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"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
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(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, August 18, 2006

The Hon Justice Marcus R.Einfeld AO QC PhD...

...as he styles himself, helps us understand the mentality of many diploma mill graduates. A highborn Australian, he seems to have gotten a legitimate law degree and been a competent judge for a number of years. He's now retired, but he still calls himself a judge, which you're not supposed to do, and this stubborn bit of vainglory is our first piece of evidence as to what is wrong with the man.

The Hon Etc. falls squarely into the Egomaniac Conman diploma mill grad category. It wasn't enough for him to have merely college and law degrees; he must have PhDs, or people wouldn't be impressed. So he got a couple of them, and he describes them in his online personal material as simply being from the USA -- no university name is given.

Nobody examined this matter closely until a few weeks ago, when The Hon got a speeding ticket and instead of paying it said that an old friend from America was driving the car. Police tracked down the woman, and she turned out to have been dead for three years. The Hon then said no, no, not THAT American friend; another American friend with the exact same name... Only no one could find any other person fitting that description with that name.

So the merde's already hitting the ventilateur for The Hon (some of his businesses are in bankruptcy too), and now it turns out he has not one but two bogus advanced degrees:



FORMER judge Marcus Einfeld obtained a PhD degree from a university that has been debunked in the US Congress as a "diploma mill".


Pacific Western University, which awarded one of the two doctorates claimed by Mr Einfeld, was investigated by the USGovernment Accountability Office and named in Congress in 2004 for handing out doctorates for the flat fee of $US2595 ($3413).

The other doctorate is from the Century University in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is not accredited with the relevant American legal bodies.

University of Sydney law dean Ron McCallum said he had never heard of the two universities, but said doctorates issued by degree mills "are not worth the paper they are written on".


Mr Einfeld, a former Federal Court judge, is facing a fraud squad investigation into evidence he gave to a Sydney magistrates court last week that allowed him to avoid a $77 speeding fine.

He told the Downing Centre Local Court that at the time of the offence in January, he had lent his car to professor Teresa Brennan, who had been visiting from Florida.

It later emerged that Brennan, an Australian-born academic, had died in 2003.

He will be interviewed by fraud squad detectives next week. The NSW Police State Crime Command has been called in to investigate whether he gave false evidence in the case.

"Detectives attached to Strike Force Chanter have spoken with the retired judge's lawyers and now expect to interview him during the week commencing Monday, August 21," a NSW Police statement said yesterday.

In correspondence with the court, Mr Einfeld, who retired as a judge in 2001, styles himself as"The Hon Justice Marcus R.Einfeld AO QC PhD".

The accountability office told US Congress that Pacific Western University sold its PhD degrees for $US2595 ($3390).

It offered academic credit for "life experience" and did not require any classroom instruction, the office said.

Pacific Western University, which is based in San Diego, is not accredited by the American Bar Association or the Association of American Law Schools.

Century University, where Mr Einfeld says he holds a doctorate of law, is also unaccredited with the ABA or the AALS.

ABA accreditation is granted to law schools only after inspections and assessments of factors including staff-student ratios, academic research and law libraries, according to the chairman of the Council of Australian Law Deans, Michael Coper.

When Mr Einfeld was invited yesterday to discuss his recent troubles, he said: "You have got to be joking. Thank you for calling. Goodbye."

Sydney executive headhunter Peter Salt, of Salt & Shein, said anyone seeking a job on the basis of degrees from Pacific Western and Century universities "is obviously the wrong candidate".

"If they are not accredited or in the process of becoming accredited then it immediately sends alarm bells," Mr Salt said.

Specialist legal recruiter Elvira Naiman, of Naiman Clarke, said she was always surprised by people who paid for these sorts of qualifications as most employers rigorously checked a candidate's academic background.

An undercover investigator from the US accountability office visited Pacific Western and other "mills" and was told they were not in the business of allowing students to enrol for individual courses of training, according to an accountability office official, Robert J.Cramer.

He gave evidence to a US House of Representatives education committee in September 2004 about Pacific Western's cut-price degrees. It offers a bachelor of science for $US2295, an MBA for $US2395 and a PhD for $US2595.




I'm afraid The Hon's response to all of this - You've got to be joking - is not a particularly good one. True, he has brazened out his entire life thus far with marked success; but when things begin to unravel -- when there's a lot to unravel -- events move fast.

UD's advice is for The Hon to fake his own death and resurface in Las Vegas.