Here’s the newly elected mayor of Balch Springs, Texas, Dr. Carrie Gordon. Dr. Carrie, who always calls herself Dr., positively boasts on her campaign web page that she earned the right to call herself Dr. because she got a doctorate at Columbia Pacific University — a notorious, now-defunct diploma mill.

Here’s another campaign web page, in which Dr. Carrie announces her victory in the contest for mayor by saying All Praises and glory to God Almighty!!!

Which makes UD worry a tad about the separation of church and state in her administration. But UD doesn’t live in Balch Springs, so it’s not that big a deal for her…

The Dallas Morning News reports that more and more people are beginning to question that pesky, illegal Ph.D.

…When she ran for mayor of Balch Springs this year, Gordon used the title of “doctor” extensively – including more than 20 times on her campaign Web site, on campaign signs and T-shirts, and in campaign filings. She’s listed on the Balch Springs City Council’s Web site as doctor.

Gordon did not respond to requests for comment.

Columbia Pacific appears on the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s list of “institutions whose degrees are illegal to use in Texas.

I think Dr. Carrie should respond to requests for comment. She should say what her hundreds of outed diploma mill precursors say at this point in the process: I will not dignify this smear with a response.

If she follows the well-worn path of all the shabby fake Drs. in this country, she’ll continue with variants of this for awhile: It’s sad that my political foes feel compelled…

After that, the comments will be like this: I’m far too busy doing the people’s work to respond to …

As things heat up for her, Carrie Gordon can be expected to say I entered that program in good faith, worked my butt off for it, and am the victim of a scam.

If things get even hotter, here’s what she’ll say: I was a young, hard-working wife and mother. I had no time to attend a traditional university. If in my haste to improve myself through higher education I made some wrong moves, I apologize to my constituents.

She will graciously announce at the next council meeting that the residents of Balch Springs no longer need feel obliged to address her as Dr.

Not that UD‘s telling these schools anything they don’t know. Frank Tanzini used public funds to get a fake degree and then after the story broke (he was an Assistant Superintendent of Schools when it broke) Rowan and Ramapo gave him faculty appointments.

Here’s his listing at Rowan. Here he is at Ramapo.

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If you’re thinking of going to Ramapo or Rowan, don’t. Their professors are frauds.

If you already go to Ramapo or Rowan, transfer.

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UD thanks a reader for this story.

The latest from Naperville, where the new superintendent of schools graduated from a now-defunct diploma mill. The search firm that charged the taxpayers of the district for their services describes its methods.

… District 203 school board President Suzyn Price directed questions about Mitrovich to Hank Gmitro, an associate with Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, the search firm the district employed to help it find a new superintendent.

Gmitro said the firm was aware of what school Mitrovich attended and learned during a routine check several days ago that it was not accredited. He was unsure of whether the firm learned before or after the board approved hiring the new leader and said it’s typical to focus discussions with candidates more on their experiences….

Unsure whether they knew before or after the board took their recommendation whether he graduated from a pretend school.

… The result of these so-called budget pressures, as we try to educate increased numbers of students with ever-smaller budgets, is espousal by administrators of things like online education or larger class sizes or “distance” education despite evidence that these “changes” do not benefit students to the same extent as face-to-face education. For example, at one campus, administrators have encouraged faculty to teach yoked classrooms where the professor is only present in one but is broadcast to students in the other room — something tried and discarded in the ‘70s when TV teaching failed as an educational innovation.

I am regularly contacted by students at online universities seeking hands-on research experience in my lab, because it is not offered at their school and they cannot apply to graduate programs without it.

… This year I will be teaching face-to-face a class formerly taught only online. Students are grateful and tell me they hated the previous approach, that they avoid online classes whenever possible. Faculty who teach online have published studies showing that more faculty time is required to teach an online class effectively, not less, so class sizes cannot be increased even though there is no physical seat restriction.

But class sizes are increased and faculty thus are forced to teach less effectively. This kind of experience is being ignored by administrators because they care more about the efficiency of instruction than its quality. Then when professors point out these things, we are accused of resisting fundamental change, as if we have a collective personality flaw that makes us too rigid to recognize good ideas or “inevitability.” …

I hear you, baby.

A professor at a public university in California prefers to go unnamed in an Inside Higher Education piece about the poor white trash of education, online classes. The writer points out that among the spectacular advantages of online is that graduation rates at some schools improve markedly with them. This is largely because students can get a friend or family member who knows the material to take the course for them; or because the overworked person running the show isn’t very rigorous.

… But I mean I hear you when you complain that distance devotees call people who say the obvious out loud – these courses are dreck – rigid, flawed, regressive… Oh yeah.

You forget to mention the other thing, though – the thing for-profit distance devotees say about you and me: Elitist slime! You’re slamming the door to self-improvement shut in the face of people who have no option but to take out enormous loans they can’t pay back in order to sit at home and talk to a screen! That’s the only form of higher education available to these people, and you’re denying it to them!

Yeah. UD‘s heard them all. All the beautiful claims made for the superiority of a total separation between two human beings as one of them tries to learn something.

You know what that person learns? She learns that legitimate schools won’t accept her expensive credits from for-profit online schools.

Let’s think about what might be in the mind of schools that consistently reject her credits. Let’s take our time…

Actually, we can do this fast. Reread this post’s headline.

People are always warning you against these things, but here’s one diploma mill grad who’s really going places!

… One by one, Gov. Crist has summoned the contestants on his not-so-short list of finalists to replace Mel Martinez. After private interviews, he’s trotted them out to stand before the cameras and publicly declare their admiration for Crist and to tout their assets.

… [Among the nine finalists for Senator is] State Rep. Jennifer Carroll of the Jacksonville-area. A conservative African-American Navy veteran, Carroll would surely earn Crist a huge burst of glowing national attention for looking like a new breed of Republican. But Carroll is no stand-out in the Legislature (and she once claimed an MBA from a diploma mill called Kensington University that was later ordered closed). She could be a risky, unpredictable choice.

Aw c’mon. It’s the last frontier! And after that, who knows? President?

… Yad Vashem.

Claims of Roman [Abramovich’s] pivotal strategic role in potentially ending the [Ukraine] war felt so fantastical that they might as well have cast him as some peacemaking chameleon, a very Zelig of international diplomacy. He was there at Westphalia in 1648, where he played some of his best treatying, and at Versailles in 1919, where he had an absolute shitter. And yet, many accepted and repeated the claims – performing ever more unpaid service in the reputation laundromat. Abramovich had bought himself yet another day of grace to add to the thousands and thousands of days of grace he has enjoyed in the UK since buying Chelsea [soccer club] in 2003…

Tomorrow Chelsea will host Newcastle, who are now owned by a group led by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia – but remember, those guys are the good autocrats, because they buy our weapons. And use them in a war in Yemen that has thus far gone on for seven years, killing or starving hundreds of thousands, the vast majority believed to be children under five. But of course, the sovereign wealth fund isn’t the same as the Riyadh government. They just have a good relationship with it, same as Roman Abramovich just has a good relationship with Putin. “Which owner knows the guy who’s killed more babies?” is a question you won’t be seeing on any banners at Chelsea-Newcastle.

Marina Hyde, The Guardian

Okay, so that’s one North Carolina taxpayer unhappy to be subsidizing a diploma mill.

We’ll keep count here at University Diaries.

… is a classic disorder among degree fraudsters.

UD‘s been saying for years that if you want to get by with a diploma mill degree or just a degree you made up out of your head, you need to keep your sheepskin stats low.

UD understands it’s tempting, as long as you’re manufacturing your own awards, to give yourself three or four or five. But the danger is that if anyone investigates you, all those PhDs will look odd.

Currently a lad of 31, Jason Walker “taught three undergraduate courses, as well as one graduate course” in some medical subject or other at the University of Victoria. This was in 2006, so he was what? 27? But already at 27 he had ” two or three doctorates in forensic and behavioural sciences and medical epidemiology.” These and earlier degrees were from a variety of schools:

Among the academic institutions Walker has claimed to have studied at are the University of Victoria, the University of Calgary, McMaster University, the University of Toronto, Yale University and Smith College.

Smith College is an all-women liberal arts institution in Massachusetts.

I guess he liked the anonymity of the name Smith.

Anyway, Walker recently gave expert advice in some child custody thing in Canada, and someone in some office checked up on him, and now he’s in deep Vancouverian doodoo.

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Update:

… [P]olice became suspicious about his academic background when someone looked closely at a University of Toronto degree on his office wall, spokeswoman Sgt. Julie Fast said.

“It says it’s a Ph.D. in ‘philiosthy.’ That is how it’s spelled,” she said…

UD says philiosthy is a variant of philioque, itself a variant of filioque. This was a theology degree.

“If I don’t act fast enough to save your life, prevent you from getting septic, I could be liable for civil cases … malpractice. But if I act too quickly and I’m not 100% certain that the patient is going to die from the complication she’s sustaining, then I could be guilty of a felony.”

… [Idaho] allows certain family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000 if the procedure breaks the abortion law.

Doctors in those cases also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges and even prison time.

Beyond that, Idaho’s governor also signed a law that says anyone helping a minor travel out of state to terminate a pregnancy – without parental consent – is guilty of a crime.

… [F]ive of the nine remaining full-time maternal-fetal medicine physicians in the state will have left by the end of this year.

… Jim Souza, the chief physician executive at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Boise, told CNN: “We’re at the beginning of the collapse of an entire system of care.”

… And because there are no ob-gyn residencies in Idaho, finding doctors willing to relocate given the abortion laws on the books is a real challenge.

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But God never closes a door without opening a window! Idaho will soon be America’s ground zero for diploma mill grads! Recent graduates of the Lake Natron School of Medicine will flock to the state, where desperate hospitals will snap them up. And all will be well.

Diploma mills once charmed me; in the early years of this blog, I couldn’t get enough of bogus outfits that would, in exchange for a few thousands, hand you a suitable-for-framing certificate attesting to your having earned a PhD. In our simulacral era, it’s a way-thriving con.

California Coast University remains a prominent diploma mill, with one particularly prominent purchaser: The Trumplover who – amazingly – remains Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, continues to put “PhD” after his signature, and continues – like all pathetic diploma mill grads – to insist that everyone call him doctor.

His main function in the job – currently getting all sorts of media attention – is withholding Trump-incriminating documents from Congress. Congress has had enough of it, and has written to him asking that he recuse himself from January 6-related probes.

So UD’s gonna go on record with the following: The letter writers won’t hear a peep out of Doc Cuffari, currently hunkered down in his office engaged in the same self-comforting activities mad Mark Meadows engaged in as scads of desperate staffers begged him to talk to the president about the ongoing rape and pillage of the Capitol. With his bogus degree and Trumplove and paranoid silences Joseph Cuffari has constructed a personal fantasy world as fragile as that of Blanche DuBois, and like her he will be carried out in a straitjacket.

A blog like this one, which features a much-used category titled Beware the B-School Boys, welcomes a bunch of new books with titles like Nothing Succeeds like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools and Leadership BS. Also a bunch of new opinion pieces with titles like We Should Bulldoze the Business School. Very nice.

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UPDATE: Right on cue. A perfectly timed news item on the subject just broke, and it’s being widely covered for all the wrong reasons. Everyone’s hyperventilating about a photogenic go-getter abundantly and shamelessly lying her way into a high-profile job in the current… troubled federal government. Said she went to schools she didn’t go to. Bought her degree from a diploma mill. (Read this page while you can.)

But as you know if you read this blog in its infant days, diploma mills (see that UD category) are a permanent structural reality of all countries. It’s a quirk of the United States that when people here find out you bought your college or graduate degree they actually get upset and do something about it. Most countries don’t care. This is why you want to wait til you get back to the States for that surgery.

So the fact that Mina Chang is a diploma mill grad who claims on her cv to have graduated from Harvard is a ho-hum revelation. Generous chunks of the military, fire departments, and public education are all milled up. Why those locations in particular? Because if you demand an advanced degree for job advancement, people will, er, advance them.

No: The real story lies here:

According to her educational history on LinkedIn, Chang writes that she took part in an “Executive Nonprofit Leadership” program at Southern Methodist University in Texas.

The Non Profit Leadership Certificate Program is a six-day program with a $900 fee.

That’s right, kiddies: Leadership BS at nine hundred (with travel, etc. let’s make it an even thousand) for SIX DAYS. Can you imagine the amazing leadership bs you’re getting for that moolah? Reminds ol’ UD of this 2011 six day New Zealand bs leadership seminar (run by a diploma mill grad – beginning to see the synergy?) that cost around $13,000 dollars in American currency. Or, closer to home, there’s this (quoting meself in a 2010 post about leadership bs seminars paid for by the federal government):

The Center for Creative Leadership doesn’t just have a great name.  It’s located on ONE LEADERSHIP PLACE, Greensboro, North Carolina.  Its street is a leader. This alone perhaps warrants a certain premium for leadership trainees who, even as their rented cars pull up to CCL headquarters, can sense that the very ground upon which they motor is imbued with leadership.

A five-day leadership course at the CCL will cost you between $6200 and $10,600.

And that’s not all, folks! Here’s another example of your tax dollars at work, again from a 2010 post:

[Let’s see what] the Kennedy School is charging these days for their Senior Executive whatever — all of it paid by the government.  The school has just raised the tuition.  It now costs almost $20,000 for four weeks… The costs for this and similar four-week courses offered by other outfits the Office of Personnel Management uses are 460% higher than all costs for one month at an average private American university.

As Michael Kinsley once wrote, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal. That a hyper-ambitious young person would survey Trump University World and come to certain conclusions is no scandal. That the federal government enables, and schools like Harvard exploit, the leadership racket is, if you ask UD, scandalous.

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Oh, whoops. Forgot the big shocking news item about Chang and that leadership program. Shockingly, she didn’t really attend it. Shockingly, she listed it on her resume but actually did not attend.

UD finds this admirable. I ain’t saying I’d hire the woman! But she definitely shows good sense here.

[Erwin] Sniedzins, who said he was on the hunt for a master’s degree to “validate” his professional and life experience, thought [Kings Lake University] was real.

“It felt like they were more legit than the other ones. Their website’s pretty good. And when you phone, you get someone there,” Sniedzins said.

After his experience was “validated” by the university, Sniedzins said he paid the $8,100 fee, and received a master’s degree in education, specializing in technology in education.

The university mailed him the degree and several other signed, stamped and apparently certified documents. He said he even received a graduation cap and gown.

Sniedzins repeatedly told CBC Toronto that he never suspected a degree based on life experience that required no academic work, studying or exams could be fake as it was in line with his approach to education.

… Any doubts Sniedzins may have had were also eased by what appears to be a sworn affidavit, included in his package of documents, supposedly signed by former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry.

“I really feel stupid if [it’s a diploma mill], and I’m angry about it,” Sniedzins said.

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UD thanks Jack.

And, Christopher Hitchens might had added, you don’t even have to go that far. Dave Bliss, notorious head basketball coach at notorious Baylor University, has been hired by yet another Christian school.

He broke rule after rule at the college level, even dragging the reputation of a murdered player through the mud, but none of that seems to matter … What are the students at Calvary Chapel Christian School supposed to think about all this? You can break every rule in the book and become synonymous with disgrace in coaching, but as long as you say you love Jesus, none of it matters?

No. They’re supposed to think that you have to say you love Jesus PLUS be a great basketball coach and none of it matters.

UD anticipates that with each new Bliss scandal and firing he’ll be hired by a Christian school with a longer name. He’s up to three adjectives at the moment – Calvary Chapel Christian – but UD has noticed that the scummier the diploma mill (these places exist to provide fake high school graduation records for athletes so they can be admitted to jockshops like Baylor), the longer and more feverishly pious its name.

So Bliss’s next stop will be Consecrated Calvary Chapel Christian School. Then Celestial Consecrated Calvary Chapel Christian School. Then Chosen Celestial Consecrated Cavalry Christian School. Then Charismatic Chosen Celestial Consecrated Cavalry Christian School. Then Chaste Charismatic Chosen Celestial Consecrated Cavalry Christian School. Then Canaan Chaste Charismatic Chosen Celestial Consecrated Cavalry Christian School.

… it’s time for the feel-bad part.

The dull-witted Kansas public schools superintendent who showed gross negligence not only in hiring the scammer, but in condescendingly and aggressively defending her against his sharp-witted students should, UD believes, resign. He has brought international embarrassment to his district. Even after he was forced to fire the diploma mill grad, he noted, with persistent gullibility, that she “also has a teaching degree from the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England.”

It is clear that the superintendent’s education on matters of credentials is happening much, much too slowly.

He needs to go.

Actually, journalism students at Pittsburg High School in Kansas didn’t have to work all that hard to discover that their incoming principal (salary close to $100,000) had diploma mill degrees. They just did what the people in charge of educating Pittsburg’s high school students couldn’t bother doing: They checked her out online.

“If students could uncover this, I want to know why the adults couldn’t find this,” said their journalism advisor; and in response UD says: Check out the credentials of the people who were supposed to check her out. Public education (with charter schools right behind) is a notorious dumping ground for frauds who bought their degrees. This blog used to cover such cases, but there were so many of them, and they were so redundant in style and content, that I stopped doing that. Now I only cover fun diploma mill stories like this one, where students had to do the work of the superintendent, and everyone else in Pittsburg pulling down a good salary to do due diligence on behalf of public school students.

Worse, the local superintendent ignorantly and indignantly defended the diploma mill grad… Until he couldn’t anymore, presumably because of the outcry from parents, teachers, and students.

Now it’s a big national story.

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… Robertson was unable to produce a transcript confirming her undergraduate degree from the University of Tulsa …

UD thanks Janet for sending her this very detailed Washington Post account.

Back when she followed stories like this closely, UD always used to say that you could probably get away with buying or fabricating all of your degrees if you kept your head down. By which UD meant that modest diploma millers, content with anonymous mid-level employment in the military, the fire department, or public ed (America’s three big milltowns), will probably live out their lives quite comfortably, drawing reasonably good salaries on the basis of having spent five thousand dollars on a totally bogus BA and MA. It’s only when they rise enough in the world to merit the slightest degree of vetting (and even there, as the Pittsburg case, pre-journalism students, demonstrates, there probably ain’t gonna be much vetting) that diploma millers run a risk of exposure.

I don’t mean to suggest that America is overrun with diploma mill grads. Pakistan, yes. Saudi Arabia, definitely. Once Hungary finishes pushing Central European University out of that country, it will certainly have made itself a much friendlier home for diploma mill grads.

Most countries are chockful of bogus degree holders, from the president on down, and no one cares. No one in a position of responsibility in the public schools of Pittsburg Kansas cared. But UD will say this: America has fewer bogus degree holders than probably any other country; and America even occasionally unmasks and removes bogus degree holders. That is a remarkable, distinctive, fact about UD‘s homeland.

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You just can’t keep a good story down.

And that photo!

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Explanatory Update: Why, you ask, has UD said nothing about those other two immense stretches – as far as the eye can see – of American diploma mills?

Why has she not even bothered mentioning here our profuse and hilarious online godbots, grinding out bogus preachers?

Why has she failed to discuss our equally pious high school diploma mills, whose function is to grind out plausible transcripts which allow schools like today’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina, to admit their extraordinarily physically fit graduates? He got all A’s at Glorious and Merciful Supreme Master of the Playing Field Prep!

Why should ol’ UD waste time on these structural elements of modern American culture? We couldn’t have Touchdown Jesus without them.