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State of the Profession: Tarnishing the Image
By Martin D. Snyder
If you are already having a bad day, you probably don’t want to visit the Web site of University of Illinois physics professor George Gollin. On his site, Gollin exposes scores of online “universities” that grant degrees despite their lack of faculty, staff, and actual course offerings. For a buck—well, actually a few thousand—these sham universities will transmogrify your “life experience” into credits, transcripts, degrees, and some very fancy looking diplomas. The latest addition to this rogues’ gallery is the University of Berkley , styled a “diploma mill” by Pennsylvania attorney general Tom Corbett, who is trying to shut it down.
Though UB’s potentially misleading name allegedly stems from Berkley, Michigan, the school’s headquarters are actually located in an industrial park in Erie, Pennsylvania. (On its Web site, the UB disclaims affiliation with the University of California, Berkeley.) The University of Berkley offers associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees for a flat installment rate with a discount for prepayment. There are also bargain combination packages with bachelor’s and master’s or master’s and doctoral degrees. UB offers more than 160 degrees, though those listed on its Web site are only samples. Self-designed “student generated” degrees are available. UB offers honorary degrees for a minimum $2,000 “honorarium.” The Web site displays an honorary degree allegedly conferred on former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
According to the institution’s Web site, “the University of Berkley is not accredited by one of the seven regional accrediting agencies recognized by the United States Department of Education. The University is not accredited by any accrediting agency recognized by the United States Department or Secretary of Education. The University of Berkley is however fully accredited by NAPFEW (New Millennium Accrediting Partnership For Educators Worldwide).” According to Attorney General Corbett, NAPFEW is a business owned and operated by Dennis Globosky, a former New Mexico state police officer, who holds a diploma from an Erie County high school. Globosky also owns and runs UB; he refers to himself as “Dr.” Globosky, director of academic administration.
The University of Berkley, according to its Web site, “does not offer course work per se.” What it does provide are titles, descriptions, and syllabi of a large number of courses from accredited academic institutions. UB students are instructed to use the creative work and research of faculty at accredited institutions to convert their “life experience” into equivalent academic credits. The university claims that its more than 12,000 degrees awarded are “accepted worldwide by a number of institutions, businesses and organizations.” Among those listed on the UB Web site are Cambridge University, Lausanne University, the Gestalt Institute, the Arcane School, the Pasteur Institute of Iran, Harvard Business Services, the American Psychological Association, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History.
All of this might be humorous if it were not so very sad. If the Pennsylvania attorney general is successful, thousands of people will discover that they have utterly worthless degrees. The more gullible who actually believed that higher education degrees could be bought and sold like supermarket commodities will be sorely disappointed. Others whose intentions in purchasing a sham degree were not so innocent and who used their UB credentials to deceive have reason to be apprehensive. In the words of the attorney general’s complaint, “Defendants knew their worthless, fraudulent degrees, phony accreditation, bogus faculty, falsely portrayed physical facilities . . . would be used to mislead employers.” Jobs, promotions, and certifications acquired with UB degrees will be in jeopardy, a comfort, though a small one, to those of us who worry how many University of Berkley degree recipients may hold critical health care, engineering, technology, or security positions.
And then there is the damage to the profession and to the cause of higher education in general. At a time when the academy is besieged by ideologues, bottom-line cost cutters, and self-serving politicians, we really don’t need the public to think that higher education is just another con game where bunco artists swindle the innocent and conspire with the devious. Legitimate institutions and the faculty whose talents lend them luster do not deserve to have their reputations tarnished by the likes of UB. Some states, like Maine , Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas are taking the expanding diploma mill problem seriously. We need to urge others follow their lead.
Martin Snyder is AAUP director of planning and development.
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