: Tue, 26 Aug 2014
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Contact:  2014 Los Angeles Times
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Pubdate: 26 Aug 2014
Author: Elaine Woo
Page: AA1

ENTREPRENEUR FOUNDED UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX

JOHN SPERLING, 1921-2014

John G. Sperling, a poor boy from the Missouri Ozarks who survived a 
cruel childhood to become a college professor and a billionaire with 
an idea for a university that launched a revolution in higher 
education, has died. He was 93.

Sperling, the self-described "unintentional entrepreneur" who founded 
the for-profit behemoth University of Phoenix, died Friday of 
complications following an infection at Marin General Hospital in 
Greenbrae, Calif., said former University of Phoenix President Jorge 
Klor de Alva. Sperling had homes in the Bay Area and Arizona.

Sperling was a tenured professor at San Jose State University in 1972 
when he hit on the idea of an alternative institution for adult 
learners whose needs were not being met by traditional colleges and 
universities.

He formally founded University of Phoenix in the mid-1970s after 
moving to Arizona and built the business into one of the world's 
largest private higher education systems.

It now has an enrollment of 241,000 students, many of them virtual 
learners who never step inside a classroom.

"He had an enormous impact," said professor William G. Tierney, an 
expert on forprofit education who co-directs USC's Pullias Center for 
Higher Education. "What he realized was there were working adults who 
wanted to take classes at a convenient time and location and who were 
willing to pay money for it.... As an idea, it was really quite remarkable."

Although profit-making schools had existed for 100 years, mainly for 
people seeking to learn a trade, Sperling greatly expanded the 
concept, creating a degree-granting institution that aimed for the 
breadth of any conventional university. His efforts met with ridicule 
from academics and state regulators who said it was unethical to make 
a profit off students and derided him for lowering standards for a diploma.

Critics dubbed Sperling's enterprise "McUniversity."

On the verge of bankruptcy several times in the early years, Sperling 
persevered because, he insisted, profits were the ultimate measure of 
education success.

"For years the troops would say, 'Sperling, are you in this to 
improve education or make money?' And I had a mantra: If we don't 
make money, we won't improve education. You understand that? You have 
to have money to survive," he told the Arizona Republic in 2000.

Nearly 40 years later, it still has many detractors, including 
government officials concerned about low graduation rates and other 
high student loan default rates. But even critics agree that Sperling 
's vision transformed higher education, which has adopted many of his 
innovative ideas, particularly distance learning. The for-profit 
sector now comprises 11% of higher education in the U.S., Tierney said.

Sperling was also an iconoclast outside the education sphere.

His wealth enabled him to pursue off beat causes, from financing 
initiatives to decriminalize marijuana use to research that could 
extend human life. He even backed a company to clone pets, eventually 
succeeding at replicating his beloved dog, Missy.

"He was a man who was not afraid of anything but boredom," said Klor 
de Alva, who knew Sperling for more than 40 years.

One of six children, John Glen Sperling was born on Jan. 9, 1921, in 
a log cabin in Willow Springs, Mo.

His childhood was an ordeal. When he was 7 he developed pneumonia and 
required surgery to drain his lung. The doctors operated on him using 
only a local anesthetic, rendering him so weak he was in bed for a year.

He said his mother was the most important person in his life, while 
describing his father as a failed farmer who regularly beat him. When 
Sperling was about 10 he warned his father that if he ever hit him 
again he would kill him in his sleep. The beatings stopped.

When he was 15, his father died. Sperling called that day "the 
happiest day of my life" in his memoir, "Rebel With a Cause" (2000).

He graduated from high school unable to read, finding out much later 
that he was dyslexic. His real education began when he joined the 
merchant marine and was introduced to literature by fellow sailors, 
who lent him works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dostoevski as well as 
political tracts by Marx. He embraced socialism.

After serving in the Army Air Forces, he earned a bachelor's degree 
from Oregon's Reed College in 1948. He received a master's in 
psychology from UC Berkeley and, in 1955, a doctorate in 18thcentury 
English mercantile history from King's College at the University of Cambridge.

He was hired to teach at Ohio State University but grew to loathe 
academic culture, especially faculty parties featuring "either a tuna 
or a macaroni casserole and cheap red wine," he wrote in his memoir.

In 1960 he moved to San Jose State to teach humanities. He led a 
faculty strike in support of black studies programs that turned many 
of his colleagues into enemies.

Although a fiasco from a labor organizing standpoint, it taught 
Sperling an important lesson. "Ignore your detractors and those who 
say that what you are doing is wrong, against regulations, or 
illegal," he wrote.

In 1972 he ran a federally funded project to teach police officers 
and schoolteachers about juvenile delinquency.

When his students told him they wished they could take more classes 
and earn degrees, Sperling pitched the idea to his superiors. They 
shot it down.

Convinced he could succeed, Sperling took a leave of absence and 
approached the University of San Francisco, which saw his experiment 
as a potential boon to its ailing finances. Taking $26,000 in 
savings, Sperling affiliated with the university and started the 
Institute for Community Research and Development in 1974. It quickly 
gained popularity with evening and weekend classes convenient for 
working adults and an egalitarian approach that banned lectures, 
emphasizing learning as a partnership between teacher and student.

In 1976 he moved to Arizona, which had few regulations to stymie his 
expansion. Although Arizona officials and members of the higher 
education establishment fought his efforts to gain accreditation, he 
prevailed and named his enterprise University of Phoenix.

In 1989 he bought a defunct distance-learning company, laying the 
foundation for a boom in online learning as the Internet began to 
expand. By the early 2000s Phoenix Online was generating millions of 
dollars in revenue, and online learning has been embraced by 
traditional colleges and universities.

"I can't think of an individual who has single-handedly created more 
viable higher education opportunities for more individuals than John 
Sperling," said Guilbert Hentschke, chairman emeritus of USC's 
Rossier School of Education.

Sperling later renamed the company Apollo Education Group. After 
taking it public in 1994, enrollment and revenue grew wildly and so 
did its founder's personal wealth. By 2006 Forbes said his fortune 
exceeded $1 billion in revenue. The Chronicle of Education described 
the maverick as "perhaps the wealthiest educator in history."

He retired in 2004, only to return two years later as executive 
chairman. He retired again in 2012.

His survivors include his son, Peter, who is company chairman. Twice 
divorced (he once described himself as "not co-habitable"), he is 
also survived by two grandchildren, his longtime companion, Joan 
Hawthorne, and Missy 2, the clone of his long-departed dog.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom