BORNEO OPEN INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
True Democratization of Non-Academic
Adult Education through Global Connections

Articles by Dr. John Bear and Dr. Marina C. Bear
Source : Internet

For the sake of argument, let's say you run the company that makes Rolex watches. For many years, your company has carefully cultivated and protected its reputation for quality. One day you pick up a major business magazine and see the following advertisement: "Genuine Rolex Watches by Mail, $50." 
You quickly learn that they are being made in a huge factory in another country. You are confident that your sales will be dramatically affected, and as these fakes fail to work well, your reputation will be damaged. But despite your increasingly frantic attempts, you are unable to interest law enforcement agencies in taking any action, and you can't persuade the media to stop running those ads.

It sounds like a nightmare.

It is a nightmare, and it's happening today-not in the world of wristwatches, but in the world of higher education.



Consider the following:

• There are more than 1000 unaccredited universities now operating. While a few are genuine start-ups or online ventures, the great majority range from merely dreadful to out-and-out diploma mills-fake schools that will sell people any degree they want at prices from $3,000 to $5,000.

• It is not uncommon for a large fake school to "award" as many as 500 Ph.D.'s every month.

• The aggregate income of the bad guys is easily in excess of $200 million a year. Data show that a single phony school can earn between $10 million and $20 million annually.

• With the closure of the FBI's diploma mill task force, the indifference of most state law enforcement agencies, the minimal interest of the news media, and the growing ease of using the Internet to start and run a fake university, things are rapidly growing worse.



The prognosis is bleak. This is not some jerk with a laser printer on his kitchen table cranking out a few phony diplomas, often to the mild amusement of the media (as when Florida congressman Claude Pepper bought a fake doctorate to show how easy it was and proclaimed himself Dr. Pepper).



Fake schools are a serious economic force in America, hitting legitimate schools in their pocketbooks in two important ways:

• A fair chunk of that $200 million is being spent by people who really want and need a legitimate degree but don't know enough to tell the difference. It's tuition that should be going to the legitimate schools.

• Every time a phony school is exposed by the media, the whole public perception of distance learning suffers. So when the public sees your advertisement or press release, they are more likely to say, sneeringly, "Oh, I've heard about those kinds of programs," and you'll never hear from them.

A huge crime wave is under way, and almost no one has noticed. You can't have a crime wave without two basic ingredients: villains and victims. In this particular crime wave, there are four kinds of villains and four kinds of victims. In the course of looking at each of them, much can be learned about what is going on, and why.



The Four Villains :

Who are the villains in this sad drama? There is an obvious one (the perpetrators), a less obvious one (the customers), and two very important ones: the media and law enforcement.

Villain #1: The People Who Run the Dreadful Schools
Of course there would be no such institutions without these people, and we cannot excuse their behavior. They were not sold into the diploma trade. No, they all know precisely what they are doing, and they are doing it for money and, perhaps, the prestige that comes with a business card reading "University President."

These folks typically fall into three categories: Lifelong scam artists, who might have progressed from three wheel cart mounted on the street corner to running a university; quirky academics who have decided to cross to the dark side; and businesspeople who simply find another kind of business-that of selling degrees.

An example of one such businessman is James Kirk. In addition to dabbling in film production, 3-D film distribution, and a video dating service, in the late 70s he got involved with a correspondence law school called the University of San Gabriel Valley (it no longer exists; the California Supreme Court suspended one of Kirk's lawyer-partners for three years and placed the other on probation for a year).

But Kirk saw the cash potential and opened his own Southland University down the street. When Southland could no longer meet California's minimal operating requirements, he moved it. It ended up in Missouri, where he changed its name to La Salle University. Leaving Missouri a few steps ahead of the sheriff, he found a haven in Louisiana's unregulated world of higher education. He ran ads in dozens of airline and business magazines. He took a vow of poverty, so his World Christian Church owned the university, his Porsche, and his million-dollar home. And when the federal authorities finally came for him, they discovered bank deposits in excess of $35 million, current cash deposits of $10 million, and numerous other assets. Kirk McPherson was indicted on 18 counts of mail fraud, wire (telephone) fraud, and tax fraud, among others.

Following a plea bargain, he was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

What is he up to now? Well shortly after he arrived at the federal prison in Beaumont, Texas, a new university started advertising nationally. The Edison University campus in Honolulu turned out to be a Mail Boxes Etc address at box rental store. The literature was almost identical to that of La Salle. The registrar was one Natalie Handy, James Kirk's wife. And the mail was postmarked Beaumont, Texas. Instead of "University Without Walls," we may well have a case here of "University Behind Bars."

One of the academics who has gone down this path is Dr. Mary Rodgers, founder and president of the Open University of America. She has an earned doctorate from Ohio State and had a decent career in higher education. When I visited the, um, campus, I found it to be a pleasant suburban home in Maryland. When a young girl answered the door, I said I was looking for Open University. "She's upstairs," was the reply. When I asked Dr. Rodgers about the legitimacy of the university, she showed me photos of their graduation ceremony at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C., featuring mostly, it seemed, foreign military officers receiving their degrees. "What more could you ask for?" she inquired. Oh, perhaps something more than grandma in the basement (I had been given a tour) filling orders.

Then there's lifelong con-man Ronald Pellar, undisputed king of the fraudulent school world, who probably has tens of millions of dollars in offshore bank accounts to prove it. Following an early career as a Las Vegas lounge hypnotist, a brief stint as Lana Turner's seventh and last husband (she threw him out and accused him of robbery), and a two-year prison stretch for hiring a hit man to kill someone, Pellar discovered the world of education and training. He also hit upon the easiest method yet of becoming a "Doctor." He called himself Doctor Dante. Doctor was presumably his first name.

After making a bundle with his fake travel-agent training school and his dangerous cosmetology school (he was convicted under federal fair trade laws in California for running the fake cosmetology school), he hit the big time with his Columbia State University. Starting in the late 1980s from a Mail Boxes Etc. store in New Orleans and featuring a Ph.D in 27 days-no questions asked. Columbia State University grew and grew. By 1997 Pellar had several employees filling orders in an unmarked warehouse in San Clemente, California, not far from the Nixon museum. Between January 1997 and March 1998, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the school deposited approximately $16 million in its bank account. By this time, Pellar was living on his million-dollar yacht in Ensenada, Mexico, defying warrants for his arrest.

The obvious question at this point is: How could he make so much money, for so long, with such a blatantly phony (to you and me, at least) scheme? The answer can be found by looking at the other three categories of villains.



Villain #2: The Media

No fraudulent scheme can succeed if people don't know about it. And the traditional way to make yourself known, whether you are selling Coca-Cola or doctorates, is to advertise.
Pellar's basic advertisement for Columbia State University read like this:


University Degree in 27 Days!
Bachelor's, Master's, Doctorate
Legal, legitimate, and fully accredited.
School rings available.


What publication on earth, with the possible exception of the supermarket tabloids, would run such an advertisent? Well, how about the Economist, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Money, Business Week, Investors Business Daily, and USA Today?

But surely, the rational mind asks, no responsible publication would continue to run such ads, once they learned the nature of the advertiser.

The media I contacted reacted in one of three ways when they learned they'd been running advertisements for fraudulent schools.



A. We run them. Period. The Economist is one of the worst offenders: Every weekly issue for at least the last five years has had five to 20 ads for "schools" that range from to totally phony to merely unaccredited and bad. Because of the magazine's excellent reputation, many readers assume if a school advertises in the Economist, it must be OK.

When I first tugged at the magazine's sleeve, sending them clear evidence of their bogus advertisers, the response from Suzanne Hopkins in their classified ad department was loud and clear: "Although I understand your urgency of making people aware of the dealings of Columbia State University, we are of the belief that our readers are educated enough to make there [sic] own decisions." (As a conservative guess, readers lost over a million dollars to this one phony alone, before the FBI finally closed it down.)



B. We run them. Wait, no we won't. Many years ago, the Wall Street Journal was running some ads for reprehensible schools. My attempts at getting their attention either went unanswered or elicited replies like that from Hopkins. Then one day, when an especially dreadful ad appeared, I went into my "terrier" mode (relentless, get teeth in and don't let go).

I finally got through to the key decision maker in New York. Robert Higgins, of their advertising standards committee said, in effect, "Of course we shouldn't be doing this," and they simply stopped. It was simple because they said what any medium could say: "If a school doesn't have recognized accreditation, we don't run their ads. Period."

C. We won't run them. Wait; yes we will. For sheer numbers, USA Today is the champ. Every morning, the flagship of the Gannett fleet runs from five to 15 ads from questionable schools in the Education section of their classified page, although sometimes the ads migrate into the rest of the paper, notably, one full-page ad (at an estimated $70,000) for a phony university. When I did my sleeve-tugging act at USA Today, the response was immediate and gratifying.

Cynthia Ross, in the advertising office, seemed genuinely alarmed and promptly drew up a set of standards and guidelines for accepting school ads, which were as reasonable and rigorous as anything I would have done. She thanked me profusely and assured me that changes would be implemented as soon as questionnaires were sent to advertisers. The only problem is that this happened three years ago, no changes were made, and Ross no longer returns my calls.



Villain #3: The Media Again

Another failing of the media is indifference. The two-headed snake at the 4-H show will probably get more coverage than the local high school principal discovered to have a fake degree. Or the campaign literature of former senator Joseph Biden reporting a degree he didn't have. Or the President of Croatia with a worthless California doctorate. Or Arizona's "teacher of the year" with a bogus Master's. Is this business as usual?

The press hardly noticed. When the FBI discovered that a few scientists at NASA had fake doctorates, the news was largely ignored by the press. When the Fowler family- some of the most flamboyant degree mill operators ever-were charged with stealing millions and put on trial in North Carolina, the courthouse was full of reporters-but only because Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Fawn Hall were on trial in the next room. Despite the best efforts of the FBI and yours truly, not an inch of copy ever appeared.



Villain #4: The World of Law Enforcement

If I held up a 7-Eleven for 50 bucks, I'd probably be in prison before my Slurpee melted. But if I start a totally fraudulent university, selling degrees by return mail for $3,000 each, and I obscure my path just a little, changing the name from time to time and using various mail-forwarding services, the odds are that I will go unpunished forever. And if caught, I will get little more than a slap on the wrist.

Because of the multistate and international aspect of many fakes, it's often unclear who has jurisdiction. When, as in the case of one huge fraud, a man in California rents a one-room "campus" in Utah and mails his diplomas from Hawaii, who regulates him? In the Columbia State saga, for years the attorney general of Louisiana was saying, in effect, "He may use a mail drop here, but the entire operation is run from California. It's their problem." And the California attorney general was saying, "Hey, he uses a Louisiana address and telephone in all his ads and in his catalog.

It's their problem."

In this great republic of ours, each state has its own school licensing laws, and they differ mightily and change regularly. During the 1990s more new universities opened in Hawaii than in the rest of the country combined: over 100 of them, and all but two or three located at mailbox service addresses. In the 1980s it was Louisiana, a state that did not license degree-granting institutions. Recently, the state of choice for this kind of thing has been South Dakota.

It wasn't always this way. In 1980 the FBI made diploma mills a priority and established the DipScam task force, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. With the states generally uninterested in acting, time after time the FBI did the research, secured a search warrant, marched in (often with postal inspectors and the IRS in tow), collected evidence, got indictments, and ended up closing down more than 50 major frauds, including two active fake medical schools.

But in the early 1990s FBI agent Allen Ezell, scourge of the degree mills, took early retirement, and the agency removed diploma mills from its priority list. The sad news is that more fakes and near-fakes have been launched in the last 10 years than in the previous 50. They are fueled by the ease of advertising and the even greater ease of setting up an impressive-looking Internet site-even one with the hallowed .edu suffix, which many people think signifies quality, but which has been doled out to many questionable schools.

There have been a few good guys in the last few years-but not many. One assistant attorney general in Illinois guards his state like a bulldog. When a fake Loyola State University opened not far from the real Loyola University in Chicago, Assistant Attorney General Hollister Bundy got an injunction and closed them down within a few days. But Attorney General Richard Ieyoub of Louisiana yawned and looked the other way for years, until a close election battle in 1998 spurred him to action, posing for photos while shutting down a few notorious mailboxes. And California's top lawman showed zero interest while some of the biggest frauds ever thumbed their noses in the direction of Sacramento.

Even when some action is taken, there often is little or no follow-through. Since 1998 the Federal Trade Commission has had the important power to regulate the use of the word "accredited," but to my knowledge, it has never filed a case, despite blatant misuse of that word. The state of California ordered Columbia Pacific University to close three years ago, but the "university" appealed, and it remains defiantly open, continuing to advertise nationally.



Villain #5: The People Who Buy and Use Fake Degrees

The question is always asked: Do the customers of these schools know what they're doing? Are they acquiring what they are well aware is a questionable degree for the purpose of fooling others? Or have they genuinely been fooled by the purveyor of the parchment?

The only certain answer is that there are some of each, but whether it is 50-50 or any other proportion is quite unknown and much discussed. Surely, you are thinking, anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature who acquires that "Ph.D in 27 days" must know exactly what he or she is doing. And yet. And yet, the literature and the sales pitch of the phony Columbia State is really slick. The catalog is more attractive than some real schools, replete with photos of campus scenes, happy alumni (all from stock photo companies) and two Nobel laureates listed with honorary doctorates.

Their argument is that many universities today are giving credit for experiential learning. If you've run a business for 10 years, they suggest, you know more than most M.B.A.'s (heads nod), and so we'll give you that M.B.A. If you've taught Sunday School at church, you know as much as one of those Ivy League doctors of divinity, and we'll award you the degree you've already earned through experience.
When I put a detailed exposé of Columbia State up on my Web site, I received more than 500 replies from alumni. While most were of the boy-was-I-stupid sort, a significant subset were like the woman who wrote, "I can't believe I did this. I have a master's degree from Goddard [College in Vermont]. I really understand this 'life experience' thing. Those people were so convincing."

And, depressingly, there was another notable subset of people who said, "Well if they're as bad as you say, how come my employer (they name a Fortune 500 company) is paying for three of us to do that degree?"

My hunch is that at least half the "victims" are truly co-conspirators. They know they live in a world where employers pay higher salary for the same job if the person has a higher degree; where therapists with a Ph.D. after their name are said to get three times as many Yellow Pages responses as those with an M.A.; and where a large Ohio city told the man who had been cutting down dead trees for them for 20 years that, due to a new policy, unless he earned a degree within two years, he would be let go. So they're willing to take the risk.

Surely it would be nice to see some meaningful research about these matters. I believe that I am right when I tell people, as I have for years, that using such a degree is like putting a time bomb in their resume. One never knows when it might go off with dire effects. In my expert-witness work, I see this all the time. A few years ago, for instance, I testified against a prison psychologist for the state of Florida who had gotten away with his fake Ph.D. for eight years. He insisted that he believed the University of England was real, in spite of their P.O. box address, the absence of a telephone, and their offer to backdate his diploma to the year of his choice. As the prosecutor said in summation, "Here is a man who probably spent more time deciding which candy to buy from the vending machine than he did in choosing his doctoral school."



The Four Victims

Victim #1: Those Buyers who Aren't Villains

And many of them aren't. Some stories introduced at diploma mill trials are heartbreaking: Old people mortgaging their homes to provide their children's tuition. People selling their cars to pay their fees. And untold numbers of people losing their jobs, even being fined, jailed, or, if holding a green card, deported, for unwitting use of fake degrees.



Victim #2: The Employers

Employers are victimized in two ways: The obvious one is ending up with untrained employees, and the more subtle but potentially devastating one is financial liability when people with fake credentials make mistakes that damage people or property. Consider the urgent meetings that must have taken place when a prominent staff pediatrician at the University of California-Berkeley student health center was discovered to have forged his medical degree. A matter that sometimes keeps me up at night is two sleazy (but excessively litigious) universities that specialize in quick and easy home-study doctorates in nuclear engineering safety.

How can such things happen? Many employers either don't check or don't care. LaSalle University in Louisiana, shortly before their founder went to prison for mail fraud, listed hundreds of companies that they said had accepted and paid for their degrees. Skeptically, I started calling these companies, fully expecting to find the "university" had lied. But they hadn't. About half the companies had confused them with the real LaSalle University in Philadelphia. And the rest believed their accreditation claim, because they didn't realize there was such a thing as fake accreditation.



Victim #3: The Public

Many well-meaning people suffer because the person they think is a trained teacher, business consultant, or engineer may not have the degree or even the knowledge. Consider the damage potential of the sex therapist in Syracuse with his fake Ph.D., for which he paid $100. The import-export lawyer in San Francisco who turned out to have bought his University of Michigan law degree from one of the insidious, no-questions-asked, "lost" diploma replacement services that advertise nationally.

This spring, I'm scheduled to testify in California Superior Court, to help expose the phony doctorate claimed by the expert witness for the plaintiff. This man's Ph.D., his only degree, is from a well-known European "university." But for more than 20 years, this worthless credential has buttressed his scientific testimony in more than 300 court cases. If we are successful, it could lead to reopening all those other cases. And that's just one person from one "school." We are truly talking about the tiniest tip of a very large iceberg.



Victim #4: The Legitimate Schools

Just as the fake Rolex seller harms legitimate watch companies by taking money that should be theirs and by tarnishing their reputations, the fake schools take millions from the good schools' pockets, and, at least as significantly, foul the waters of nontraditional higher education.

Despite the huge surge of interest and investment in online and distance learning, everything is not rosy in the groves of virtual academia.

Extremely well funded efforts such as California Virtual University just couldn't attract enough students and faded away. How many potential students were on the verge of sending for a catalog or writing a check to a good school when they saw one of the fake school exposes on 20/20, 60 Minutes, or Inside Edition, and decided not to take the risk of dealing with "one of those" schools.



What can legitimate schools do?

If there were an Olympic gold medal for hand-wringing, the foes of diploma mills would have won one year ago. But, with the lone exception of the FBI's decade-long effort, results have been sporadic, generally ineffective, and woefully short-lived. In 1982 the American Council on Education announced an impending, hard-hitting, and uncompromising book (I hoped) on fake schools.

But by the time Diploma Mills: Degrees of Fraud finally emerged in 1988, the lawyers had marched in, and the book was, at best, soft-hitting and compromised. The authors apologized for lack of specificity (not a single currently operating fake was named) because of "the present litigious era."

Yes, schools do sue. When Lingua Franca, the sister publication of University Business, ran an article about Mellon University Press and Mellon University (which they judged to be a diploma mill), they were sued by the owner. They ultimately prevailed in court, but it was a long, expensive process.

I've been sued eight times by schools, including once, for $500 million, by the University of North America. Only one ever got to court, and that was thrown out by the judge, as frivolous, in minutes. But there is a cost in both dollars and, my wife will confirm, despondency.



How to fight the bad guys.

So shining the light of publicity on these schools can certainly do no harm, but I'm afraid that books and even articles like this may do little more than accelerate the hand-wringing.

Wouldn't it be fine if there were a consortium of legitimate universities and companies in the business of education that worked to eradicate the problem? They could do it through a combination of individual action, group action (especially media notification and advertising boycotts), and working for the passage of meaningful legislation and the enforcement of existing laws. Like the computer industry's software piracy efforts, organizations that might be fiercely competitive most of the time work together in this arena for their common good.

• Individual school action. I believe that the bigger and better schools can be a force for change-if only they would. A few years ago, a completely fake Stanford University began operating from Arkansas, even selling medical degrees by mail. I couldn't interest anyone at the real Stanford in this matter, and the fake carried on for more than a year. If the president of the real Stanford had telephoned the governor of Arkansas and the editor of USA Today and said, "Stop this!" might something have happened much sooner?

• Advertising boycotts (or threats thereof). Recently, on the same page in the Economist, there were large ads for Harvard University (quite real) and Monticello University (which the state of Kansas has accused of being fake). What if Harvard (or a group of major schools) got together and said they no longer wish to be on the same pages with the fakes?

• Build a fire under the FTC. In 1998 the Federal Trade Commission published a rule that would regulate the use of the word "accredited," limiting it to schools with recognized accreditation. The FTC has successfully dealt with the misuse of other words, from "organic" to "low-tar." Enforcing this rule would be a major blow to the fakes, who count on being able to call themselves accredited.

• The "graffiti" approach. Cities have begun winning the war on graffiti by taking immediate and decisive action: monitoring trouble spots, working with community organizations, and painting over it before the sun rises the next morning. It would not be impossibly labor-intensive to monitor ads in major publications, Web sites, and well-meaning lists compiled by people who have been fooled. The very moment a bad guy appears, instant action is taken. Action in the form of a phone call followed up with a professional and comprehensive information packet to the editor, publisher, or Internet site provider from a respectable consortium of schools would do it. Perhaps another warning letter or packet to the relevant federal, state, and local authorities as well.

As it happens, the advance scouts are already out there beating the bushes searching for the bad guys, and they are doing it without pay, just for the satisfaction of the chase. Point your browser to an Internet newsgroup called alternative education. Distance education, and you'll find a hundred or more postings a day. There are at least 50 zealots, from Australia to Switzerland, whose antennae vibrate when some questionable institution arises. They (well, actually, we) collect information, visit nearby locations to see what's there, write reports and then, well, wring our hands a lot. Of course, the group does not speak with a common voice, but I know of no other place where there is so much useful information for someone (please) to take and run with.

• Educating the public. Legitimate schools could do this through articles, brochures, books, and public relations pieces. They could even devote a percentage of advertising, marketing, and PR budgets to this purpose, possibly through pooled efforts.

• Law enforcement. For my doctoral dissertation (in communication, earned at the legitimate Michigan State University) I studied complaining and how politicians and the media deal with complaints. I learned that the personal approach is the one that usually works, especially on an issue where the politician has little personally invested. A million letters won't change a vote on abortion or gun control, but one good letter, especially from a power-possessing individual, can get a traffic light installed, the almond import quota changed, or, quite possibly, the fake schools dealt with.

The media can be significant here, too, especially in the process of getting legislators to act. In 1983 Arizona was the haven for many fake schools. Then the Arizona Republic did a splendid four-day, page-one series, the first article running with the headline Diploma Mills: a festering sore on Arizona Education. Within months the state got and enforced some tough laws, and one by one, every phony in the state moved on to Louisiana, Hawaii, South Dakota, and other places.

If the good guys turn the power of their own credibility, credentials, contacts, and connections on the fake degree sellers, and if they do it the very instant the bad guys' ads and their Web sites appear, there is a fighting chance to recapture all of the playing field.

John Bear is an author based in El Cerrito, California. For 12 years he was the FBI's principal consultant and expert witness on diploma mills and fake degrees. His books include Bear's Guide to Earning Degrees Nontraditionally and College Degrees by Mail and Internet.


John Bear is an expert on and proponent of distance education. He is the author of Bear's Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning, and is considered an authority on what distance schools are reputable and what are not. He has been engaged by the FBI in their investigations into diploma mills for twenty years.

In the past he has been involved with several unaccredited distance learning institutions. Bear says that the unaccredited institutions that he was involved with were all reputable at the time.

Bear's publisher, Ten Speed Press, operates the website www.degree.net on the subject of distance learning, which among other things maintain a list of accrediting agencies not recognized under Generally Accepted Accrediting Practices, i.e. accreditation mills.

In 2004, Bear was interviewed by CBS News (60 Minutes) for an investigation involving Hamilton University. He has also been the on-screen degree mill expert for Good Morning America, Inside Edition, American Journal, and others. He is the author or co-author of 34 books with major publishers on education, cooking, consumerism, computers, the world of publishing, and humor.






Guest column
by Marina C. Bear, Ph.D.
Source: Internet

In 2001, a suit was filed in a case in which a woman who had been promoted to the position of principal in her school district—a job requiring a Master's degree—acquired this degree from an unrecognized online degree-awarding "service" after the job offer was made. A teacher in the district who had a legitimate Master's degree, and was in line for the job of principal, brought a suit against the school board, claiming they did not act appropriately. The attorney for this woman engaged the services of Dr. Marina Bear, to look at the complex ethical situation surrounding these matters. Since the issues involved are ones that all-too-commonly arise, it seemed appropriate to make her report available on Degree.Net, with all the names and places removed. As of early 2002, the case had not yet come to trial.]

Before beginning an analysis of the case involving [the principal] and her appointment to the position of Principal of the [School], let me clarify what it is an ethicist does. Unlike a lawyer, who works with facts of the case and such elements of the law as are, or might turn out to be, relevant, and whose aim is to bring about a successful outcome for his or her client, an ethicist brings together the facts of the case and the morals of the relevant society. By examining those, an ethicist aims to bring about as clear as possible a view of where things went wrong and what might be done both to rectify the situation and to make it less likely that things will go wrong in the same way in the future. In addition, the hope is to leave all parties concerned with an understanding of the consequences which have, or most probably will, result from the case.

Our ethics are an expression of the society in which we live. Diverse as that society is, there are basic ethical principles which we hold in common, although how those principles are applied may vary.

Societies are be divided into subgroups, based on ethnicity, profession, special interests, and so forth. There are codes of ethics which guide the participants of those subgroups in their common activities. They identify what is expected of us and what we may reasonably expect of others, as well as identifying how breaches in the moral fabric may be mended. Sometimes those codes are written down. Professional societies often publish them and their members display them as information whose very presence proclaims the moral character of the professional.

But many areas of human endeavor are not covered by such codes. Nonetheless, by appealing to more general principles widely held to be important for the health of our society, we can usually figure out the right thing to do using reason and common sense.

In the case of [the principal], it is clear that there was some wrongdoing, but it is worthwhile to take a moment to figure out exactly what the wrong was, and to whom the wrong was done.

As parents and citizens, we know that we want teachers of good character working with our children. Although many of us are unaware of the exact process by which teachers are hired, we place a certain amount of trust in those administrative bodies, which often include elected School Boards, to see that teachers support the highest ethical standards in their classrooms, promoting such values as honesty and fairness, in addition to fostering a love of learning and conveying specific information.

We even expect that school administrators will behave with personal discretion, if not exemplary ethical behavior, in all aspects of their lives which may come into public view. And we have all heard of the high school counselor with unfortunate bouts of occasional kleptomania, or the School Superintendent whose personal life challenges community standards. Often they are simply strongly encouraged to leave public service and find employment in less sensitive areas, and that is the end of it.

One of the most basic of ethical principles is justice. That means that the rules apply to all concerned, and that there is a dependable regularity to their application. It means that you and I are to be treated the same unless there is a clear and relevant difference between us which justifies differential treatment.

The [City] Area Schools and [City] Area Schools Administrators Association published a document entitled Labor Agreement1998-1999 & 1999-2000 in which the qualifications for a Principal were listed (in a section called Professional Standards). To meet that basic definition of justice, those qualifications should have been asked of anyone applying for the position. Meeting those requirements would have been a necessary, although not sufficient, criterion for further consideration. Choosing someone to lead an enterprise always involves judging the candidates' personal talents and skills and trying to predict the dynamic of the new working unit.

It would seem, from the letter of support for [the principal], that she had a good working relationship with members of the staff. Had the selection committee been free to hire without considering this Section, it may well have been that [the principal] would have been the obvious choice based on experience and the already-present support of a number of her co-workers and, we may assume, some satisfied parents of children in her classes.

Nonetheless, the Section was there, and it was ignored. By doing so, the selection committee and any confirming body (School Board, Trustees, or other) were unjust, not only to all other candidates for the position who presented the technically minimum requirements for the job, but also to other potentially interested members of the public who also did not hold accredited Master's Degrees but might have wished to be considered.

One of the most blatant and damaging forms of discrimination occurs when those responsible for hiring come to the process with unstated criteria which will narrow the field in ways the applicants for the job cannot predict and address.

The most obvious example of this is the formality-interview process, where the main criterion for the position is that the candidate be the one the group has already agreed, openly or tacitly, will get the job.
It is usually impossible to determine whether this has gone on, since people often discover their consciences after committing an ethical blunder, and rarely does such behavior issue from groups with a strong moral fiber running through them that would lead to public confessions of inappropriate action.
What we do know in this situation, is that the schools and the administrators' association set the standards, but somewhere along the line they were not followed.



How were these standards compromised, and what did this come to mean?

Here comes some of the common sense mentioned earlier. A job listing appears. If it looks interesting to me, I read the fine print. What do they say they want done? How much does it pay? What are the listed qualifications?

As [the principal] had been Acting Principal of the [School}, she probably had a better idea than most applicants of the tasks the job entailed.

The second question is not as simple as it looks at first glance. [The principal] was well aware of the fact that salaries in school positions are based on a formula that usually includes experience and level of certification, including the highest degree completed. Two teachers may instruct the same subject at the same grade level, but receive widely-different salaries for so doing if one has a Master's Degree in the relevant field and the other does not.

In fact, the second and third questions were interlinking, in this case. To get the job, the candidate was supposed to present a Master's Degree from an accredited college or university; the salary was keyed to the presumption of that degree. It was not wrong of [the principal] to aspire to hold such a position, but it was wrong for her to claim it without holding the degree, unless some special accommodation had been made on her behalf. We'll get to that in the "What could they have done?" portion of this report.

[The principal] presents herself, in her deposition, as acting on her own in this situation, and I will presume that whether she received advice from anyone else while working through the application process, she wishes to be held responsible for her actions. This is admirable and appropriate.
Nonetheless, I must suggest that if she is to be seen as innocent of any wrongdoing, she is guilty of a surprising level of ignorance regarding academic matters. That ignorance alone might bring one to question her fitness to operate as a school administrator, except that it is hard to imagine the situation in which damage could be done to students by her ignorance of how the world of higher education really works. An elementary school principal probably has little call to counsel people concerning university life.

On the other hand, by presenting a phony credential, she may well jeopardize the accreditation of her school in the eyes of whatever larger body is charged with reviewing its policies and procedures.
In gathering information for this report, I visited the website of the "university" from which [the principal] received her Master's Degree. One line was sufficient to throw into doubt the validity of the institution. They claim "a proprietary method of awarding equivalencies of work experience as substitutions for formal education requirements."

This is like suggesting that one can set up a private, proprietary way of issuing change for your hundred dollar bills. Would you send them in? The only way equivalencies make sense is if most other relevant institutions will accept them as equivalent—banks will recognize and accept the "change" you get back; reputable universities will accept the "credits." Otherwise, you're in the same position as someone who sends in his hundred dollar bill and gets back 11 homemade ten dollar bills. $110 for a $100 bill. Sounds like a good deal, but the chance that you could use them in the marketplace is small, and if you did, you'd be setting yourself up for serious trouble.

In [the principal]'s case, she appears from her deposition, to have simply e-mailed [the "university"] a form which gave details of "qualifications, your experience that you encountered, what you have done, what impact you make on your community, that type of stuff" and her fees.

First of all, anyone who believes that everything done on the Internet is legitimate and aboveboard suffers from that surprising level of ignorance mentioned above. Anyone who reads a newspaper or listens to the evening news has heard stories of scams involving the offer of items for sale which are never delivered or, if they are, turn out to be other than promised. Why do scams work? Because they seem to offer a good deal. The ["university"] degree sounds a lot like the "brand-name merchandise" for sale at bargain rates on street corners in many major cities. Vuitton suitcase for $20? No problem.

Let us invoke another basic principle, common to every system of ethical thought: Do no harm. To be good people, we are expected to keep in mind the idea that in the light of the seeming capriciousness of fate, the power of nature, and the undependability of strangers, each one of us still has the capacity for advancing the good by, at the very least, not initiating harmful actions wherever possible. Each time we further an unjust cause by colluding with it to our temporary advantage, we do wrong. [The principal] would probably not buy a shiny new car from someone who approached her in a parking lot and offered it to her for $2,000 no questions asked.

Even if the car came with a legitimate-seeming bill of sale and registration, the very fact of its price and the way it was presented would suggest "Hot Car" and all the potential trouble that implies. And she'd probably agree that buying stolen merchandise put the buyer in the position of supporting the business of thievery.

[The principal]'s situation is all too common, even if her search for a "good deal" may have less to do with money than with two other valuable commodities: time and pride. She needed the degree in a timely manner to appear to have the basic qualifications for the position of Principal. No legitimate college or university can work as fast as the diploma mills. The ["university"] didn't even need to examine her transcript.

Why should she spend months applying to universities, having her qualifications evaluated by them, engaging in lengthy negotiations to get the most credit recognized for the courses she had already taken? The ["university"] just takes your word for it.

Did a red flag go up in [the principal]'s mind over this detail? Apparently not. If she'd walked into the shopping mall after refusing to buy that new-looking car from the man in the parking lot and been confronted by a man in an academic robe who said to her, "Madam, you look like somebody in need of a Master's Degree. I can help. Tell me your qualifications." It's hard to imagine anyone reciting a list of college courses taken and life experience acquired.

However, if she did, the man in the robe might then say, "Dear Lady, by virtue of the powers which we have invented, I will whack you on the head with this rolled-up sock and proclaim you a Master of Science. Congratulations, please proceed to that lady over there behind the card table and pay your fee. She'll give you your diploma." [The principal] did the Internet equivalent, but without benefit of the sock-whacking ceremony, and unfortunately her Internet degree is worth as much as the shopping mall degree.



There's a reason why pride was the first of the seven deadly sins.

Many people who fall into the hands of the proprietors of diploma mills know that they deserve that degree. They've done the equivalent work—in fact, in many cases, they may have far more practical experience doing the very job for which the degree is a basic requirement than some young kid just out of college. They don't feel a need to present themselves to somebody in a university and ask for the rights and privileges that accrue from having that degree because they've already done the work. The advertisements, in the Internet and in the print media, feed right into that syndrome.

"You may have already earned your degree. Isn't it time you reaped the benefits?" "Your hard work and life experience deserve recognition."

But there's another basic ethical truth by which we operate in this society: we have a responsibility to learn the laws and rules under which we live and a duty to follow them. We have a responsibility to learn the laws of the land we live in and a duty to follow them. We have a responsibility to know the basic laws of nature if we're going to take on the care of another living thing. And if we're going to present ourselves as ready to work in a particular environment, we have a responsibility to understand the rules of that organization and a duty to follow them.

A cab driver needs to know the rules of the road and the policies of his company regarding fares, care of his vehicle, treatment of customers, and the basic licensing he has to have to be a driver. He doesn't need to understand how getting a college degree works and [the principal] didn't need to know how one becomes licensed to drive a vehicle which transports people. But we all know there are standard ways to get what you think you need and there are probably under-the-table ways to get the same thing and it's a good idea to know which is the right one and which is the one which may get you into more trouble than it's worth.

Someone operating in the field of education has a responsibility to know how it works at any level in which she's likely to become involved and to have the common sense to distinguish the real coin of her realm.

Did [the principal] do wrong in "falling for" the diploma mill scam on the Internet? Yes. She is not an innocent victim, because she had a responsibility to know how the world of higher education operates. She's not an innocent patient handing a prescription slip into a pharmacy and falling victim to the pharmacist's inattention or ignorance when she gets and takes the wrong medication.

She may very well have heard the word "accreditation" during her tenure as a teacher. Most public schools, and many private ones as well, are subject to scrutiny by independent agencies to determine the standard of their operation from the cleanliness of their facility through the quality of their library as well as the evidence of learning which their students can demonstrate. Schools which fail such scrutiny may end up closing. Those who pass, display their resulting certification proudly. To be unaware of the importance of accreditation is to have slipped up in responsibility to know.

There is, however, an all-too-human tendency to hope that details will work themselves out. It's a degree. It's not an accredited degree. Maybe it doesn't matter. So we use the dairy products that drifted to back of the fridge and are long past their expiration date and hope that nothing happens. We make that u-turn when there's no endangering traffic even if there's a little sign that suggests it's not legal. We pay attention to the big stuff and hope that our overall goodness will count. Sometimes it works that way, sometimes it doesn't.

But what if the rule is wrong? If there's no traffic for blocks, shouldn't I be able to make that u-turn? Some cities try to accommodate variations: "No left turn between 7-9 am and 4-6 pm." But when there's no accommodation, you don't turn left unless you enjoy meeting your local law enforcement officers in adversarial situations.

Here we should take a moment to consider what a real school does that a diploma mill doesn't—a distinction which [the principal] does not consider in her deposition, although she uses the word "Program" to describe what preceded the awarding of the ["university"] degree. A Master's program involves an array of learning experiences which are designed to produce in the student "mastery" of a body of knowledge.

Almost all schools claim some right to administer a portion of that knowledge, since they believe that in awarding their degree they are giving the student the benefit of the school's prestige and reputation for the rest of that student's career, and that reputation in part rests in turn on their turning out students whose competence in their chosen field will bespeak the high standards of the school's instructional program.

In fact, many schools insist on providing all the education at the graduate level. In such cases, a student who applies with a significant amount of graduate credit is awarded equivalency in credits, but not in classes, so that when the student arrives at a final project, a thesis or dissertation or other demonstration of achievement, the student can continue working independently without paying additional school fees until submitting the final work. Thus the school retains the right to educate the student, but allows the student some credit for time and work already accomplished.

Even when classes are accepted for transfer, most schools attempt to do so by finding actual equivalencies in their own program, since a graduate program is not just an accumulation of classes taken at random, but an array of related studies within a discipline designed to produce just that mastery of the field. And the primary criterion for transfer of credits to an accredited college or university is that the credits presented in turn were done at an accredited institution. This implies some scrutiny by an impartial body of the quality of educational programs offered by the institution.

There is no sense in which the ["university"] offered a "program" to [the principal].

Nonetheless, she may still feel that her qualifications should have been recognized under the rules of the schools and the administrators' association.

If a rule is wrong, obviously, we can try to change it. Here we come to the "What could we have done differently?" section of this paper. The school district and the administrators' association have demonstrated the capacity to accommodate in the very Section 12 to which we referred earlier. Each administrator in the instructional division was to obtain three graduate semester hours of credit every three years, however "The Superintendent or designee may waive or extend the time limit above referred to for good and sufficient cause on a case-by case basis without creating a precedent."

If [the principal], or one of her supporters on the selection committee, had been able to bring before the relevant body a suggestion that a comparable sentence regarding the Master's Degree, a road would have been opened for [the principal] to propose a plan whereby she might meet the requirement in an honorable and acceptable way.

Perhaps the selection board was also suffering from "Ignore the Details and Hope they will Go Away" Syndrome. If so, that is unfortunate.

Or it may be the case that the current rules are set in stone and changing them is impossibly difficult. In that situation, we may be facing an unjust law. If [the principal] is, indeed, an example of an ideal candidate who cannot be hired because the regulations prohibit it and the regulations cannot be changed, a kind of courage not usually found in school boards and similar bodies is required.

We have no better teacher in the appropriate meeting of that situation than the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" stands as a model for the intelligent person of good conscience who confronts an impossible law. He said, "One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty." He wrote those words while suffering the penalty of imprisonment for breaking the segregation laws of the state of Alabama in 1963.

In our case, the fact that [the principal] may well have been the best candidate for the position implies that the law is inappropriate—even unjust to her and to those who would benefit from her service as Principal. But the fact that the breach of that law had to be called to public attention by someone who felt wronged in that breach means it was not done openly. And there is no evidence that [the principal] even accepts the fact of her participation in the breaking of the rule, so she does not have the dignity of Dr. King's position.Wrong was done in the [City] Schools in the hiring of [the principal] to the position of Principal.

The selection committee acted unjustly in not applying the stated criteria, thus wronging the applicants, and probably some members of the public. [The principal] failed to exercise sufficiently responsibility in determining the details of the requirements for the position and the appropriate way to meet the requirement for the Master's Degree. Presenting herself as holding a degree to which she is not entitled may endanger the reputation, and possibly the accreditation, of the institution which she leads.

It is often difficult to determine how to right ethical wrongs. It would be a shame if [the principal]'s successful career as a teacher, mentor of teachers, and acting administrator were to end in embarrassment and result in her quietly disappearing like the kleptomaniac counselor. It is entirely possible that she was the best candidate for the job, and her possession of an embarrassing Master's Degree is an obstacle which might be overcome by the relevant body in [City] granting her a period of time to research the acquisition of a legitimate, honorable degree in her field so that she may end her career in the way she, and her supporters, would prefer.

This presumes the capacity for recognition of her part in the wrong-doing, and her willingness to take further action towards legitimizing her employment. It is probably too much to address the question of repaying the school district for the increment in salary retained during the time she served without appropriate credential, although that may come up.

It is to be hoped that the basic values of honesty, responsibility, and justice will be upheld in the ultimate resolution of this case. By doing so, we do the best we can as individuals to maintain the moral strength of our communities.

Copyright © 2001 Degree.Net




BOOKS BY DR.JOHN BEAR AND OTHER AUTHORS AVAILABLE FROM www.AMAZON.COM AND OTHER REPUTABLE BOOK DISTRIBUTORS FROM THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.


Degree Mills: The Billion-dollar Industry That Has Sold Over A Million Fake Diplomas by Allen Ezell and John Bear (Paperback - Jan 2005)

Fighting diploma mills by degrees.(News and Trends): An article from: Security Management by Michael A. Gips (Jul 14, 2006)

Diploma Mills: Degrees of Fraud (American Council on Education/Oryx Press Series on Higher Education) by David Wood Stewart and Henry A. Spille (Hardcover - Oct 1988)

Bears' Guide to College Degrees by Mail and Internet by John Bear (Paperback - Mar 1, 2004)

Bears' Guide to the Best Education Degrees by Distance Learning by John Bear, Mariah Bear, Tom Head, and Thomas Nixon (Paperback - Mar 1, 2004)

Degree Mills: The Billion-dollar Industry That Has Sold Over A Million Fake Diplomas by Allen Ezell and John Bear (Paperback - Jan 2005)

Bears Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning (Bear's Guide to Earning Degrees By Distance  Learning by Mariah P. Bear and Thomas Nixon (Paperback - Jan 1, 2006)

Bears' Guide to College Degrees by Mail and Internet by Mariah Bear and Mariah P. Bear (Paperback - Jun 1, 2005)