Faculty
Bud Stone
Founder, The Graduate Institute
When Bud Stone founded The Graduate Institute more than a decade ago his intention was to create an educational community that moved beyond traditional academia toward dynamic learning relevant in contemporary society. Today, The Graduate Institute offers degrees in emerging fields of inquiry like the Master’s of Organizational Leadership.
“Such things as English literature, history and mathematics are not dynamic in the worlds of most people. They are dynamic in the world of academic people,” Stone explains. “Furthermore, they are not programs that are career programs. They are programs for the human evolution, not for personal development. Studies in emerging fields of inquiry reach deep into what intellectual and cultural values are about.”
When Stone met MAOL founder, Mel Toomey, he saw how the program fit seamlessly into The Graduate Institute’s mission to create intellectual and cultural communities as a foundation for sustainable society. As a seasoned academic with deep experience in designing and introducing innovative undergraduate programs, Stone is well suited to write MAOL’s program. He says that across his experiences in academia and working with emerging studies programs, MAOL is unique.
“There is nothing like it anywhere. Nothing is as productive, nothing as generative, nothing as transformational for the individuals involved in it in the way MAOL is. It is an absolute genius of a program, and the majority of people who go through it transform from passivity to gigantic activity and self determined pathways,” says Stone. “There are ‘taught’ programs, but this is not a ‘taught’ program, it’s a learned program. We honor the learners’ vitality and potential and our job is to help them bring themselves to their potential.”
The MAOL and The Graduate Institute’s faculty are unique by design. Those involved with the Institute and MAOL do not sit behind closed doors, engaged in research. For dozens of years, Stone has purposely sought out people, whether at Princeton or IBM, or in the hills of Massachusetts, who have big ideas and the capacity to share those ideas in a cogent way. Fittingly, the faculty or, “academic coordinators,” are charged not with imbuing students with lessons and learning, but with facilitating the learning process for the candidates.
“We think of coordinators as sherpas as opposed to teachers, and the colleagues or candidates as trekkers,” Stone says. “Trekkers set the direction of where they’re going and the sherpas provide the support for the endeavor. Within the structure of these courses the colleagues have their own individual learning design.”
Stone sees the power of the MAOL program as being a function of its personal incentive based system. He explains that the program requires all students to engage in something not just academic, but stringently so.
“Here you’re getting a degree because you got an education, not because you memorized facts. You provide the incentive and the motivation for yourself. Your education is about what you learn, how you learn, and who you become as a learner.”
Stone has authored more than 35 educational books and publications and served as chair of the Faculty of Education at Sacred Heart University. He has also served as chair of the Department of Education at Southern Connecticut State University and held an academic appointment at Harvard.