Ex-Chairman Says CSUN Students Were Misled

The former chairman of the Cal State Northridge psychology department said Tuesday his staff misled a dozen graduate students into thinking they were being trained to become licensed clinical health counselors.

Tyler Blake, who headed the department from 1997 until earlier this year, expressed concern the blunder would tarnish his school’s image, and said the university owes a debt to the inaugural graduates of the clinical health psychology program, which was created in 1998.

“To me it’s beyond ambiguous. It’s misleading,” Blake said, adding he did not know whether students had been misled intentionally.

CSUN administrators acknowledged this week that their description of the program in letters to students was confusing.

The students learned six months before their June graduation that they would not be able to take the exam--as they say they were promised--and thus would not become professional counselors treating people suffering from life-threatening illnesses.

Several of the dozen graduates prepared Tuesday to ask the school to pardon their student loans--some as high as $25,000--because, they said, professors encouraged them to complete two years of study under false assumptions.

Five of the 12 graduates met to fill out formal grievance forms asking the university to investigate actions by psychology professor Dee Shepherd-Look, who created the clinical health psychology program. They will also ask the university to pardon their student loans or reimburse them for the money they borrowed to complete their master’s degrees.

“We don’t want to go back to school here,” said Narma Ali, one of the graduates. “They could at least give us our money back.”

The university has offered to waive up to 75% of the fees for any of the graduates to earn another master’s degree in a two-year program that would qualify them to sit for the licensing exam.

Current psychology department head Maura Mitrushina and Mack Johnson, associate vice president for graduate studies, declined comment. Shepherd-Look did not return phone calls to her office.

Blake was department chairman in 1998 when the clinical health psychology program was introduced, but he said he had no knowledge of the developing problems until April.

“The professors don’t really work for the department chair,” said Blake, who is still on the faculty. “We’re still more like peers. The program chairs operate with a great deal of autonomy.”

He disputed a statement by Johnson, who said Monday the removal of Shepherd-Look from her position as program director had nothing to do with the issues raised by students.

“That’s completely false,” Blake said.

As one of his final actions at the end of his rotation as department head, Blake said, he unseated Shepherd-Look and named another professor to the post.

“Regardless of intent or culpability, what they were doing wasn’t working from the system standpoint,” Blake said.

Students said that when they asked about vagueness in letters from the department, professors assured them they were on a path toward qualifying for the licensing test.

“It is inapprehensible that students could get to the end of a two-year program and not have a clear understanding of what their objective is,” Blake said. “There was either a complete lack of advisement, wildly inaccurate advisement or an extremely erroneous misunderstanding by the students.”

CSUN President Jolene Koester and Johnson have said the university is responsible only for program descriptions in the course catalog, or what they called the school’s legal contract with the students.

The still-unapproved clinical health psychology program was not mentioned in catalogs issued in the program’s first two years. It was added this year and does not state graduates would qualify for the licensing exam.