The University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Ellen Cook and Anita Cook Hazelwood have added the title “Dr.” to their names. They simply refer to each other as sister.
Cook, assistant vice president for Academic Affairs, and Hazelwood, director of the Health Information Management program, have worked at UL Lafayette since 1977 and 1976, respectively.
They share more than the same parents and place of employment.
The sisters will become the University’s first two students to earn a doctorate in Educational Leadership, with a concentration in higher education.
They will be hooded during the Fall 2016 Commencement General Assembly, which will begin at 11 a.m. Friday at the Cajundome.
Cook, 64, and Hazelwood, 62, grew up in Houma, La., daughters of an accountant father, and an elementary schoolteacher mother. They have a younger sister, Kathy, an attorney, and a younger brother, Bert, who works in public relations.
Cook earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University, and a master’s degree in accounting from LSU; Hazelwood earned a bachelor's degree in medical record science from the University, and a master’s degree in library science from LSU.
At one time, all three sisters were professors at UL Lafayette. Kathy Cook taught criminal justice, until deciding to pursue a law degree.
Ellen Cook and Hazelwood stuck with higher education.
It was a wise choice.
Both rose to their current positions, and attained the rank of full professor along the way, in a way uncommon in higher education — without doctoral degrees.
That began to change in 2013. The University added a higher education concentration to its doctorate in educational leadership. Until then, the doctorate had included only a concentration for K-12 teachers.
Both programs are geared toward educators who are in leadership positions, or people who aspire to be. The higher education concentration includes a range of courses, which cover subjects from legal and public policy issues, to fiscal management and student affairs.
For Ellen Cook, the decision to enroll in the new program was a no-brainer.
“Earning a doctorate was something I always wanted to do, and the educational leadership program made sense for me because, as an administrator, it was an opportunity to learn so much, and I did,” she explained. “Besides, I needed the enrollment numbers to justify offering the program.”
One of Cook’s many duties at the University is to help implement new academic programs. When she realized she could fulfill a lifelong dream, and count herself among the 14-student cohort needed to launch the new doctorate, her decision was easy.
Hazelwood, on the other hand, quips that her decision to pursue a doctorate in educational leadership was made for her by her older sister.
“I only did it because I was kind of bullied into it,” Hazelwood said jokingly, “but that’s OK, because I’m very glad I did. It’s a great program.”
Both Cook and Hazelwood said the curriculum helped them round off skills they had developed over their 30-year careers in higher education, and enabled them to add knowledge they can weave into their current roles.
It also revealed a personality trait shared by both women: determination.
The program consists of night and weekend classes that added to their already stacked workloads. The curriculum consists of 57 hours of coursework, and six credit hours of dissertation work.
Since the sisters share a house in Lafayette with their mother, Joycelyn Cook, who is 89, neither liked leaving her alone as often as was necessary to meet the demands of work and study.
But Cook and Hazelwood persevered, and were on track to put the finishing touches on their dissertations. Cook’s delves into the state's GRAD Act; Hazelwood’s is about university mergers.
Then, in mid-August, the Flood of 2016 saturated portions of Louisiana with days of rain. The unnamed storm claimed 13 lives and damaged hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.
In the case of Ellen Cook, Hazelwood, and Joycelyn Cook, and Kathy Cook, who was visiting, water flooded their neighborhood and home. They had to be rescued by boat.
They brought only what was important with them for the journey, their “two dogs, and two computers, double-wrapped in garbage bags, because they held our dissertations,” Cook said.