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(Tenured Radical)

Monday, September 13, 2004

UNIVERSITY DIARIES SALUTES SUSAN ANDREWS AND JOHN CREED...


...two faculty members at the University of Alaska dismayed to discover that the incoming president of the faculty senate, a man still identified as Dr. Michael Hannigan on the university's website, bought his diploma mill Ph.D. from an outfit whose sole requirement is that you spend five days at a resort on St. Kitt's.

Andrews and Creed have sent a letter to the academic community calling for Hannigan's removal from the presidency of the senate. The faculty senate is "the primary creator and overseer of academic policy at the university," explains the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, so Hannigan will have a pretty free hand setting scholarly and ethical standards.

Andrews and Creed discovered Hannigan's fraudulent degree when they read about him in the Chronicle of Higher Education:



Michael Hannigan saw an advertisement for International University in a magazine. An associate professor of social work at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, he had never finished the Ph.D. program in family therapy at Florida State University and was looking for a way to get his degree.

The professor calls International "lightweight" and says he is "used to a bit more rigor in academic things." Still, he believes that his degree from the university is legitimate. "They have the same accreditation as Oxford has," says Mr. Hannigan.

Not quite. According to Dale Gough, director of International Education Services at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, the University of Oxford is recognized by the government of Britain, as are several colleges in the Caribbean. International University is not among them. Mr. Weisman says his institution is accredited by the government of Saint Kitts and Nevis, a recognition that experts like Mr. Gough and Alan Contreras, director of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization, a state agency, consider meaningless. After all, the Caribbean nation once accredited a university that doled out degrees for watching I Love Lucy and other sitcoms.




UD can't help being impressed by the willingness of so many bogus degree holders like Hannigan to chat openly about their educational history: how they came upon their doctoral institution in a magazine advertisement; how they spent such and such an amount of money to purchase the right to call themselves a doctor; how their institution continues to be misunderstood by a world of snarling elitists...

Anyway, if Hannigan had been reading University Diaries he might have spared himself this exposure, for UD has noted again and again that it's only when bogus degree holders rise too high in the academic world - when they become directors of institutes and presidents of senates - that they run into trouble. You want to keep your head down if your degree is dogshit.

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Update ten minutes later: No, UD is wrong. Dr. Hannigan has now been officially de-doctorated on the university webpage. This marks, methinks, the onset of serious merde/ventilateur stuff for our man Hannigan.