We are told by our publisher that U S News and World Report has scheduled a major feature on degree mills for next week, ostensibly with a lot of focus on our book. They say it goes on sale at airports on Sunday, reaches subscribers on Monday, and news stands on Wednesday. Needless to say, Ezell and I are hoping this is true (and favorable!) since major print media articles typically lead to many radio and TV interviews.
Therefore, the citizens of US News and World Report are in a hurry these days, because with the novel and astonishing modernize information of CCU, the have to transform the episode. No extra of the GAO festival about CCU. In addition, no more of the absurd classification that Alan and Michigan give to CCU.
With all due respect, I must have missed something in my reading of this article. Perhaps the online version is not the entire article. Was Ezell accusing CCU of being a mill? Is CCU even mentioned in the article at all? Granting DETC approval (an accreditation that most people have never heard of) to CCU (a school that most people have never heard of) is not exactly big news to most of the public. However, nearly anyone with an e-mail account has had first-hand experience with diploma mill e-mail spam. Tony
Re: Laura Callahan Allen Considers her a victim because out of all the government employee's with "less than wonderful" degree's she is the only one that has been fired. So in essence she is a victim, and wrote a chapter in the book. Which i haven't gotten to, Dan Zevin has been in my way lately.
I followed the link to the article and found an advert for instantdegrees.com running along side. How ironic.
DTechBA: "I would hesitate to label Laura Callahan a "victim" as this article does." John: Ezell and I agreed that her account of what she did at least deserved public airing, which is why we offered her -- not a chapter, but an appendix in our book. As MichaelR points out, Ezell and I agree that she is a victim of a government that says, "Hey, Mr. Abell, senior Undersecretary of Defense, friend of Rumsfeld, your only degree is an unaccredited and worthless one that would make you a criminal in some states, but we choose to ignore that, even if you are in charge of HR for the entire Dept. of Defense . . . but, Ms. Callahan, with a comparably worthless degree, we force you out of your job and deny you the pension you've worked 19 years to accumulate." For whatever it's worth, Abell is a Bush appointee and Callahan was a Clinton appointee.
From reading this forum I have always thought she got a raw deal. I have also always thought she was wrong for getting involved with Hamilton. If a degree was not required for her job, and she had done it well for so many years she should have been disciplined or even demoted, but not fired and put through what she was put through. I guess that is the risk you take though.
re: 'Dr. Callahan' Here's a link to an altogether unflattering article concerning 'Dr. Callahan': Cut-Rate Diplomas
This is the longest and most complete article I've seen. Thanks, scross. If the author is correct that the various Hamilton degrees were actually used for promotion and salary increases, that seems a more serious charge. I believe Callahan has maintained that none of her jobs required any degrees.
Paul Sperry's article in Reason Online is certainly very interesting and quite damning as the facts are presented. As a non US citizen though, to me it is also an insight into the politics of the US and how every aspect of a person's life is fair game for knocking the opposition. (Pretty much the same in most democracies I suppose with the no-go areas decreasing in number every year.) But what struck me as well was the poke at TESC.
Re: re: 'Dr. Callahan' But I don't understand. Wasn't Callahan a victim in all of this? Thank you very much for the link to this article!
I had the same reaction, and in fact just posted a response to the same link to Paul Sperry's article that was posted in another thread in the Distance Education forum: thread link It's unfortunate that legitimately accredited distance education so often gets tossed into the same category as diploma mills in these kinds of investigative pieces. In my opinion it belies either a lack of research or an attempt toward sensationalism. Fortunately the U.S. News article didn't sink to either of those tactics. Kit
