KA-BOOM!!! - Police Chief With Fake Degree

Shelbourne/Glencullen, etc. strike again;

http://telegram.com/article/20071127/NEWS/711270469/1153/NEWSREWIND

 

And now he's backpedalling furiously, using the two standard replies that people caught with hand in jar of cookies usually use:

1. I really did work, and took exams.
2. The job doesn't require a Master's anyway.

As to the first: impossible. He is lying.
As to the second: but does it require integrity and the telling of truth?

 

Hits a little close to home!!

This happens to be the new chief of my town....!! What scares me (among other things) is the hiring committee seems to be not the least bit concerned with it. They seem to be satisfied with his undergrad, although I wonder if he gets a pay bump for the masters....Dr. Bear hits the nail on the head on #2 as to the question of his integrity.

 

There is a program in Massachusetts called the Police Career Incentive Program, commonly referred to as the "Quinn Bill", but it's up to each city and town as to whether they participate or not;

http://www.osfa.mass.edu/quinnbill/default.asp

They now are extremely tough on which schools qualify, and those schools have to pass rigorous standards, but it is possible for someone who has been employed for awhile to be grandfathered in.

 

Secondary explosion......it now appears that the sergeant/chief has also claimed a legitimate undergrad degree from Worcester State College, but the school has no record of him graduating;

http://www.telegram.com/article/20071203/NEWS/712030483

http://www.telegram.com/article/20071204/NEWS/712040624

 

So he's a complete academic fraud yet he was still someone's first choice despite this!!!?!!

>sigh<

 

A dud that landed with a thud.
Gavin

 

One of the articles indicated that:

• He was never awarded a Bachelors degree from the state university and
• He was a colonel on the Army Reserve.

I'm inclined to think that he must have a Bachelors degree because the Army Reserve is pretty strict about not promoting people without undergraduate degrees.

Thoughts?

 

You can be an Army officer without a bachelor's degree. I could see an Army Reservist rising to that level, with or without a degree.

 

From what I've heard from people "in the know", it's news to the Army Reserve that he doesn't have an undergraduate degree and they will be looking into it.

 

One of my former company commanders was a Captain w/out a degree; however, he was passed over for promotion to Major twice because he didn't have a degree.

He decided to resign his commission and put in a packet to become a warrant officer. While he was waiting for his warrant packet, he was "demoted" to E-6 (you have to be an enlisted soldier to apply for warrant.) While he was waiting, our unit was activated for OIF - and he went to Iraq as an E-6. Ouch :-( He was very professional throughout the entire tour about it - and when people would ask him about it, he was quite frank. He said that he made the choice not to finish college, and that there were repercussions for his choice. But still...

Shawn

 

I've heard of National Guard officers without degrees getting promoted up to major or higher, even though they didn't have college degrees; but we (my OCS class) were told that those kinds of officers can't transfer to the Army Reserve or the Regular Army as captains (or higher) unless they have a Bachelors degree. In this instance, the police sergeant was in the Army Reserve, which requires a Bachelors degree to remain as a captain (and definately to get promoted to major). If this guy slipped through the cracks by getting promoted to colonel in the Army Reserve, then that's remarkable! I'm not 100% sure on what the current requirements are to be promoted as a commissioned officer in the Army Reserve. Rules and regulations frequently change, depending on the needs of the service.

 

I knew a police chief with accredited B.A. and M.A. degrees and a Pacific Western Doctorate in public administration. He was quite brilliant and very successful and always open and honest about the non-accredited nature of his doctorate.

 

Pacific Western was a diploma mill. (Now California Miramar University, under new management, and applicant to DETC.) Perhaps not quite of the Glencullen or Columbia State variety but almost as bad. PWU seemed to let their students do at least some work for their degrees, whereas Glencullen and Columbia State didn't make any pretenses of requiring work. The KTLA investigation (and others) showed though that academic rigor and academic standards were NOT part of PWU policy. So they might ask for a dissertation but probably didn't have any knowledgeable person review the papers.

 

Bill re Pacific Western: "So they might ask for a dissertation..."

I think not. I believe all they asked for was what they called a "warrant" which was their word for a six-page annotated resume.

 

There's some PWU graduate that doesn't like the Wikipedia description of CMU. He wants the article to say that at one time PWU was an academically rigorous university. When I ask him to please provide a reliable source for the assertion he says that he won't accept an impossible task but that I'm instead supposed to take his word for it. He also says that Wikipedia policy is horribly flawed to not allow his anonymous testimony as reference for such an assertion in the article. (BTW, he generously offered similar testimony from some of his fellow graduates.) I guess that nothing is perfect, not even Wikipedia policy and guidelines.

A serious question, I understand that PWU received approval for their Business degrees from BPPVE. This was after The Private Postsecondary and Vocational Reform Act of 1989. So does that mean that any non-business degrees bestowed by PWU in the 90's would have had to have been officially bestowed by the Hawaiian branch of PWU? Second question (less serious) was there anything to stop PWU Hawaii from bestowing a business degree that didn't adhere to BPPVE approval?

 

Yes. But keep in mind, the two operations ran from the same California location and by the same people. Hawaii was merely a convenience.

No. But why bother? It seemed simple enough to operate both with California Approval and outside the stated standards. It's not as if the BPPVE had the resources to check or anything.

That's a reason why approval under the CPPVE had more meaning. They could focus on the better schools and programs, leaving everything else for the Authorized category. The downside was that the Authorized category was notoriously lax. It contained such luminaries as PWU, Kennedy-Western, Century, Kensington, CULA, U. of Beverly Hills, and Golden State.

And it was easy to tell the difference between a serious, unaccredited school (like Columbia Pacific, California Pacific, International, Saybrook, Laurence, Santa Barbara, and CCU) and the crap. Not anymore.

Those were fun times, though.

 

The implosion is complete; Brice Lesley went from being a newly appointed chief of police to resigning his position as a police sergeant and facing the possibility of re-paying thousands of dollars in educational incentive money he shouldn't have received;

http://www.telegram.com/article/20071215/NEWS/712150435

 

Based upon what we've seen recently in similar cases, it was his non-existent bachelor's degree that killed it, not the fake "Shelbourne" degree.

I suspect he resigned to avoid paying back the 10 grand or so he's been paid for a bachelor's he doesn't have. That, and to avoid prosecution. The West Brookfield government might just let this one fade away quietly.

My take: it sounds good all around. I don't think they should try to collect from the guy. First, he's been punished a lot from the public disgrace and, now, the loss of his job. Second, collecting might not be worth the return--it could get expensive to litigate.

Of course, a hard line against fraud would be in order, too, especially regarding a public servant and law enforcement officer. Either way, I'm glad he's gone.

 

West Brookfield is one of those classic old New England towns where things are still done by "town meeting" (about the purest form of democracy left) and to whom $10,000 is a lot of money. All it takes is a couple of zealots at town meeting to make some noise, and the town will be banging down Lesley's door to recoup the money (as they should, IMO).