Googling a Questionable School

Discussion in 'Accreditation Discussions (RA, DETC, state approva' started by BillDayson, Jul 11, 2003.

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  1. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Henrik recently challenged me to do a Google search on some new and small institutions, and to compare them with his. I've been a proponent of the "Google-test" for some time, believing it to be very revealing, so I decided to take him up on it.

    My example is Hsi Lai University. It is small, less than ten years old and is still just CA-approved.

    I excluded all of HLU's own webpages, along with those of Buddhist organizations associated with HLU. I only wanted independent opinion. I generally favored academic or specialist sites.

    Some highlights:

    1. 2002 Australasian Buddhist Conference. Keynote speaker was HLU's Ananda Guruge:

    http://www.bddronline.net.au/bddr12no2/convention1.html

    2. Conference speakers' bios from a different site:

    http://www.bfvaust.org/HTML/Speakers.htm

    3. Guruge at the Sept. 2000 UNESCO Conference on Interreligious Dialogue in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

    http://www.unesco.org/culture/dialogue/religion/html_eng/uzbekistan4.shtml

    4. Guruge gives keynote speech at 2000 launch of the new World Buddhist University in Bankok Thailand:

    http://www.wfn.org/2000/12/msg00077.html

    5. 2002 meeting in Bankok on the World Buddhist University, with Guruge present:

    http://www.bdcu.org.au/BDDR/bddr12no1/wbuconference.html

    6. HLU and Whittier College's Paul Kjellberg. A bio from a Religion and Ecology Conference at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions:

    http://www.hds.harvard.edu/cswr/ecology/kjell.htm

    7. Bio of Hsi Lai's Ven. Yifa (a Buddhist nun) at Harvard's Pluralism Project

    http://www.pluralism.org/about/yifa/index.php

    8. Bio of Hsi Lai's Gordon Gibb from LA Buddhist-Catholic dialogue site:

    http://bcdialog.urbandharma.org/bcd2/ggibb.html

    9. A New York Times story on the Hsi Lai Temple (with photos):

    http://www2.kenyon.edu/depts/religion/Fac/Adler/Reln260/HsiLai.htm

    10. Ananda Guruge statement on the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas:

    http://hss.fullerton.edu/comparative/bamian_buddhas_art.htm

    11. Review of 'Patterns of Religion', coauthored by Roger Schmidt of Hsi Lai U.

    http://www.human.toyogakuen-u.ac.jp/~acmuller/articles/patterns.htm

    12. Master Hsing Yun, the 48th Patriarch of the Lin-chi (Japanese Rinzai) line of Ch'an, founder of the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Order and Hsi Lai University, speaks at the January 2000 Conference on Culture and Humanity in the New Millenium in Hong Kong:

    http://ihome.cuhk.edu.hk/~b102437/congress/biodata.html

    13. Guruge at April 2003 UNESCO conference on Buddhist-Islamic Dialogue in Paris:

    http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php@URL_ID=11690&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

    14. A cryptic thing referring to Michael Murray's talk on 'Unicode Issues for Input of Chinese Texts' at the 4th meeting of the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative 1997 at Otani University in Kyoto.

    http://www.human.toyogakuen-u.ac.jp/~acmuller/ebti/cjktech/murray.htm

    15. Statewide California Electronic Library Coalition:

    http://www.usc.edu/isd/partners/orgs/scelc/scelc_consortium.html

    16. Bios of some Myanmar Sayadaws in LA who are students at HLU:

    http://web.ukonline.co.uk/buddhism/rmsimonk.htm

    17. Announcement of the First International Conference on Humanistic Buddhism hosted by Hsi Lai U.

    http://www2.uiuc.edu/unit/psames/newsletters/nbltoct18.html

    18. A National Taiwan University page listing Buddhist studies programs including HLU:

    http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/DBLM/resource/academic/academic-o-e.htm

    19. A Myanmar Buddhist nun studying at HLU:

    http://www.myanmar.gov.mm/myanmartimes/no85/Timeouts/3a.htm

    20. Harvard Gazette story on Engaged Buddhism:

    http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/03.20/13-buddhists.html

    21. 1997 UCLA Asian Studies conference with a presentation by Ven. Yifa:

    http://www.isop.ucla.edu/eas/summ-97.htm

    22. Ananda Guruge presentation to NY Interfaith Center:

    http://www.interfaithcenter.org/RONY/Buddhists/nobletruths.html

    23. Guruge gives a talk at Tony Pina's own CSU San Bernardino:

    http://asian.csusb.edu/events/lecture2.php

    24. 2003 Nuns in the West Conference held at Hsi Lai Temple. From a Benedictine/Cistercian website:

    http://www.monasticdialog.com/bulletins/71/nunsinthewest.htm

    25. Same conference, from a Buddhist website:

    http://www.urbandharma.org/nunsofwest.html

    26. Article on academic Buddhist Studies in Tricycle (a leading American Buddhist magazine):

    http://www.tricycle.com/p_articles_id_15.html

    27. Reference to a paper presented at 4'th Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Philosophy and Religion hosted at HLU, in a Japanese bibliography on Aum Shinryko.

    http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/~mwatanab/jp/gyouseki.htm

    28. Review of Ven. Yifa's book 'Safeguarding the Heart', about Buddhism, suffering, violence and September 11.

    http://www.urbandharma.org/udnl/nl091002.html

    29. Guruge at 2001 APARRI Conference at UC Berkeley:

    http://www.psr.edu/pana.cfm?m=96

    30. Presentation on international insurance trade by HLU's Yue Yun Chen at 1997 Southern Risk Insurance Association:

    http://www.terry.uga.edu/sria/97prog.htm

    31. Occidental College gets grant from the Lilly Endowment allowing its undergraduate religion students to do internships at, among others, Hsi Lai Univ.:

    http://0-www.oxy.edu.oasys.lib.oxy.edu:80/news/articles/021126-lilly.html

    32. U. Oklahoma Buddhist Association site listing HLU:

    http://www.ou.edu/student/ouba/main/links.htm

    33. Harvard's Women, Religion and Social Change conference with Ven. Yifa:

    http://www.pluralism.org/events/wrsc2/index.php

    34. Chinese language story about monks from Hsi Lai visiting St. Louis:

    http://www.scanews.com/spot/2001/august/s574/blia/

    35. San Diego State faculty page for Asian Studies Prof. Sandra Wawrytko, who also teaches at HLU:

    http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~aps1/graphics/wawrytko_teaching.htm

    36. Wasc grants candidacy to Hsi Lai:

    http://www.wascweb.org/senior/Report_of_Actions0602.pdf

    37. C.John Powers of the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University is a consultant to HLU:

    http://www.anu.edu.au/asianstudies/cvs/powerscv.html

    38. U. Chicago Divinity School's alumni page announces one of their Ph..D.s hired by HLU:

    http://divinity.uchicago.edu/research/criterion/autumn2001/alumni_news.html

    39. Guruge at The Religious Consultation:

    http://www.sacredchoices.org/participating_scholars.htm

    40. Somebody at LaVerne U. wins third prize in an ethnic video festival with a film on Hsi Lai U.

    http://www.ulaverne.edu/campustimes/990319/vidfest.htm

    41. Western Association of College and University Business Officers

    http://www.wacubo.org/membership.html

    42. A University of Southern California class meeting at HLU:

    www-classes.usc.edu/engr/ee-ep/597/ee597_01_hw2.doc

    43. Guruge gives a talk to the United Nations Association of Orange County:

    http://www.una-oc.org/newsrgt.htm

    44. Story on Guruge from the CSU Fullerton campus newspaper:

    http://dailytitan.fullerton.edu/issues/fall_00/12_08/news/crusaderfor.html
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 11, 2003
  2. John Bear

    John Bear Senior Member

    Hsi Lai also had a significant role in the Buddhist fund-raising scandal that haunted Al Gore 3 years ago.
     
  3. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    As I noted in another thread, if you do that with Kennedy-Western, you get about 350 hits, all sites set up to advertise for Kennedy-Western. Essentially, they've hijacked the search process. Although these sites look superficially as if they're set up to refer people to degree programs, the performance of Google seems to indicate that these sites are Kennedy-Western first and foremost--hence their prominence in a search.

    There was NO independent information about Kennedy-Western available. I'm sure that's the way they like it.
     
  4. uncle janko

    uncle janko member

    Right all round. Thanks, guys.
     
  5. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Bill Huffman remarked on another thread that none of the most credible non-accredited programs seem to be distance learning. While I basically agree with him, there arguably might be a handful of exceptions.

    I'm hesitant to scare Degreeinfo by posting this, but the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco offers one of the most credible short residency non-accredited doctorates that I know of. Actually, this is an on-campus program that it is possible to complete in a short-residency format. But whatever it is, they actually do research and stuff.

    There's an obvious California flakiness factor, but it's hard to deny that something is happening here. These people kind of take advantage of their non-accredited status by being very edgy and alternative, approaching their non-traditional subject matter in a way that few other universities duplicate. I mean, if you want to know what's happening in the back rooms of the most subterranean of underground gay nightclubs, who are you gonna call? I guess that I'm saying that if you are into what they are doing (now that's scary), this school might be one of the world's best.

    WARNING: IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED, DON'T CLICK ON THESE LINKS. Despite all the obvious similarities, this is not Bob Jones University.

    1. List of dissertations:

    http://www.iashs.edu/catalog/diss.htm

    2. The IASHS e-journal:

    http://www.ejhs.org/

    3. Listing by U. Indiana's Kinsey Institute:

    http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/resources/education.html

    4. Listing on CSU Northridge's Center for Sex Research website:

    http://www.csun.edu/~sr2022/links.htm

    5. Listing on University of Hawaii's Pacific Center for Sex and Society website:

    http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/links/hslinks1.html

    6. Bio of Professor Doctor Doctor Erwin Haeberle (one of the doctorates is from IASHS), director of Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin's Archiv für Sexualwissenshaft. (And IASHS professor):

    http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/STAFF.HTM

    7. Story about Haeberle:

    http://www.libidomag.com/nakedbrunch/archive/berlin.html

    8. Haeberle keynote speaker at 14'th World Congress of Sexology,Hong Kong, Aug. 1999

    http://www.glink.net.hk/~hksea/was/s4-spea.html

    9.Haeberle's sexology timeline, including founding of IASHS by Wardell Pomoroy, Alfred Kinsey's closest collaborator

    http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/CHR07.HTM

    10. IASHS' Charles Moser lectures at UC San Francisco's AIDS Clinical Grand Rounds on "Sexual Dysfunction in HIV Diseases"

    http://www.keck.ucsf.edu/seminars/0301.html

    11. Moser bio and bibligraphy

    http://pw1.netcom.com/~docx2/CV.html

    12. Moser interviewed in 'Psychology Today' article: ''The Pleasure of
    Pain: Why Some People Need S&M"

    http://www.gawth.com/~desolate/psychtoday.html

    13. Gina Ogden of IASHS, author of 'Women Who Love Sex: An Inquiry into the Expanding Spirit of Women's Erotic Experience', is on the advisory panel of Spirituality and Sexuality

    http://www.spiritualityandsexuality.com/pages/Board.html

    14. IASHS professor Mildred Brown's new book 'True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism' 2003, Wiley

    http://www.wileyeurope.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787967025,descCd-authorInfo.html

    15. IASHS professor Fang Ruan, researcher on gender identity and transgender in China:

    http://web.hku.hk/~sjwinter/TransgenderASIA/directory_of_researchers.htm

    16. Gloria Brame's S&M survey:

    http://gloria-brame.com/domidea/research.htm

    17. Gloria's book 'Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission;

    http://gloria-brame.com/diflove/index.html

    18. Gloria's book 'Come Hither: A Commonsense Guide to Kinky Sex'

    http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0FKJ3ESU3Q&sourceid=&srefer=&isbn=0684854627

    19. Comments on an FDA study:

    http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dailys/03/Jan03/013003/8004e1ad.html

    20. IASHS's 'Guide to Safer Sex' a reading assignment in a 1990 SUNYC at Potsdam Anthropology of AIDS syllabus.

    http://puffin.creighton.edu/aarg/syllabi/1990_anthropology_aids.htm

    21. Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation microbicide study:

    http://aim-med.org/venture.html

    22. Cynde Moya of IASHS presents paper 'Subject Access to "Pornography" for Serious Research Purposes' at November 2001 conference of American Society of Information Science and Technology in Washington DC

    http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM01/monday.html

    23. IASHS is trustee of the world's largest collection of pornography and other "erotological materials" (more than 3 million books, journals, films, and other artifacts)

    http://www.ncac.org/issues/ashcroft.html

    24. The strange and obscure world of balloon fetishists:

    http://www.deviantdesires.com/brp.html

    25. Moser presents a paper at the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality Western Regional Conference, April 2000 in San Diego:

    http://www.sssswr.org/prog00.htm

    26. April 2002 Western Regional Conference of the SSSS in Manhattan Beach

    http://www.sssswr.org/Prog02/page1.html

    27. IASHS given as a resource in a National University syllabus:

    http://www3.nu.edu/schools/SOAS/DOP/courses/PSY626syllabus.html

    28. Jamie Stroud's investigation into how gay and lesbian parishoners see the United Methodist Church:

    http://www.gumresearch.org/

    29. National Catholic Reporter article by IASHS professor:

    http://www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives/110102/110102r.htm

    30. Online text of "Introduction," from Erwin Haeberle's THE BIRTH OF SEXOLOGY: A BRIEF HISTORY IN DOCUMENTS

    http://www.sexuality.org/l/sex/sexohist.html

    31. University of Hong Kong link:

    http://www.hku.hk/facmed/research/alinks.html

    32. Member of the National Coalition to Support Sexuality Education

    http://www.thebody.com/siecus/report/coalition.html

    33. World Association for Sexology

    http://www.worldsexology.org/english/membership.html

    34. IASHS' Charles Moser a charter member of the International Association for the Treatment of Sex Offenders

    http://www.medacad.org/iatso/members.htm

    35. U. of Texas link:

    http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/MestonLAB/Resources/orgs.html
     
  6. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    I've poked around before in some of those links that you previously posted that are related to this institute. It is actually quite fun and interesting. I agree with your "California flakiness factor". In particular, I got a real kick out of the specialist term "sexologist". The most important point though is that obviously, there is real genuine academic research going on there. Oh and thanks for the amusing links again! ;)
     
  7. Dennis Ruhl

    Dennis Ruhl member

    Justine Hill - 1978 "A Study of Male Genitalia"

    Brings a whole new meaning to doing an all-nighter.

    "Mom! I can't do the dishes tonight, I have to work on my thesis."

    "That's okay dear, at least you're not running around with boys."

    I've done a study on the same subject, from a less than arms-length perspective, for over 50 years. Where do I get my PhD?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 13, 2003
  8. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Results for search on ["berne university" "st. kitts"] 251 hits, of which 104 were displayed.

    These included dozens of college guide sites and a number of online cv's. There were several discussions of "international mystery universities", including a paper by Alan Contreras. The most significant sites seemed to be these:

    1. Conference on Technology in Education, just concluded July 2003, St. Kitts, cosponsored by St. Kitts Min. of Education and Berne:

    http://www.stkittsnevis.net/conference.html

    2. Reference to Berne in a paper out of the UVI.

    http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/sk&n/conference/papers/SJHendrickson.html

    3. Reference to an unpublished Berne dissertation

    http://www.coe.unt.edu/gifted/Links/Tempo_CZ-MS_June-01.PDF

    While varying the search terms could probably generate more hits, this seems to suggest that Berne has a considerably smaller web presence than one of the stronger CA-approved schools. Berne offers doctoral programs in several fields that failed to generate any hits at all. Compare that to the abundant (albeit peculiar) hits generated by the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
     
  9. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    This Goggle for an academic "webprint" (from the term footprint) actually gets more intriging after each time I try it. Perhaps worthy of an educational dissertation? A study of hit categories and possible conclusions, e.g., degree mill versus academic institution. More likely it could give quantitative figure that could be compared against a spectrum chart.
     
  10. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    While the subject and results are interesting and relevant, I would want to see the methodology section of that dissertation proposal.
     
  11. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    Look Bill, I think we just found your first peer review committee member!
     
  12. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    I'm most emphatically not a doctoral candidate.

    Google can be used to generate a set of webpages related to various questioned universities and programs. While I think that we can respond intuitively to the number of hits that we generate, I'm less comfortable with the idea of "quantifying" it.

    For one thing, the set of hits that's generated is in part a function of the choice of search terms. If we were going to do anything formal and comparative, the search parameters would have to be uniform and equally relevant in each case.

    But there's a much more serious issue.

    What Google generates is a set of hits that illustrates what is being said about the questioned program, and by whom. Obviously that takes in an essentially unbounded number of possibilities. So we are presented not only with a quantitative number of hits, but with the task of qualitatively evaluating them and assigning them weights.

    Most of us have an intuitive grasp of this. We will assign academic and professional pages more weight than marketing pages on college-guide sites. We will assign weight to things like collaborations, presentations and publications, based in large part on who the collaborations were with, where the presentations were made and what the publications contained and where they appeared. We will assign weight to "star" faculty and researchers, based on our evaluations of their importance. We will weight research contributions, grants and awards.

    It will probably be hard to quantify and to standardize all that. There's going to be an ineradicable interpretive element. That's why I've suggested that this might be more a matter of aesthetics than of algorithms.

    What I'm tying to do here is to use Google to help us produce a sort of image, an "X-ray" picture of non-accredited schools that might partially substitute for their lack of accreditation. I'm trying to find a means that would allow us to form an opinion about what questioned schools are really doing and about how credible it is, based on observing how other people of various sorts are responding to it.
     
  13. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    Well you keep this up and we just might have to make you an unwilling candidate. :D
     
  14. Jack Tracey

    Jack Tracey New Member

    Obviously, all search engines are not created equal and Google has been at the top of the heap for some time (IMHO). I'm not enough of a computer jockey to understand why some work better than others but I've recently found a search engine that might rival Google. It's called Teoma and you can find it, guess where,
    http://www.teoma.com
    I haven't done a lot of "compare and contrast" tests between Google and Teoma but my amateurish experimentation indicates they are the top 2 search engines on the web. Please keep in mind that this is something I know very little about and I'm not looking for some sort of "my search engine can beat up your search engine" sort of interaction.
    :cool:
    Jack
     
  15. Gus Sainz

    Gus Sainz New Member

    Interestingly, I did a search for the term “Knightsbridge University,” on Teoma, and I was offered the following suggestions to refine and narrow my search:
    • Fake Diploma
    • Fake Degrees
    • Fakes
    • Fake College Degrees
    • Sample Certificates
    • College Degrees
    • Fake Certificates
    • Fake High School Diplomas
    • Fake Ged
    • College Diplomas Fake
    The only other school that brought up a derogatory refinement suggestion (and I tried quite a few searches, including some of the most notorious degree mills in history) was Columbia State University. Among several innocuous suggestions to refine the search for Columbia State was the term “diploma mill.”

    The search for Knightsbridge University was also the only one that featured a few unsavory sponsored links. I am refraining from commentary and simply reporting the facts.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 14, 2003
  16. Jack Tracey

    Jack Tracey New Member

    Hi Gus - Thank you for validating my experience with Teoma.
    Interesting, no?
    Jack
     
  17. uncle janko

    uncle janko member

    I must admit that I was unaware that there were people who have sex with balloons.
     
  18. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    Well, if there are, I hope that they're consenting ballons.
     
  19. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    A search for "knightsbridge university" produced 179 hits, of which 81 were displayed (the rest being "essentially the same").
    There were a great many college-guide sites, and some cv's. There were some sites in Eastern European languages whose content is unclear. There was BREM and that controversy in SA.

    Interestingly, there seemed to be some confusion about whether KU was located in Denmark or Devon.

    The remaining highlights:

    1. A 2001 material's science paper by KU's E. De Silva:
    http://www2.umist.ac.uk/corrosion/JCSE/Volume3/Paper13/v3p13.html

    2. A Barbados politician with an honorary doctorate from Knightsbridge
    http://www.smallshop.com/barbadoselections/candidates/dlp/braddie.htm

    3. Listed by Simon Fraser U. as an educational evaluation resource:
    http://www.sfu.ca/learningassessmentnetwork/interint.htm

    4. Listed by the U. of Toronto as a British prior learning institution.
    http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~plar/links/abroad/europe.html

    5. A South African environmentalist who claims a KU Ph.D.
    http://www.mtnforum.org/resources/library/hamil96c.htm

    6. A listing on a website for a very cryptic Russian 'European IT Management and Immunocomputation Workshop International Consortium'
    http://reton.tom.ru/EB/team.php

    7. A caution warning:
    http://courses.telecampus.edu/articles/index.cfm?fuseaction=unaccredited-institutions

    8. An unfavorable mention on a Japanese TESOL website, calling KU (at the time of writing) "a limited company in Torquay" whose degrees are a "sign of gullibility":
    http://langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/97/mar/distance.html

    9. A listing on a Torquay Devon 'local college' site:
    http://www.locallife.co.uk/torbay/collegesandunis3.asp

    10. A listing on a Torbay Devon church's website:
    http://www.sagart.force9.co.uk/links.html

    A number of sites citing Knightsbridge aren't in English. While they seem to me to be college guide sites, they may be more substantial. But based on what's available on the web in English, it's pretty thin.
     
  20. Dr. Gina

    Dr. Gina New Member

    Bill,

    Some of the most intresting "rescearch" to date. Thank you!



    P.S. Is there a difference in the arousal level between a red or green baloon?:D
     

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