From April 25 Tampa Tribune: www.tampatrib.com in the 'metro' section. Hillsborough Detective: I Didn't Know School Was Fake By MARK DOUGLAS [email protected] Published: Apr 25, 2003 TAMPA - Anthony Bordonaro saved time and money on a college diploma by paying Columbia State University about $1,600 for a bachelor of science degree. The trouble is CSU is a fraud. ...If anyone should have known, it was Bordonaro. He is a veteran detective in the Special Operations Division of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office who has 18 years in law enforcement and a number of commendations in his personnel file. ...Despite [Columbia State's] notoriety, national exposes featured on ABC's``20/20'' and ``Good Morning America,'' and the longstanding FBI crackdown on diploma mills, Bordonaro said he was in the dark about his alma mater's shady history until a reporter approached him... ...Despite CSU's published offers of a bachelor's degree in two weeks and a doctorate in 27 days, Bordonaro said...he studied long and hard for his degree. The detective insisted he spent two years of correspondence study earning his bachelor's degree in political science from CSU..."
It seems to me that the detective was taken for a ride (as did many other CSU graduates). He obviously believed that CSU was an accredited university. It's a shame that he had to study so hard for those years only to end up with a useless piece of paper.
I don't think that CSU even bothered to pretend to teach classes. Don't rule out the theory that this guy may be dishonest and just lied about putting in two years of work. Putting in more than two weeks worth of work for a degree would be totally against Pellar's theory of education, at least from what I saw him spout.
It is not "obvious." An alternate, and perfectly reasonable, explanation is that he bought a degree from CSU and knew what he was doing. CSU never offered correspondence courses. That he would lie about that very significant fact would seem to preponderate, tilting the scales from "victim" to "co-conspirator." He could not have done correspondence courses--he lied--so why should anyone believe he was an innocent victim? I can believe some situations where students are fooled about a school's accreditation status. But dealing with CSU was all about buying a degree, not earning one. It is not just the unaccredited status of CSU that is at issue (many schools in Louisiana fit that definition), it is the fact that Ron Pellar operated it without facilities, faculties, courses, or anything else that would give one pause to think CSU was a real school. This guy wasn't an innocent victim. He got caught.
A lot of agencies are now requiring some college for entry-level positions and are requiring Associate or Bachelors degrees to get promoted. This put pressure on veteran cops who want to get ahead. IMO, the entry-level college requirement should be abolished and should be replaced with the TABE test and with another test that measures the writing ability of the applicant. Why impose a college requirement on entry-level applicants? After all, we're not hiring executives -- we're hiring blue collar workers. I would not be surprised if more agencies drop the entry-level college requirement over the next seven years, due to the inability to hire enough qualified applicants. Agencies are getting desperate (at least down here in Florida).
Here's the exact link to the article: http://news.tbo.com/news/MGAWTTWOXED.html There was a copy posted to Usenet: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=MAL.mgkx1%40email.onlinecollege.info
