BUCHANAN SLAMS DIPLOMA MILLS

LARAMIE -- Wyoming should be ashamed of “allowing online universities with no faculty and no curriculum to operate with impunity,” University of Wyoming President Tom Buchanan said Friday.

“There will always be people who want the credentials with a minimum of effort, and there will always be those who will provide them with a pretty parchment with ribbons in exchange for money,” Buchanan said at the annual honors convocation of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“At the University of Wyoming, we know we are not a business.”

Buchanan drew applause from the audience of honor students and their families when he said, “Congratulations to us for creating and developing and sustaining the University of Wyoming. Shame on us for allowing online universities with no faculty and no curriculum to operate with impunity in the state of Wyoming."

The UW president applauded those in the Legislature who are trying to raise the licensing requirements for such online institutions, rules he said are the lowest in the nation.

"There is a world of difference between getting a diploma and getting an education,” he said. “We don’t honor a piece of parchment. We honor the work that went into it.

“We must not believe that getting a degree from any online university that hangs up a shingle is the same as getting an education. We have a responsibility to discriminate between greatness and mediocrity.”

Buchanan said he was “concerned by the state of Wyoming’s reluctance to discriminate between the good and the bad” in licensing such schools. “A world of difference exists” between legitimate public and private universities “and the online charlatans who take your money for a worthless diploma.”

Such schools are springing up everywhere, he said, but nowhere is the climate better for them than in Wyoming.