Christopher Hitchens, who wrote that sentence in an essay about Jerry Falwell, would have been fascinated by the brotherhood on view at Donald Trump’s latest rally, where Trump’s warm-up bigot, a loud-mouth diploma mill graduate (not Trump University; another diploma mill), shrieked that Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe in God and must be made to come to Jesus.

I wish Hitchens were here to describe this man.

As UD has long noted on this blog, if you’ve bought your diploma(s) from a diploma mill, or if you’ve forged your diplomas, you stand a chance of getting away with it if and only if you content yourself with a middling sort of place in the world. The minute you begin to rise, people start checking your credentials. If you want to go undetected, you must figure out a way to avoid or reject any career event that will make you an object of bureaucratic interest.

And yes, I’ve got a current example.

One Kimberly Kitchen practiced a little estate law out in the boonies for years without attracting any attention. Unfortunately, she did it so well that her firm decided to make her partner. The people reviewing her noticed certain, er, discrepancies in her paperwork, and began looking further.

According to her resumé, she graduated summa cum laude from Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh and had taught trust and taxation law at the Columbia University School of Law.

But the state attorney general’s office and a criminal complaint say none of her credentials hold up. Kitchen allegedly forged numerous documents attesting that she was a licensed attorney, including an attorney’s license for 2014, supposed bar examination results, supposed records of her law school attendance and a check purporting to show she’d paid her registration fees.

A forger’s work is never done. But Kitchen could have stayed in Permanent Forge mode for many more years were it not for her apparently unblockable worldly success. That’s what did her in.

Women could learn a lot from guys like these. The Jersey Honors List includes an old familiar face around here – James Wasser, diploma mill grad par excellence – but it’s good to get acquainted with his fellow scholars.

[He] duly provides a résumé listing an imaginary master’s thesis (“The Bergsonian Conception of Time in the Contemporary Novel”) and an “interrupted” doctoral dissertation (“Introduction to a Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness”). On a separate form, he describes his service [he was in fact a fascist collaborator] in a resistance group during the war…. When his transcript arrives, from the Free University of Brussels, he doctors it to appear that he got his degree…

University Diaries is always interested, as you know, in academic frauds – diploma mill grads, credentials-conjurers, etc. – and no one fits the bill better than Paul de Man. (UD was his student at the University of Chicago, and writes about it here.)

But Youth Wants to Know – What the hell? Why was he an academic God?

I don’t think it was his essays on literature, although the essays very cleverly reveal the way poetic assertions and poetic structures always seem uncontrollably to contain their own idea- and coherence-dissolving refutations. The essays very cleverly reveal the way this inescapable linguistic dissolution-operation applies just as much to the critic who thinks she’s interpreting literature as it does to the writer who thinks she’s creating literature. We think we’re using language to create meaningful fictive worlds and meaningful interpretations of those worlds, but we are being used by language. We are always trapped inside interminable sign-play, and all we can do is fashion more or less self-aware and intricate verbal fabulations, little mythic narratives about what’s going on in literature, the world, and our minds — narratives that reassure us that the world exists, we exist, beauty exists, meaning exists, moral conflict exists, consciousness exists. But we must be self-aware about all of this futility; we must never, as Peter Brooks puts it in describing de Man’s approach, take “the seductions of rhetoric as something in which to believe.” We must, indeed, de Man’s work and life seem to suggest, believe in nothing.

These essays were part of de Man’s immense charismatic appeal, in that they were the written address, if you will, of de Man’s broader, all-out assault on human consciousness. You could look it up there. You could go to the essays and delectate what Harold Bloom called de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism.”

But de Man’s real appeal, I think (and I’m thinking about it because a new book full of evidence of de Man’s moral degeneracy has just come out and is being widely discussed) lies in his having embodied, for his time, first-rate absolute unswerving nihilism. Not just linguistic nihilism. Everything nihilism. Like America’s current wildly popular nihilist, the tv show True Detective‘s Rust Cohle, Paul de Man seems to have believed that, as Cohle puts it, “human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution.”

Let’s be clearer about “consciousness.” We assume that we have a quality of self-reflective cerebral aliveness which can be trained to understand the world in clarifying and useful ways. We acknowledge that along with being clarifying and useful, consciousness can be a source of obfuscation and evil and false consolation and many other bad things. Yet few among us assume that because human consciousness can be monstrous as well as illuminating and transformative we must dedicate our lives to loathing it as tragic, and to revealing again and again its absurd insidious pointlessness.

And yet – all reflective people rightly take an interest in nihilism because all reflective people know what it feels like to have – at one point or another in your life – all of the supporting structures in your life collapse. We are drawn to – even seduced by – people we rightly identify as true nihilists or nihilistic in appearance (Amy Winehouse, Chet Baker) because we have room in our consciousness for the possibility that their brutal flattening of value and meaning might be right. A philosopher discusses Rust Cohle’s

meditation on the eyes of murder victims. The idea that they would have welcomed it, that they were being released, [chimes] well with many pessimists. [Rust’s take on the murdered is] a visualization of what the pessimist ultimately holds — that death is to be welcomed…

Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst, channels everyone’s nihilistic capacity when he says

These are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.

Cohle and de Man represent and represented true detectives of our collective latent nihilism; they’re on the case in our rats’ alleys where the dead men lost their bones, and they are taking notes.

In the latest New Yorker, Louis Menand quotes one of de Man’s colleagues calling him “a connoisseur of nothingness.” In an article written in 1989, when the dimensions of the de Man mess were just emerging, Frank Kermode describes critics influenced by de Man as “connoisseurs of the symmetry between the impossible and the necessary.” (Impossible to use language to posit meaning in a meaningless world; necessary to keep using and positing anyway.) UD would suggest that connoisseurship is the right way to enter into an explanation of de Man’s intellectual appeal. A good wine; a good nihilism. One wants to delectate this endgame. One should want to delectate this endgame, because it is a very serious and real thing. You can do it via Paul de Man quite adequately, and throughout his American adventures people excitedly intuited this about him.

… when all we care about is our receivers. When your football team is your university, as is the case at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you’ll accept anyone who can catch a ball well, and you’ll make up pretend classes for those people to get A’s in so they can remain eligible to catch balls for your sports factory.

This has been true, is still true, and will remain true at all of America’s big-time sports schools, and if you think a little academic scandal is going to change that, you’re a fool. The system can’t work if you only admit college-level students.

The high schools do their bit – America now has a rich and complex system of diploma mills feeding their staight-A grads to the sports factories. All the sports factories have to do is keep the mill going – fake classes, fake grades, piece of cake.

If, as at Chapel Hill, the system occasionally breaks down and reveals itself to the world… Well, point one, the world already knew and doesn’t care; and point two, there is no point two.

And if, in a class action suit against the NCAA’s refusal to pay athletes for the commercial use of their names, the athletes’ lawyers point out that the only justification for this refusal – universities are providing athletes with an education – is a total joke (see above)…. Well, the NCAA has lawyers too. I’m sure they can get around this somehow. Still, it’s fun to read stuff like this:

The athletes are using the [Chapel Hill] case to contest the NCAA’s claim that the athletes were getting a meaningful education in exchange for helping universities and the NCAA make millions of dollars from their exploits on the football field or basketball court.

This week, Mary Willingham, the UNC learning specialist who blew the whistle on the lecture-style classes that never met, was named as a witness for the attorneys representing current and former college athletes in a class-action suit against the NCAA. The lawsuit is commonly known as the O’Bannon case, after former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon. He sued after seeing his likeness being used in EA sports video games without being paid.

The case, nearly 5 years old, has a trial date in June. Michael Hausfeld, one of the attorneys representing the athletes, said Willingham’s experiences as a former learning specialist for the athletes’ support program, plus her research into the academic abilities of those athletes, make her a strong witness. She would counter the NCAA’s claims that athletes can be barred from being paid for their athletic efforts because the universities are providing them an education.

“The NCAA is arguing that it is necessary to impose restraints on the athletes because in doing so, it promotes the integration of academics and athletics,” Hausfeld said. “We think that’s patently false, and we have other statistics that demonstrate that very vividly. Mary adds a personal experience which further highlights the falsity of that representation.”

I mean WHOOOPS. You forgot the educate them part!

But then, who could blame you? Ain’t nothing around here that looks like a university.

It’s … good news, I guess, that Bill Clinton is not involved with Trump University. But this is just the latest example of the land mines Clinton has been planting in his wife’s path for the presidency, should she indeed decide to run. As the [NY] Times reported in a major investigation, there are a lot of questions and there is not a lot of transparency about how the Clinton Global Initiative operates. And that’s the nonprofit Clinton arm of Bill Clinton’s post-presidency. His other business dealings have been profuse and often murky, and every single one of them is going to be investigated by the press if a Hillary Clinton campaign goes forward. The Bloomberg piece [on Clinton’s heading up a for-profit ed venture] does not find any illegality in this instance, but the sleaze factor is considerable. Clinton serving as the “Honorary Chancellor” of a diploma mill that rips off young people — and doing it in a financial partnership that includes the hedge-fund titan Steve Cohen, whose SAC Capital Advisors is ground zero for insider-trading criminality — does not pass the smell test.

Trump, Laureate, and Brown University’s highest-profile trustee, Steve Cohen. The story of today’s university, all in one short paragraph.

… the trinity of America’s Christian diploma mills, the three-point theology of our creedal unaccrediteds, the pivot-point ministry of our basketball brethren — UD loves to watch dribblers for the deity at work on her soul.

These college students “focus,” says one team’s coach, “on bringing glory to God in whatever we do,” and losing games by hundreds of points is what they do to bring undecideds like UD to the Lord.

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But the scoffers! O lord, the scoffers!

They are blocking UD’s prayer shot.

Want to make some money? Start a divinity school offering a Bachelor of Theology degree in Pastafarian Studies, and round up some buddies. Troll the coaching forums or hang out at the Final Four, tell coaches you’re the USM Noodly Appendages head coach, and you’ve got an open date on some Saturday in November. Book the game, show up, lose by 100, and cash your $50,000 check.

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To grapple with the theological implications of all this, go here.

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UD thanks Dave.

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Update on one of America’s universities:

– Their website doesn’t load and they don’t have a Wikipedia page

– They do have an regularly updated Twitter:

Are u interested in playing basketball or volleyball for the Champion Tigers? Call 501-623-2272 for more information on our sports programs!

– The person that Twitter says is the school’s president, Eric Capaci, is also listed as the school’s head basketball coach …

********************

Okay, try this.

Take this painting of Saint Sebastian …

… and imagine him pelted with basketballs rather than arrows. This puts Champion Baptist squarely in the martyrdom tradition.

*****************

Wow. This here’s getting to be a big national story real quick. Google News is going razorback wild!

Now ol’ UD‘s gonna make a perdiction. You jest set there and listen.

Champion Baptist University is in Arkansas, and you don’t gotta read too much University Diaries (put the word ARKANSAS in my search engine) to know that pret’ near the whole state of Arkansas is one big fat insult to the word university. So this here latest thing don’t help.

Airgoe, UD makes the following perdiction. We’re gonna be hearing from Mike Huckabee any minute. Somebody’s gotta step up and defend the state, and that’s gonna be – gotta be – our next president. Y’all hold on and see if I’m not right.

********************

Attendance: Just a smidgeon over two hundred souls. ‘Course now it’s famous, everybody’s gonna claim they was at the game.

And I know you’ve heard this before on this blog, but I’ve just gotta say it one more time: The whole spectacle was paid for by you and me. Your education taxes at work.

… are taking their money and leaving them uneducated and unemployable. Chile’s totally filthy for-profit university sector has now been outed; and though I’m sure – as with all diploma mills – the owners will lie low for a bit and come back again filthier than ever, the forced resignation of Chile’s justice minister is certainly good news.

The resignation of Teodoro Ribera on Monday was the latest in an unfolding saga that has prompted massive street demonstrations, criminal investigations and the jailing of a dean suspected of money laundering and a former government official accused of selling university accreditations.

Same deal as in the States: Pay bribes to get your website accredited as a school and instantly start stashing away state cash. If you have a physical campus:

[Structure] deals with property developers who … build the educational institutions then rent them back to the university. The monthly rent – often paid to members of the same university management team – [is] used to strip money from the institution.

And – hey look! It’s the guys who own the University of Phoenix!

Further revelations … led the Chilean government to announce on Tuesday an investigation into possible violations of regulations by two more universities including UNIACC University, owned by Apollo Global, which according to the company website is “a $1bn joint venture formed in 2007, 80.1% owned by Apollo Group Inc and 19.9% owned by a private equity firm, the Carlyle Group”.

Er, make that 24.

And, as law schools across the country begin to enjoy the synergy of the ABA’s policy of accrediting anything that moves, and the dramatic shrinkage of the job market, there’s this from the Charleston School of Law (famed for the otter tank pissing incident):

Graduates of the Charleston School of Law are so alarmed by the possible sale of the school to InfiLaw System that they are considering ways to stop it.

Current students grew more outraged Friday, when they couldn’t get answers to their questions on the school’s future from its leaders.

The law school released a statement Thursday evening, which said it had entered into a management services agreement with InfiLaw System, a group that owns three other for-profit law schools.

Investors are cashing in and letting the place go diploma mill and they don’t want to talk about it.

I

Doldrums

From her chilled house with condensation on all its windows, UD contemplates her privilege.

Yesterday through the watery streaks she saw – she thinks – a small bear at the top of her property. It was too small to be a deer – she thinks – and had a hunched crawling way about it … There are bears, now, in Bethesda, and what better place for them to gather than the long field and forest behind UD‘s house.

Inside this house are all the goods of interior existence, the sort of existence you lead when the exterior is unbearable. Meals are brought to the door. The air is chilled.

UD plays Purcell on the baby grand, and sings. Music for a while shall all your cares beguile.

Late afternoon, before night falls, UD cuts back her garden, rampant with hot sun and night storms. When, overheated, she reenters her house, it feels antarctic.

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II

An Update

** UD has been invited to teach in India next year. She is looking into it.

** UD will speak about women and technology (in particular, MOOCs) at the next Modern Language Association convention, in Chicago.

Saturday, 11 January

651. Women in the Expanding University: Global and Local

5:15–6:30 p.m.

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession

Presiding: Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Speakers: Diana Elizabeth Henderson, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.; Teresa Mangum, Univ. of Iowa; Margaret Soltan, George Washington Univ.; Catharine Roslyn Stimpson, New York Univ.

Women are often at the center of debates about technological pedagogy. Taking women and the “expanding university” as our framework, we will address pedagogical strategies, forms of community engagement, and prospects for women’s activism offered by new technologies. This forum promises to open a space for critique of emerging technologies even as it identifies new avenues of innovation.

** UD was interviewed twice last week, first by a freelancer pitching a story about MOOCs to Poets & Writers, and then by a reporter at the Argus Leader. He’s doing a piece about a local dignitary who has a degree from a diploma mill. I’ll link to these articles when/if they appear.

Plagiarism and diploma milling, while popular in the west, are endemic in the east. Now that attention is being paid to him, Iran’s new president is dealing with the predictable charges.

Although “Dr Rouhani’s election campaign videos featured pictures of Glasgow Caledonian University and the former GCU student spoke warmly of his time in the city,” there is “some doubt over whether Mr Rouhani, who was a high-ranking official in the Islamic Republic during the 1990s, actually attended the British university in person or undertook his studies there by remote study.”

There’s also doubt about whether he wrote his dissertation.

… how much are you willing to overlook?

Okay, you’re willing to overlook the fact that your lieutenant governor for years claimed a degree from a notorious diploma mill (she even used to be on the National Commission on Presidential Scholars!)… But, as UD has often told you, scummy things like diploma mill degrees – and plagiarized articles and all – can be symptoms of, er, a broader outlook on life…

And so it appears to be with the aforementioned lieutenant governor, for whom fraud turns out to be a way of doing business. She has just resigned in disgrace.

Really, if Florida had had enough self-respect to reject a diploma mill fraudster in the first place, they wouldn’t now be dealing with this much higher-level embarrassment.

On the other hand, it’s clear that Florida is way past caring about things like this.

… that even UD, who prides herself on her grasp of our simulacral world, is having a little trouble.

It’s a diploma mill in Wyoming — nothing to see there; hundreds of thousands of diploma mills operate all over the world, and Wyoming is one of the most pro-diploma-mill states in America (God forbid the feds interfere with private enterprise). But even by Wyoming’s give-a-shit standards, the gloriously named Degree in a Day (the website provided in the Star Tribune story no longer functions) represents a problem. Dig:

The website tells visitors that purchasers can receive diplomas “in the traditional university manner printed on traditional paper with traditional fonts in the traditional format,” plus official transcripts, signed letters of verification to for use with an employer and letters of recommendation from the dean and president.

Under a tab called, “About Degree in a Day,” the website says it “offers verifiable and authentic life experience degrees from our own ‘Anonymous Universities.’” It continues, “We will never publish the name or allow it to be associated with this site to anyone other than alumni. We do this to ensure our alumni can feel confident there will not be any negative press online about their degree.”

The website “gives examples of legitimate-appearing university websites that it promises to construct in order to give purchasers ‘further proof their degree is in fact authentic,’” according to the complaint.

So… UD‘s been trying to figure this one out. Here’s what she’s come up with. If she’s right about the business model, it represents an authentic advance in the industry.

As soon as a diploma mill’s name becomes known, it becomes notorious. Coverage of the scam will invariably refer to “the notorious degree mill, LaSalle University,” or whatever. In order to avoid instantly stigmatizing the millions of people who’ve gotten bogus degrees from this or that outfit, Degree in a Day will tailor-make a pretend online university just for you. It will come up with a name (the model assumes one will never run out of plausible-sounding university names, and this seems to UD a reasonable assumption) that will be known only to you and to the few to non-existent employers who ever bother to check your credentials.

One particularly brilliant aspect of this model involves (I assume) the ability at a moment’s notice to change the university from which you graduated. Once you’ve been run out of town because of the exposure of your fake Cambridgetown Institute of Technology degree, you can go back to Degree in a Day and have them construct Oxfordshire Institute of Technology.

UD has said it again and again on this blog: Go ahead and get your diploma mill degrees, but be sure not to rise too high in the world. UD has even specified how high you can rise before someone actually looks at the shit on your resume.

So. Let’s review:

Teacher, but not superintendent.

Police officer but not captain.

City council member but not mayor.

Mid-level but not chief bureaucrat.

How difficult is this to grasp? With fraudulent degrees, you’ll do fine, the two thousand dollars were well spent, but you’re going to have to spend your life under the radar. You’re not going to be able to rise. When you rise, people start paying attention.

The University of the District of Columbia has responded to the discovery of three diploma mill grads on its faculty (it’s bad enough when, as at Ramapo College and Northeastern Illinois University, you’ve got one) with lethargy and defensiveness. They’ll… you know… look into it (others have done that for them, though of course it was UDC’s responsibility from the start to winnow faculty frauds); and hey “the university considers more than academic credentials when hiring faculty.”

This is the time-honored response of hapless organizations to diploma mill people — It doesn’t matter that we retain (at tax-payer expense, at UDC) people who’ve lied and cheated their way to a bogus degree in order to get a raise; we love other things about them.