BTW, Davidsons school was run by the dubious John Tulip lol and Dr Dennis Muhilly. Davidsons school a/k/a fake American University of Suriname, ostensibly
in South America, with its German-based web site in English, mba-study.de. The
two names on the website and the pictured diploma are Dennis Muhilly (associated with the
fake Eire International University, the curious APICS accrediting agency, La Jolla University, and other wonders),
and John Tulip (who has been associated with Mellen University)
===============================================
groups.google.com
May 13th/2000.
Here is a partial email message to myself from John Bear on the subject
of "APICS", written and
mailed on May 13th 2000: (Bear writes as follows): I can think of
nothing positive to say about APICS,
Earon. The long-time involvement of Denis Muhilly, who has been
associated with 3 or 4 places that
I have no problem calling degree mills (e.g., Eire International
University) does not help. Nor does the
fact that when I contacted the only findable American who was listed as
one of their board people
(a professor at Stanford), he was outraged to learn that they were using
his name.
I have conveyed such information (more than four months ago) to Les
Carr, regarding Senior U,
and I am troubled by that connection. (end of comments from John Bear).
John states that Dennis Muhilly, one of the principals behind APICS is
now also operating the
American University of Suriname, another fake school. On 4/16/2000 John
Bear provided other
information on Dennis Muhilly, on alt.distance.ed, a Usenet newsgroup
that focuses largely on
scams in higher education and degree/diploma mills:
(Bear writes as follows): I guess you can't keep a bad man down. Or two
in this instance.
Comes now the new and fake American University of Suriname, ostensibly
in South America,
with its German-based web site in English, mba-study.de. The
two names on the
website and the pictured diploma are Dennis Muhilly (associated with the
fake Eire International
University, the curious APICS accrediting agency, La Jolla University,
and other wonders),
and John Tulip (who has been associated with Mellen University) (finish
of comments from John Bear).
Bear has written on the totally illegal and fraudulent Mellon University
for many years, going back
into the 1980's.
And finally, on 05/13/2000, Bear comments on alt.education.distance,
about how bogus accreditors
"accredit" well-known schools without their knowledge. According to Bear
APICS is one of the
"accreditors" that engage in this practice. Bear was replying to
comments about how WAUC
(another bogus accreditor) claimed to have accredited the totally
legitimate and private Universidad
de las Am ricas in Costa Rica.
(Bear writes as follows): I'm not personally familiar with this school,
but it sounds like the classic
scam that other fraudulent accreditors such as APICS and the bogus
agency that Columbia State
set up to accredit itself. The accreditor (in this case, WAUC) bestows
unwanted and unrequested
"full accreditation" on a couple of legitimate schools, often without
even letting them know that
they've been granted the dubious honor. Then, the accreditor can point
to the one or two legit schools
in their roster and say "See!! We accredit legitimate programs!!". Snell
at Monticello (a fraud artist recently
convicted of running the totally fraudulent Monticello U.) fraud used
weasel-word language with APICS
accreditation, something to the effect of "APICS-accredited schools are
viewed as equivalent to regionally
accredited programs", which was true of the two schools that APICS
bestowed accreditation without
being requested to do so... but, of course, it was true because the
schools were already legitimate,
not because of APICS. If you have any connections at the Universidad de
las Am ricas, I would highly
recommend notifying them that WAUC is a scam so they can take action to
have themselves removed
from WAUC's list (end of comments from John Bear).
My Post to CPU's Alumni Board (cc'd to SUI and Les Carr of CPU) on the
National Post article on
Senior U. (titled "Canada's National Post Calls Senior U. a Degree Mill"
To my recent surprise and shock the following article blasting Senior
University International
as a degree mill recently appeared in Canada's "National Post" - a major
Canadian daily
newspaper. I hope CPU takes a long hard look at the implications of this
upcoming merger
with SUI. Speaking subjectively, I personally do not wish to be seen as
associated with any
institution that is perceived publicly as a degree mill or otherwise
perceived as dubious. If CPU
should ever recover its reputation I hope it takes care to guard it with
due diligence and enter
only into associations that will serve that goal.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
National Post Article:
Saturday, June 03, 2000 Would you like a degree with that pizza? That's
Dr. Seeman to you, by
Neil Seeman National Post Charles Rex Arbogast, The Associated Press.
You won't get anything
like this from a diploma mill. In fact, you may have trouble finding any
campus at all. A flustered
Janet Reno, the U.S. Attorney-General, this week urged Ministry of
Justice officials to study the
issue of false credentials after investigators were able to buy phony
accreditations from online
diploma mills. Government investigators had used fake I.D.s obtained on
the Internet to get past
security at 19 federal agencies, at the Pentagon and at two airports.
According to John Bear, the
credentials-for-cash problem is hardly unique to the United States.
Bear, the co-author of Bears'
Guide to Earning Degrees Nontraditionally, has been waging a one-man war
against diploma mills
for more than 20 years. One of his discoveries is that Canada has become
home to numerous
fly-by-night institutes of higher learning, many of which go to great
lengths to avoid the limelight.
"Several use addresses outside Canada such as Mellen University -- run
from Toronto with an
address in New York -- and Nova College (a.k.a. Farelston and Nova
College), run from Edmonton
but with addresses in Utah and the Channel Islands. And there is the
dreadful one-man Washington
University, run from Burnaby, B.C., but with an address in St. Louis
(where the real Washington
University is)," Bear notes. Diploma mills specialize in selling dubious
credentials, in law enforcement,
medicine, the humanities, almost anything. It is a lucrative business:
With hardly any overhead expenses,
the diploma mill industry worldwide is estimated at more than
US$200-million a year, with single schools
earning between US$10-million and US$20-million annually. Of course,
such institutions cater to our
obsession with credentials. In our ostensibly meritocratic society, the
right letters after one's name
open the same doors that a family name or connections alone once did.
Hence the scandals of recent
years involving people like Jag Bhaduria, the former Ontario Liberal MP
who was ousted from the party's
caucus in 1994 when it was learned he didn't have a law degree as he had
stated, or Jane Fulton, whose
fleeting career as Alberta's deputy health minister came to an abrupt
end in June, 1996, after it was
discovered she overstated her academic laurels. People like Bhaduria and
Fulton attract attention for
claiming degrees they didn't have. But Bear and other observers say that
thanks to the Internet, there
is now an enormous, burgeoning industry that makes it increasingly easy
for determined resume-burnishers
to obtain actual -- if meaningless -- degrees. Inspired by Reno's call
to action, I decided to compile my
own anti-guide to Canada's universities. My goal? To discover what is
the absolute worst, bedrock bottom,
school in Canada. The only difficulty was realizing just how stiff the
competition would be. --- Simply to
get in touch with a Canadian diploma mill, whose typical life span is
three months, you need to find an
anonymous source posted on an Internet newsgroup, send an email to the
source, then arrange for a
telephone call with a designated "career counsellor" on an untraceable
phone. It's all very mysterious --
and deliberately so. Why the secrecy? Most Canadian diploma mills live
in perpetual fear of periodic
CSIS investigations and journalistic exposes on shows such as 60
Minutes, which has run a documentary
on the subject. Hardly any have listed phone numbers. Alberta's Nova
College, for example, has a lone
post office box in the middle-class Calgary suburb of Northland Village.
(The extreme may be Harrington U.:
Run from California, it has its mailing address at a mailbox service in
London, its bank is in Limassol, Cyprus,
and its printing plant is in Jerusalem.) Senior International
University, however, which is located in Richmond,
B.C., with a business Office at the Lifelong Learning Center in
Evanston, Wyo., prides itself on being a
"university of open doors," according to the mission statement posted on
its Web site (www.senioru.edu).
Senior is what Bear calls a "grey area" school, offering wildly dubious
degree programs under the trappings
of authenticity. Nusri Hassam, the school registrar, puts it slightly
differently: Senior, she said, simply offers
"a highly individualized model." "If you're lucky," she said, "you can
train with the eminent Dr. Hassam himself."
Dr. Abdul Hassam, she informed me, was a world-renowned authority in the
paranormal. "You know, like Fox
Mulder of The X-Files." As a test of Senior's exacting standards, I
decided to adopt a persona with the worst
academic record I could think of. "Holden Caulfield. What a most curious
name," Ms. Hassam said when
I pretended to be J.D. Salinger's sardonic anti-hero and enquired about
the university's "school of
consciousness studies and secret traditions." (Last time anybody heard
from the protagonist of The
Catcher in the Rye, he had flunked out of high school after losing the
foils for the fencing team, of which
he was captain, on the Long Island subway.) Being Holden Caulfield, it
turned out, was no barrier whatsoever.
But could they grant me a PhD in psychology; specifically, in alien
studies? "No problem," said Ms. --"Ahem,
that's Doctor, actually" -- Nusri Hassam, who is an admitted acolyte of
Dr. Abdul Hassam, "who is very much
into consciousness-studies." Nusri Hassam explained that for a fee in
the $1,000-plus range -- which is
often negotiable -- students write a one-to-three-page proposal about
their preferred course of study. The
student is then placed under the tutelage of a like-minded mentor, asked
to complete a series of readings,
and then rigorously assessed, in a kind of "academic defence," on his or
her knowledge of those readings --
over the phone or on e-mail. "If you put in a tremendous amount of
work," the registrar said, "you can get
your degree in alien studies in one year." "Is this a joke?" I asked.
"No, we're officially recognized by the
PPSUC, a degree-granting authority," she explained, "under the auspices
of the state of Wyoming." "What
about the fact I never even really graduated from high school?" I asked
Judy, Senior International's receptionist.
"No problem! We evaluate the whole person," she explained chirpily. "We
have lots of students who have taken
different programs in different places. But without high-school, things
may take a little longer," she conceded.
"How much longer?" I asked in a tone of grave concern. "At the very
longest, a year," she quickly reassured
me. Senior's modus operandi is illustrative of what most diploma mills
offer: negotiable fees, super-accommodating
administrative staff and hilariously light-weight academic standards. In
that regard, Senior is following in the proud
tradition of what may be Canada's best-known and most ambitious diploma
mill, Calgary's "College of Technology,"
which shut down two years ago after a flurry of customer complaints.
Calgary Tech offered bachelor's degrees,
master's degrees and doctorates for the bargain-basement price of $275
apiece -- which would have made it the
best deal around for a quick and dirty degree if it still existed. The
campus literature described the dean, Colonel
R. Alan Munro, as "Canada's premier Aeronaut." (As hard as I tried, I
could not find the definition of an 'aeronaut'
in any English dictionary. It is doubtless a prestige profession.) "The
Calgary College of Technology was run out
of Spiro's Pizza Parlour," says Bear, describing the school's uniquely
studious environment. He proffers jokingly
that "PhD" actually stood for "Pizza, Home Delivery." Today, the torch
of academic excellence has passed from
Col. Munro to Egbert Phipps, MD, PhD, MSc, BSc (all degrees from the
London-based Royal Society of Health),
who runs the Alternative Medicines Research Institute (AMRI) in
Vancouver. How does the Institute compare to
Senior? Phipps promises prospective students a doctoral degree in
alternative medicine as fast as they can
dispatch their resume and a letter detailing their enthusiasm and
research experience in the much-misunderstood
field of the "laying on of hands." "Many people don't hold much stock in
the laying on of hands," explains Phipps.
"But not me, I'm a huge believer." After interested students fire off
the required paperwork, AMRI promises two
standard transcripts, complete with concocted grades, and an official
letter confirming successful completion of
the degree requirements. All this costs only $650 -- one of the best
bargains anywhere, and easily besting Senior.
"Our awards-granting committee just met last week," said Phipps, "and we
agreed that most doctoral programs
charge too much money and insist on way too much study for a degree. So
we decided to lower our price substantially,
" he said invitingly. But what kind of a job can students expect with a
PhD in holistic medicine from the Alternative
Medicines Research Institute? "Well, when it comes to laying on of
hands, most of us are self-employed," sighed
Phipps. "Although," he added hopefully, "the trend these days is to move
toward group practice." A mere week
after speaking with Phipps I received a congratulatory letter embossed
with a fake gold stamp. My voice mail and
e-mail mentioned my real first name, and I was forced to use "Neil" in a
series of back-and-forth messages to the
Institute to prove my bona fides: So Phipps's letter was addressed to
"The Most Honourable Doctor Neil Caulfield."
I had passed already! Even without seeing any of my qualifications,
Phipps was "pleased to convey the
recommendation of The Board of Directors and Trustees to award you the
Doctor of Philosophy degree specializing
in Holistic Medicines." My telephone manner had clearly impressed him.
But he would be even more impressed,
he wrote, if I shelled out US$550 for the "Committee's review fees" in
addition to "processing and graduation fees"
of US$100. Since Calgary Tech is now defunct, this means AMRI is the
best deal in Canada for a quick and dirty
degree. When he's not busy laying on hands, it seems, Phipps runs
another Vancouver-based diploma-mill,
George Washington University, Inc., which offers degrees at the
Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate levels --
also without the irritation of real coursework. Yet despite the best
efforts of Phipps and others, Canada is still
in grade school compared with the United States when it comes to diploma
mills. Though doubtless wacky,
places like Senior and the Alternative Medicines Research Institute are
fairly innocuous in their marketing and
basic pedagogical methods (i.e. qualifications + money =
matriculation). By contrast, U.S. institutions like
Century University enjoy putting subtle ads -- "Many fields; no classes;
NO COST evaluation!" -- in such
venerable publications as The Economist. Kathy, a receptionist at
Century's head office (really a suite in
Albuquerque, N.M.), assured me, back in the persona of Holden, that my
abysmal performance in high
school was no barrier to obtaining a bachelor's degree in one year and a
doctorate in two. "Don't worry,
Mr. Caulfield. You sound really intelligent. And you say you've got work
experience? Don't worry, we
account for all of that stuff," she cooed. Eric Hecksler, the dean of
psychology at Honolulu's Pacific Western
University, one of the granddaddies of diploma mills, told me he had
just the ticket. Hecksler, who
professes to be a "Stafford-educated psychologist," advised me he "knows
all about interpersonal
relationships, and gender stuff too, possibly the most important field
of psychology today." The best
part about the Pacific Western degree is that, within just 48 hours --
assuming you have sufficient personal
experience of course -- you will know how soon you can get your
doctorate degree. Which can take as
little as six months, maybe less, said Dr. Hecksler. The downside? You
have to pay US$5,000 and write a
gruelling 35-page thesis. (A real PhD, even at many of the elite U.S.
Ivy League schools, may not even cost
that much, once you factor in scholarships, teaching stipends, bursaries
and grants. But a real doctorate
requires serious work: usually two years of coursework and periodic
teaching stints, followed by two years
of writing an original thesis, which must be defended before a committee
of senior academics in the field.) An
even better option for Holden might be a combined bachelor's, master's,
and doctorate degree in metaphysics,
to be completed in a year or less. That is the latest offering from the
University of Metaphysics in Studio City,
Calif., whose administrator, Shirley Lawrence, calls it an "unbelievable
deal." I agreed. Yet it's not quite as
unbelievable as The Bernadean University, in Chatsworth, Calif. -- it
used to offer its graduates a doctoral
certificate absolving them of all their past sins. Aside from elusive
hopes of salvation, and the cheap and
exponential marketing power of the Internet, why do diploma mills
prosper so? Psychologists generally
agree that people lie about their credentials in order to be more
accepted in society. Diploma mills, it
seems, answer that visceral need. Holden Caulfield, describing his high
school, Pencey Prep, gets
closest to this truth: "You probably heard of it. You've probably seen
the ads, anyway. They advertise in
about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse
jumping over a fence." No
matter who we are, it seems, we all strive to be that guy on the horse,
the phony with the gleaming smile
and the perfect hair and the beautiful girl hugging him from behind --
even if we know him to be a chimera.
Is that so bad? Probably not. But one thing diploma mills teach is that
a piece of paper alone may not
necessarily cure us of our insecurities. Perhaps the one thing they do
sell is the true meaning of caveat
emptor -- a phrase first put in print in 1523 by Sir Anthony
Fitzherbert. He was, according to his biographer,
an Oxford-educated judge -- even though no evidence of this exists. |
