University Diaries » ‘”This person was hired before we had sophisticated methods to verify international degrees,” Aerospace spokeswoman Pamela Keeton said in a statement.’

So you’ve hired a guy who “had very poor writing skills” and doesn’t come to work much at all, spending most of his time in bars and at Disneyland. His time cards are fraudulent. He’s supposedly a fancy engineer working on your top secret satellite stuff under contract with the government, but you’re aware that he’s seldom there.

This paragon tells you he has a doctorate from Oxford University. He’s actually only a high school graduate; and, you know, he certainly doesn’t act like a person with a doctorate from Oxford. But you believe him because, as Ms Keeton up there says, you lacked the way sophisticated methods of verifying university degrees that we all, in a more enlightened time, now enjoy…

What? The guy worked for you from 2003 to 2008. The telephone (Pick it up. Call Oxford University. Or email Oxford University.) had already been invented. The method of verifying educational claims way back then was the same as it is now. Call the registrar. Or contact the British equivalent of these people. It’s not satellite science.

Ah, but Aerospace Corporation

was culpable [it just paid 2.5 million to settle Justice Department fraud allegations] because it knew that Hunter was not working the hours he submitted on his time card… The company profited from its employment of Hunter because it billed the government a higher hourly rate than it paid him…

Why look a gift horse in the mouth?

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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