American Accreditors Go Abroad

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting story in the current issue, "American Accreditors Go Abroad" (23 September 2005, pp. A36-A38). Unfortunately, I have only a paper copy, and cannot access the online version at: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i05/05a03601.htm

Does anyone here have a suggestion on how to share access to this article?

The long and the short of it, according to the article, is:

• Middle States accredits 10 schools abroad, including Athabasca, several American Universities, and Open University in Milton Keynes.
• New England accredits 6 schools abroad.
• SACS accredits 4 schools in Mexico and 1 in Costa Rica.
• Western Schools accredits 2 schools, one in Saipan and one in Kenya.

In the USA accreditation is done by peer review, rather than through a government ministry. "We're the only country that can export accreditation," says Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

The article suggests that American accreditors are expanding their reach overseas, and that this trend is expected to accelerate.

 

Yes, but doing so would effectively end-run the publication's control mechanism which helps maintain its subscription revenue stream. The very purpose of copyright law is to ensure that copyright holders may control who gets to read and/or use their stuff. This board will have no part of goofing around with that. So, everyone... no login/password sharing or posting, okay? Thanks.

 

Re: Re: American Accreditors Go Abroad

Does telling people that Google has a cache of the article count? The copyright holders did after all let Google have a look at the article without registration.

 

Re: Re: Re: American Accreditors Go Abroad

You mean like this?

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:u94gL3OInmUJ:chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i05/05a03601.htm+American+Accreditors+Go+Abroad&hl=en

 

Re: Re: Re: American Accreditors Go Abroad

Of course not. If Google cached it, it's fair game to link to. Note that I said "link to." I'm not making a statement, here, about copying and pasting. That's another issue. I was referring to sharing logins and passwords. That's all I was talking about.

Thanks for asking, though.

 

You never know. It could be considered as circumventing copy protections and after all, a Princeton student was threatened under the DMCA for revealing a way to bypass SunComm's CD copy protection software, which involved nothing more than pressing the shift key.

 

Maybe they can accredit couple of schools in France?
After all private universities there are braking from centralized government controll and can benefit from free non government yet recognized accreditation

Learner
.

 

There's a difference between a threat, and what can actually be actionable, and successfully pursued, in a court of law. And, anyway... copy protection, and copyright, are not even close to being the same thing.

And there's a difference between linking to, and reproducing a copy of. It's Google that's reproducing a copy of. We're only linking to. The copyright holder's problem is with Google, not us. One could argue, "Well, if what Google's doing is illegal, then we're in trouble for linking to something illegal." But you actually have to go back a step further. Case law on web sites which merely link to copyrighted material is becoming very sophisticated; and merely linking to is not the same as reproducing, nor has the Court found a problem therewith.

Linking to the article in question in this thread -- even on the site on which it was originally published -- is not problematic. What's problematic is accompanying that link with a login name and password. That, we cannot do here. That act doesn't even have anything to do with copyright. That's just theft of service, plain and simple. This isn't actually a copyright issue. I only mentioned copyright as an example of the lengths to which lawmakers and the courts have gone to ensure that original works may be controlled by their owners. Giving a link is no big deal. Providing a login and password with said link (or encoding same into it) is a form of theft, not copyright violation.