Please forward this article to SUI leaders. It is very important and
contains allegations
regarding APICS. These allegations could damage SUI's reputation as well as
the reputation
of CPU should CPU merge with SUI. Please read and take appropriate action.
Formatting
to improve readability on CPU alumni board. No reply needed.
Some other information has recently come to my attention on the subject of
Senior U
and its affiliation and claimed accreditation with APICS. This information
leads me to
believe that officials at Senior U may have been duped into accepting
accreditation from
APICS, an entity which John Bear alludes to as a totally "fraudulent"
accreditor. Bear
outlines his thoughts below, and includes as associated with APICS at least
two individuals
that are known to him as operators of degree mills. Bear continues by
stating in part that
he has already forward this information to Dr. Les Carr of CPU. I sincerely
hope that Les
weighs this information carefully. While this information is based on the
written opinions
of Bear, it leads me to experience great levels of concern for what CPU
might be getting
into in merging with SUI. I realize that this information might be
upsetting for some alumni,
but it is better that we find out now while steps can be taken to avoid
possible future problems
that will most likely stem from a merger with SUI without appropriately
investigating these
allegations. To its credit CPU has historically claimed no false or
misleading accreditation.
But through events of the past 4-5 years CPU has been relegated to the
murky dark waters
of the third world of higher education - and this third world of higher
education is quickly
becoming known in Internet circles as "the dark side". As Larry Smith
writes, it is now time
for CPU to walk the straight and narrow more than ever. Otherwise it is we,
the alumni and
others, that will pay the price. And many of us have already been paying
deeply. I also believe
that if SUI is a legitimate institution, such allegations of its
affiliations with APICS could damage
its efforts toward accreditation with CETAC. While CETAC has only
accredited career, business,
and vocational institutions, if Senior succeeds in its bid, it would be the
first "university" to
become accredited by CETAC. Here's the commentaries from John Bear. This
will also be sent
to Les Carr and to the Senior U office.
Here is a partial email message to myself from John Bear on the subject of
"APICS", written and
Earon. The long-time involvement of Denis Muhilly, who has been associated
with 3 or 4 places that
I have no problem calling degree mills (e.g., Eire International
University) does not help. Nor does the
fact that when I contacted the only findable American who was listed as one
of their board people
(a professor at Stanford), he was outraged to learn that they were using
his name.
I have conveyed such information (more than four months ago) to Les
Carr, regarding Senior U,
and I am troubled by that connection. (end of comments from John
Bear).
John states that Dennis Muhilly, one of the principals behind APICS is now
also operating the
American University of Suriname, another fake school. On 4/16/2000 John
Bear provided other
information on Dennis Muhilly, on alt.distance.ed, a Usenet newsgroup that
focuses largely on
(Bear writes as follows): I guess you can't keep a bad man down. Or two in
this instance.
Comes now the new and fake American University of Suriname, ostensibly in
South America,
website and the pictured diploma are Dennis Muhilly (associated with the
fake Eire International
University, the curious APICS accrediting agency, La Jolla University, and
other wonders),
and John Tulip (who has been associated with Mellen University) (finish of
comments from John Bear).
Bear has written on the totally illegal and fraudulent Mellon University
for many years, going back
into the 1980's.
And finally, on 05/13/2000, Bear comments on alt.education.distance, about
how bogus accreditors
"accredit" well-known schools without their knowledge. According to Bear
APICS is one of the
"accreditors" that engage in this practice. Bear was replying to comments
about how WAUC
(another bogus accreditor) claimed to have accredited the totally
legitimate and private Universidad
de las Américas in Costa Rica.
(Bear writes as follows): I'm not personally familiar with this school, but
it sounds like the classic
scam that other fraudulent accreditors such as APICS and the bogus agency
that Columbia State
set up to accredit itself. The accreditor (in this case, WAUC) bestows
unwanted and unrequested
"full accreditation" on a couple of legitimate schools, often without even
letting them know that
they've been granted the dubious honor. Then, the accreditor can point to
the one or two legit schools
in their roster and say "See!! We accredit legitimate programs!!". Snell at
Monticello (a fraud artist recently
convicted of running the totally fraudulent Monticello U.) fraud used
weasel-word language with APICS
accreditation, something to the effect of "APICS-accredited schools are
viewed as equivalent to regionally
accredited programs", which was true of the two schools that APICS bestowed
accreditation without
being requested to do so... but, of course, it was true because the schools
were already legitimate,
not because of APICS. If you have any connections at the Universidad de las
Américas, I would highly
recommend notifying them that WAUC is a scam so they can take action to
have themselves removed
from WAUC's list (end of comments from John Bear).
To my recent surprise and shock the following
article blasting Senior University International
as a degree mill recently appeared in Canada's
"National Post" - a major Canadian daily
newspaper. I hope CPU takes a long hard look at the
implications of this upcoming merger
with SUI. Speaking subjectively, I personally do
not wish to be seen as associated with any
institution that is perceived publicly as a degree
mill or otherwise perceived as dubious. If CPU
should ever recover its reputation I hope it takes
care to guard it with due diligence and enter
only into associations that will serve that goal.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
National Post Article:
Saturday, June 03, 2000 Would you like a degree
with that pizza? That's Dr. Seeman to you, by
Neil Seeman National Post Charles Rex Arbogast, The
Associated Press. You won't get anything
like this from a diploma mill. In fact, you may
have trouble finding any campus at all. A flustered
Janet Reno, the U.S. Attorney-General, this week
urged Ministry of Justice officials to study the
issue of false credentials after investigators were
able to buy phony accreditations from online
diploma mills. Government investigators had used
fake I.D.s obtained on the Internet to get past
security at 19 federal agencies, at the Pentagon
and at two airports. According to John Bear, the
credentials-for-cash problem is hardly unique to
the United States. Bear, the co-author of Bears'
Guide to Earning Degrees Nontraditionally, has been
waging a one-man war against diploma mills
for more than 20 years. One of his discoveries is
that Canada has become home to numerous
fly-by-night institutes of higher learning, many of
which go to great lengths to avoid the limelight.
"Several use addresses outside Canada such as
Mellen University -- run from Toronto with an
address in New York -- and Nova College (a.k.a.
Farelston and Nova College), run from Edmonton
but with addresses in Utah and the Channel Islands.
And there is the dreadful one-man Washington
University, run from Burnaby, B.C., but with an
address in St. Louis (where the real Washington
University is)," Bear notes. Diploma mills
specialize in selling dubious credentials, in law enforcement,
medicine, the humanities, almost anything. It is a
lucrative business: With hardly any overhead expenses,
the diploma mill industry worldwide is estimated at
more than US$200-million a year, with single schools
earning between US$10-million and US$20-million
annually. Of course, such institutions cater to our
obsession with credentials. In our ostensibly
meritocratic society, the right letters after one's name
open the same doors that a family name or
connections alone once did. Hence the scandals of recent
years involving people like Jag Bhaduria, the
former Ontario Liberal MP who was ousted from the party's
caucus in 1994 when it was learned he didn't have a
law degree as he had stated, or Jane Fulton, whose
fleeting career as Alberta's deputy health minister
came to an abrupt end in June, 1996, after it was
discovered she overstated her academic laurels.
People like Bhaduria and Fulton attract attention for
claiming degrees they didn't have. But Bear and
other observers say that thanks to the Internet, there
is now an enormous, burgeoning industry that makes
it increasingly easy for determined resume-burnishers
to obtain actual -- if meaningless -- degrees.
Inspired by Reno's call to action, I decided to compile my
own anti-guide to Canada's universities. My goal?
To discover what is the absolute worst, bedrock bottom,
school in Canada. The only difficulty was realizing
just how stiff the competition would be. --- Simply to
get in touch with a Canadian diploma mill, whose
typical life span is three months, you need to find an
anonymous source posted on an Internet newsgroup,
send an email to the source, then arrange for a
telephone call with a designated "career
counsellor" on an untraceable phone. It's all very mysterious --
and deliberately so. Why the secrecy? Most Canadian
diploma mills live in perpetual fear of periodic
CSIS investigations and journalistic exposes on
shows such as 60 Minutes, which has run a documentary
on the subject. Hardly any have listed phone
numbers. Alberta's Nova College, for example, has a lone
post office box in the middle-class Calgary suburb
of Northland Village. (The extreme may be Harrington U.:
Run from California, it has its mailing address at
a mailbox service in London, its bank is in Limassol, Cyprus,
and its printing plant is in Jerusalem.) Senior
International University, however, which is located in Richmond,
B.C., with a business Office at the Lifelong
Learning Center in Evanston, Wyo., prides itself on being a
"university of open doors," according to the
mission statement posted on its Web site (www.senioru.edu).
Senior is what Bear calls a "grey area" school,
offering wildly dubious degree programs under the trappings
of authenticity. Nusri Hassam, the school
registrar, puts it slightly differently: Senior, she said, simply offers
"a highly individualized model." "If you're lucky,"
she said, "you can train with the eminent Dr. Hassam himself."
Dr. Abdul Hassam, she informed me, was a
world-renowned authority in the paranormal. "You know, like Fox
Mulder of The X-Files." As a test of Senior's
exacting standards, I decided to adopt a persona with the worst
academic record I could think of. "Holden
Caulfield. What a most curious name," Ms. Hassam said when
I pretended to be J.D. Salinger's sardonic
anti-hero and enquired about the university's "school of
consciousness studies and secret traditions." (Last
time anybody heard from the protagonist of The
Catcher in the Rye, he had flunked out of high
school after losing the foils for the fencing team, of which
he was captain, on the Long Island subway.) Being
Holden Caulfield, it turned out, was no barrier whatsoever.
But could they grant me a PhD in psychology;
specifically, in alien studies? "No problem," said Ms. --"Ahem,
that's Doctor, actually" -- Nusri Hassam, who is an
admitted acolyte of Dr. Abdul Hassam, "who is very much
into consciousness-studies." Nusri Hassam explained
that for a fee in the $1,000-plus range -- which is
often negotiable -- students write a
one-to-three-page proposal about their preferred course of study. The
student is then placed under the tutelage of a
like-minded mentor, asked to complete a series of readings,
and then rigorously assessed, in a kind of
"academic defence," on his or her knowledge of those readings --
over the phone or on e-mail. "If you put in a
tremendous amount of work," the registrar said, "you can get
your degree in alien studies in one year." "Is this
a joke?" I asked. "No, we're officially recognized by the
PPSUC, a degree-granting authority," she explained,
"under the auspices of the state of Wyoming." "What
about the fact I never even really graduated from
high school?" I asked Judy, Senior International's receptionist.
"No problem! We evaluate the whole person," she
explained chirpily. "We have lots of students who have taken
different programs in different places. But without
high-school, things may take a little longer," she conceded.
"How much longer?" I asked in a tone of grave
concern. "At the very longest, a year," she quickly reassured
me. Senior's modus operandi is illustrative of what
most diploma mills offer: negotiable fees, super-accommodating
administrative staff and hilariously light-weight
academic standards. In that regard, Senior is following in the proud
tradition of what may be Canada's best-known and
most ambitious diploma mill, Calgary's "College of Technology,"
which shut down two years ago after a flurry of
customer complaints. Calgary Tech offered bachelor's degrees,
master's degrees and doctorates for the
bargain-basement price of $275 apiece -- which would have made it the
best deal around for a quick and dirty degree if it
still existed. The campus literature described the dean, Colonel
R. Alan Munro, as "Canada's premier Aeronaut." (As
hard as I tried, I could not find the definition of an 'aeronaut'
in any English dictionary. It is doubtless a
prestige profession.) "The Calgary College of Technology was run out
of Spiro's Pizza Parlour," says Bear, describing
the school's uniquely studious environment. He proffers jokingly
that "PhD" actually stood for "Pizza, Home
Delivery." Today, the torch of academic excellence has passed from
Col. Munro to Egbert Phipps, MD, PhD, MSc, BSc (all
degrees from the London-based Royal Society of Health),
who runs the Alternative Medicines Research
Institute (AMRI) in Vancouver. How does the Institute compare to
Senior? Phipps promises prospective students a
doctoral degree in alternative medicine as fast as they can
dispatch their resume and a letter detailing their
enthusiasm and research experience in the much-misunderstood
field of the "laying on of hands." "Many people
don't hold much stock in the laying on of hands," explains Phipps.
"But not me, I'm a huge believer." After interested
students fire off the required paperwork, AMRI promises two
standard transcripts, complete with concocted
grades, and an official letter confirming successful completion of
the degree requirements. All this costs only $650
-- one of the best bargains anywhere, and easily besting Senior.
"Our awards-granting committee just met last week,"
said Phipps, "and we agreed that most doctoral programs
charge too much money and insist on way too much
study for a degree. So we decided to lower our price substantially,
" he said invitingly. But what kind of a job can
students expect with a PhD in holistic medicine from the
Alternative
Medicines Research Institute? "Well, when it
comes to laying on of hands, most of us are self-employed," sighed
Phipps. "Although," he added hopefully, "the trend
these days is to move toward group practice." A mere week
after speaking with Phipps I received a
congratulatory letter embossed with a fake gold stamp. My voice mail and
e-mail mentioned my real first name, and I was
forced to use "Neil" in a series of back-and-forth messages to the
Institute to prove my bona fides: So Phipps's
letter was addressed to "The Most Honourable Doctor Neil Caulfield."
I had passed already! Even without seeing any of my
qualifications, Phipps was "pleased to convey the
recommendation of The Board of Directors and
Trustees to award you the Doctor of Philosophy degree specializing
in Holistic Medicines." My telephone manner had
clearly impressed him. But he would be even more impressed,
he wrote, if I shelled out US$550 for the
"Committee's review fees" in addition to "processing and graduation fees"
of US$100. Since Calgary Tech is now defunct, this
means AMRI is the best deal in Canada for a quick and dirty
degree. When he's not busy laying on hands, it
seems, Phipps runs another Vancouver-based diploma-mill,
George Washington University, Inc., which offers
degrees at the Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate levels --
also without the irritation of real coursework. Yet
despite the best efforts of Phipps and others, Canada is still
in grade school compared with the United States
when it comes to diploma mills. Though doubtless wacky,
places like Senior and the Alternative Medicines
Research Institute are fairly innocuous in their marketing and
basic pedagogical methods (i.e. qualifications +
money = matriculation). By contrast, U.S. institutions like
Century University enjoy putting subtle ads --
"Many fields; no classes; NO COST evaluation!" -- in such
venerable publications as The Economist. Kathy, a
receptionist at Century's head office (really a suite in
Albuquerque, N.M.), assured me, back in the persona
of Holden, that my abysmal performance in high
school was no barrier to obtaining a bachelor's
degree in one year and a doctorate in two. "Don't worry,
Mr. Caulfield. You sound really intelligent. And
you say you've got work experience? Don't worry, we
account for all of that stuff," she cooed. Eric
Hecksler, the dean of psychology at Honolulu's Pacific Western
University, one of the granddaddies of
diploma mills, told me he had just the ticket. Hecksler, who
professes to be a "Stafford-educated psychologist,"
advised me he "knows all about interpersonal
relationships, and gender stuff too, possibly the
most important field of psychology today." The best
part about the Pacific Western degree is that,
within just 48 hours -- assuming you have sufficient personal
experience of course -- you will know how soon you
can get your doctorate degree. Which can take as
little as six months, maybe less, said Dr.
Hecksler. The downside? You have to pay US$5,000 and write a
gruelling 35-page thesis. (A real PhD, even at many
of the elite U.S. Ivy League schools, may not even cost
that much, once you factor in scholarships,
teaching stipends, bursaries and grants. But a real doctorate
requires serious work: usually two years of
coursework and periodic teaching stints, followed by two years
of writing an original thesis, which must be
defended before a committee of senior academics in the field.) An
even better option for Holden might be a combined
bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degree in metaphysics,
to be completed in a year or less. That is the
latest offering from the University of Metaphysics in Studio City,
Calif., whose administrator, Shirley Lawrence,
calls it an "unbelievable deal." I agreed. Yet it's not quite as
unbelievable as The Bernadean University, in
Chatsworth, Calif. -- it used to offer its graduates a doctoral
certificate absolving them of all their past sins.
Aside from elusive hopes of salvation, and the cheap and
exponential marketing power of the Internet, why do
diploma mills prosper so? Psychologists generally
agree that people
lie about their credentials in order to be more accepted in society. Diploma
mills, it
seems, answer that visceral need. Holden Caulfield,
describing his high school, Pencey Prep, gets
closest to this truth: "You probably heard of it.
You've probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in
about a thousand magazines, always showing some
hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence." No
matter who we are, it seems, we all strive to be
that guy on the horse, the phony with the gleaming smile
and the perfect hair and the beautiful girl hugging
him from behind -- even if we know him to be a chimera.
Is that so bad? Probably not. But one thing diploma
mills teach is that a piece of paper alone may not
necessarily cure us of our insecurities. Perhaps
the one thing they do sell is the true meaning of caveat
emptor -- a phrase first put in print in 1523 by
Sir Anthony Fitzherbert. He was, according to his biographer,
an Oxford-educated judge -- even though no evidence
of this exists.