So this Korean academic just got out of jail for embezzlement, and for forgery of a Yale doctorate. Here’s what she says about the doctorate in her just-published memoir:

In her book, she admits that someone else wrote the thesis for her, but says she never had any doubt about the authenticity of the degree. Yale confirmed the diploma was a forgery in 2007.

“Though I neither got the degree through hard work nor wrote the thesis by myself, I paid tuitions, submitted papers, finished a thesis defense in front of three Yale professors, not to mention that I passed graduation tests,” she writes.

I’m having some trouble unpacking this re: authenticity.

… China.

… on your graduate students or your many jealous competitors is SO the done thing. UD, who has covered reams of these stories over the years of her blog, sees it again and again. When pushed to the limit, when faced with evidence in a courtroom, academic members of what Boris Badenov called the Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union will swing wide, swing desperately…

The University of Copenhagen’s Milena Penkowa has lost her job and lost her criminal case.

She continues to insist that she did not attempt to “frame an innocent 24-year-old student assistant [for Penkowa’s own] embezzlement by fabricating documents, e-mails and account withdrawals in the student’s name.”

She’s a brain scientist… And it must be admitted that her behavior from the beginning of her remarkable fraud journey (type Penkowa in my search engine) has been a fascinating cerebral puzzle.

She faces another criminal case: She apparently lied about the rats she used in her experiments.

Rats. You can’t make this shit up.

Truly a bad week for German academia, with Baron zu Googleberg biting the dust, and now Professor Joachim Boldt, current holder of the world retraction record.

Why did he make up all of those studies? Why did he forge the names of his supposed co-authors?

He had financial interests in the plasma expander at issue.

Update on the Milena Penkowa science fraud story (background here):

[Former science minister Helge] Sander contacted several … university staff members to tell them that Penkowa’s suspension in the summer of 2010 was ”unacceptable” and that he would take the matter to the justice minister.

… [University of Copenhagen rector Ralf] Hemmingsen [says] he is ”surprised” and ”annoyed” that after the phone conversation between the two, Sander contacted other members of staff at the university to influence their decision on the matter.

It has now also emerged that Penkowa had an intimate relationship with a Science Ministry official.

In an editorial, the Sacramento Bee states the obvious truth about tax-siphoning, student-exploiting for-profit schools. The editors agree with the California Student Aid Commission that “the state [should] not give Cal Grants to students at for-profit colleges unless those colleges use some of their profits to provide student aid.”

The commission also called for denying grants to students at schools that fail to graduate sufficient numbers of students and whose students have an unacceptably high rate of default on student loans.

This is a new one on me. Apparently an online Chinese scam operation has copied a number of pages from Reed College’s website, changed each use of the word “Reed” to “Redwood,” and presented itself as the University of Redwood.

Officials at Reed suspect the site is part of a scheme to collect application fees from prospective students in Hong Kong and Asia. After collecting a fee, “a shrewd scammer could wait several weeks, then issue a rejection letter, and the student would never know,” said Martin Ringle, chief technology officer at Reed.

Instead of selling PhDs in a snap through online for-profit outfits – the way we do in the States – the Germans take the cumbersome “doctorate consultant” route:

… The consultants demand anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 euros to help aspiring doctorate holders with all the formalities and contacts needed to be accepted into a Ph.D. program – and more.

It’s the “more” that can cause problems, however. Doctorate consultants specialize in providing assistance in labor-intensive areas such as research and writing – tasks Ph.D. aspirants are normally expected to master on their own.

… [The firm] ACAD Write …employs around 250 staff and serves a customer base of 1,500. “Our clients are mostly managers, lawyers and others in the medical profession, who have little time. We help them optimize their time to earn a Ph.D….”

Well, the Germans will figure out that there’s a better, cheaper, quicker way to do it, and these firms will go under.

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It’s strange to think of a long, totally simulacral academic career, isn’t it? You buy all of your undergraduate papers; someone writes your doctoral thesis; firms like DesignWrite do all your publications; you outsource your grading to India… What am I forgetting? Is there any degree or activity associated with being an academic you can’t now just buy, or fob off on someone else, or onto some machine? Teaching? Teaching is showing films, having guest lecturers, organizing the kids into in-class discussion groups, having them present papers… And, if you really can’t avoid actually physically being in a room and talking, there’s always reading off of PowerPoints.

We don’t know who will write the definitive book about academia for our century. But we know what its title will be: She’s Not There.

A Veterans Affairs writer warns GIs.

Go to Google and search for “GI Bill schools.” The first link you get isn’t a page run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The first result is GIBill.com, and it uses the name of the most recognized public education program in existence to its financial benefit. It appears to be a legitimate site for information, but a cursory search of its privacy policy shows it is owned by an online marketing firm that, according to a major business publication, specializes in directing students to for-profit schools through its page. It’s a questionable marketing strategy that seeks to legitimize a page that serves little purpose other than to funnel student Veterans and convince them their options for education are limited to their advertisers.

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Update: Tom Ricks.

… administrators at the University of Copenhagen have – it’s claimed – been overlooking Milena Penkowa’s scientific fraud (misuse of grant money, irreproducible experimental results, etc.) for almost ten years.

It’s a strange story. Apparently after her doctoral thesis failed, the dean got a bunch of people outside the university to pass it.

Questions over Penkowa’s research began at least as early as 2002 with suspicions over her doctoral thesis. For instance, Sørensen says, Penkowa claimed to have performed experiments on around 1700 rats over several months. The committee rejected her thesis.

According to Sørensen, the university’s then dean of faculty Ralf Hemmingsen intervened and sought an external review of Penkowa’s thesis by two other researchers. They were critical of the committee’s decision, arguing that there was no clear evidence of research misconduct. Penkowa resubmitted her thesis to a different committee of researchers not based at the University of Copenhagen and passed, Sørensen says.

So at the University of Copenhagen you can pass your thesis by scraping together a bunch of people from somewhere to say it’s okay?

Here’s a letter from a bunch of scientists calling for an investigation.

… flaunt it.

Quite right. Universities can do what they like in terms of refunds and new courses, but they can’t avoid the damage that failure to check the academic credentials of their instructors does to their reputation. When students – like Hubbs up there – have to uncover the bogus backgrounds of their professors, universities have a lot of explaining to do.

The Monterey Institute of International Studies is a graduate school of Middlebury College. For years it’s enthusiastically employed a man whose grandiose claims about himself made students so suspicious that a group of them hit the internet and checked the guy out. He’s a fraud.

It’s scandalous that students, not fellow faculty or the administration, had to do the dirty work here. It’s embarrassing that it happened at a school that’s about security studies. Unable to detect an obvious fraud on their own campus!

Here’s a case where litigation is richly deserved. A parent of an autistic child “became suspicious [about the competence of her child’s therapist] and checked the online registry for the Behavior Analyst Certification Board. She could not find certification records for [Stacy] Lore. It took months for school and police officials to act, she said. [Lore worked for the Norwalk schools.]”

You sue for damages; and you sue to scare other school districts, so they won’t be tempted to blow off the business of checking credentials. It took this parent seconds to confirm that Lore was a fraud.

Lore has been sentenced to three years in prison.

… er… awkward position on the issue of higher education.

Every now and then University Diaries looks in on Harvard professor Joseph Biederman. She’s doing it today because he’s featured in a Duff Wilson article about the over-prescription of anti-psychotic drugs in this country.

… Documents produced in recent litigation and in congressional investigations show that some leading academic doctors have worked closely with corporate benefactors to expand the use of anti-psychotics.

The most well-known is Joseph Biederman… His studies, examining the prevalence of bipolar psychological disorders in children, helped expand practice standards, leading to a 40-fold increase in such diagnoses from 1994 to 2003. [Yeah you read dat right. Forty-fold.]

… Between 2000 and 2007, he also got $1.6 million in speaking and consulting fees — some of them undisclosed to Harvard — from companies, including makers of anti-psychotic drugs prescribed for children who might have bipolar disorder, a Senate investigation found in 2008.

Johnson & Johnson gave more than $700,000 to a research center that was headed by Biederman from 2002 to 2005, records show, and some of its work supported the company’s anti-psychotic drug, Risperdal. Biederman said that the money did not influence him and that some of his work supported other drugs.

… A Harvard spokesman said [Biederman is] still under review…

Yes, take your time reviewing him. He’s only been at it for a decade or so. Take another decade. There’s so much more he can do with Harvard’s prestige backing him up.