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Wednesday, June 23, 2004

UD’s DIPLOMA MILLS UPDATE


Republican Senator Susan Collins may be regretting some of what her government committee investigating university degree fraud, and in particular so-called “diploma mills” (illegal businesses which sell bogus BA’s, MA’s, and Ph.D.’s to purchasers who do no work for them) is turning up [for earlier UD posts on this subject, see entries for 3/29 and 5/12].

The committee’s zealous detective work has produced a list of contemporary and posthumous fake degree holders that is now making the rounds of American academia and shaking it to its foundations.

The names include a number of formerly sacrosanct thinkers, people whose reputation for probity and gravitas has long gone unquestioned. Shocked professors in the United States and abroad are scrambling to come up with answers as to how this could have happened, and what it means.




Perhaps the most stunning revelation involves Sir Isaiah Berlin, an intellectual and moral icon whose death a few years ago prompted hundreds of tributes, festschrifts, conferences, and books. A typical appraisal of Berlin appeared last year in the Guardian newspaper:


At the end of his long and remarkable life, Berlin began to be turned into a monument and a saint - albeit a very worldly, gossipy, Russian-Jewish saint. There were festschrifts edited by distinguished philosophers, great debates - not all of them admiring - over his work (particularly his concepts of liberalism and pluralism), and an exhaustive, long-term programme of collecting, editing, and republishing his scattered writings, by his executor Henry Hardy. After Berlin's death in 1997 at the age of 88, an outpouring of tributes was followed by Michael Ignatieff's affectionate, vivid biography (an essential companion to the letters).

Ralf Dahrendorf, for instance, called him the Erasmus of his time. Like Erasmus, he was "a great sage" who became "a kind of court intellectual"; he did not produce one single important work, "and is yet remembered for his brilliant and seminal ideas.”


A writer in the Boston Globe recently called Berlin “the most esteemed intellectual figure in the English speaking world.”




How then can it be that Berlin graduated not from Corpus Christi Oxford, as his curriculum vitae claimed, but rather from the similar-sounding, and now defunct (by court order) diploma mill, the University of England at Oxford? And that his Ph.D. in philosophy was granted on the basis of a one-page essay he wrote describing his “life experience” as a “a real pluralist” who “likes everyone”? (Quotations are taken from UEO records confiscated by the Department of Commerce.)

“It’s an intriguing story,” says Madelaine Jovovich, a member of Collins’s staff. “Berlin was born in Riga; his father was a timber merchant. His father was very unhappy that his son wanted to become an academic, because he wanted Berlin to go into the family lumber business… It turns out that this business was not just wood but wood products, including paper, and that Berlin’s father was, among other things, the proprietor of an early and very lucrative diploma mill, which his son did eventually agree to help run, so long as it could be kept quiet. The business was so successful that the Berlins opened a branch in Romania which continues to operate today.”

Given this new information, scholars are reviewing Berlin’s somewhat enigmatic life - in particular, his various overseas trips and contacts - with greater care. Even the Guardian columnist, writing before the story broke, noted that Berlin was a “chameleon-like” figure, a friend for instance of Guy Burgess, whom he knew to be “an amoral and risky character.”




Asked to comment about this new information, Berlin’s admirers were at a loss. “I’m speechless,” said Ronald Dworkin. “A real body-blow,” Michael Walzer wrote in an email. “I’ve got to figure he did it to please his father,” Thomas Nagel suggested.

Academics are bracing for what Senator Collins promises are further, equally staggering, revelations. “I can’t be definitive just yet,” she said to a reporter yesterday, “but I can tell you that we are scrutinizing Albert Schweitzer’s activities in Africa very carefully. The committee is also looking into allegations that one 'Karol Wojtyla' graduated not from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, as his cv claims, but from the University of Jagellionia at Fort Lauderdale.”