Berne University International Graduate School

Discussion in 'Accreditation Discussions (RA, DETC, state approva' started by Guest, Jun 27, 2002.

Loading...
  1. And I still want to know whatever happened to Dale Berne.

    Here I sit with The Web Guide to Non-Traditional and Distance Learning University Degree Programs, compiled and edited by "The Commission on Distance Education," published in 1997 by The Edwin Mellen Press, and on pp. 15-17 there's an article by Dale Berne -- "Assessing Transcripts and Resumes for Credit Toward Life/Work/Study Experience" (brief and very general). Berne is identified on p. 18 as "currently the founder and rector of Berne University" who "has a long and noteworthy career in the field of public education, having served as an Assistant Superintendent of Schools in New Hampshire, a principal of numerous high schools, etc."

    And now he isn't mentioned at all on Berne's Web site. He doesn't look all that old in the photo -- and you'd think that if he'd died, they'd name a scholarship or something after him. But no, Berne says nothing about its founder, or where or when it was founded.

    As to whether the New Hampshire or St. Kitts office is the "main" office -- don't you think they'd register their domain name with the main office address? Here's the WHOIS info:

    Domain Name: BERNE.EDU
    Registrant:
    Berne University
    PO Box 1080
    Wolfeboro Falls, NH 03896
    UNITED STATES
    Contacts:
    Administrative Contact:
    Chuck Knisley
    Berne University
    35 Center Street, Unit 18
    Wolfboro Falls, NH 03896
    UNITED STATES
    (603) 569-8648
    [email protected]
    Technical Contact:
    Web Hed Technologies
    1617 e. commerce
    San Antonio, TX 78205
    UNITED STATES
    (210) 354-1661
    [email protected]
    Name Servers:
    DNS1.WEB-HED.COM
    NS1.SWBELL.NET
    Domain record activated: 02-Oct-1996
    Domain record last updated: 14-Dec-2001

    (Normally the technical contact is irrelevant -- it's wherever the Web site is hosted. However, it might be of some interest that web-hed.com also hosts awu.edu and the pages for WAUC.)
     
  2. Guest

    Guest Guest

    Not unlike Capella University. Maybe Berne U is kind of Capella on the cheap. For whatever reason Berne chose to locate its residency campus to St. Kitts rather than in the North Central RA jurisdiction (maybe expense). My understanding is the the NH RA jurisdiction has not been as favorable to DL.

    Berne leases a campus for residencies. Capella leases a campus for residencies. As I understand it neither have campuses of their own and operate out of office space (I am sure Capella's office space is much nicer..............Berne does not have as many students/graduates per year and does not charge the same tuition ).

    Berne requires mandatory residency for the doctorate & apparently waived a residency for someone who was ill and could not travel if medical documentation could be provided (as I understand what was posted here earlier). Capella also requires mandatory residency but apparently waived it for a convicted murderer who could not travel.


    North
     
  3. Guest

    Guest Guest

    It is rather odd. When I asked at one point a person from the University told me "He is no longer with the University". Rather cryptic and no more details were provided. I notice that Dr. Knisley was a professor there a couple of years ago and is now Provost. Maybe there was a coupe :D Someone joked here that it was like the KGB disappearing someone and erasing discussion of them.

    Things seem to have improved somewhat for Berne since Dale Berne's departure. Maybe he just sold the University??

    North
     
  4. Ike

    Ike New Member

    If the information posted above is correct (and I believe it is), Berne's degrees should not be taken seriously by anybody. A university based in St. Kitts and Nevis should have a solid presence in St Kitts and Nevis. If not, it should not be considered a Kittitian university. In fact, I am now convinced that it is an unaccredited U.S. school. The officials of the school have been parading the outfit as a Kittitian/Nevisian school.
    For now, I will add Berne University to my list of degree mills and I will continue to view it as a mill unless the information posted above by Dr. Bear is proved wrong by someone.
     
  5. Ike

    Ike New Member

    If Berne's accreditation amounts to nothing, I wonder what Dr. Bear (also Rich Douglas and others) think of other schools that are currently accredited by St. Kitts ministry of education. Notable among them are International University of Health Sciences (IUHS) and Ross University school of Veterinary Medicine. For those who may not know, IUHS is a DL medical school and its medical graduates are allowed to sit for medical board examinations in the United States.
     
  6. Guest

    Guest Guest

    Playing devil's advocate again, if you are saying Berne should not be taken seriously because it functions out of rented office space and has no campus......Capella operates in the same way (off hand I forget which brick & mortar school they rent).

    As for the solid presence, they do what Capella does which is to rent a campus and maintain an office (Berne in St. Kitts). If you visit Berne's web site you will see they have St. Kitts staff running the office. http://www.berne.edu

    See my post above regarding Dr. Bear's other comment to which you are replying. Berne has mandatory residency which it waived for someone ill with Dr's statement (according to someones post here). Capella also waived mandatory residency for a convicted murderer.

    As for the mill comment, no one has posted anything here at all to indicate Berne's degrees are substandard in terms of current work or quality. In fact just the opposite has been posted in that Foreign Credential Evaluators reviewing course by course requirements and dissertation have given them equivalency to RA.

    So, I suppose we can throw the *mill* term around without any facts to back it up but I am not sure it is wise.

    Understand that there is no question that Berne is not going to enjoy the same utility as RA, maybe more utility than some Nationally Accredited programs, and not as much as other foreign jurisdictions with a better history of accreditation.

    North (who is neither enrolled nor an employee of Berne and is quite ready at some point to be proven to be in error but no one has done that yet).
     
  7. Ike

    Ike New Member

    I also want to know why anybody should take other schools that hold St. Kitts accreditation seriously if the accreditation amounts to nothing. I am waiting for comments from posters.
    As for the use of the word mill, uhmm, I was thinking of degree mill. A degree mill is NOT a diploma mill. I may have rushed my conclusion but there is definitely something murky about Berne that needs to be cleared. Why would an unaccredited U.S school seek accreditation from a small Caribbean nation? Why does Berne hold the same accreditation as other tertiary institutions in St. Kitts? Would this confusion be resolved if St. Kitts ministry of education provides official accreditation report that documents accreditation procedure in the island(s) nation?
    My take is that if Berne is a degree mill, it follows that other schools that are accredited by St. Kitts are also degree mills. On the contrary, if the other schools are NOT degree mills, one can rightly conclude that Berne is not a degree mill. I am probably missing something here but I don't know what it is. It's late in the east coast and I have to wake up early. This discussion will continue tomorrow.
     
  8. Guest

    Guest Guest

    Good points Ike & as it is late.......good night :)

    North
     
  9. Dennis Ruhl

    Dennis Ruhl member


    The web page with the accrediting procedures has been provided twice in this thread, early on by North and about 5 - 10 posts back by myself.

    An interesting point is that the cost of accreditation is only $ 1000 or $ 2000, I don't remember exactly.

    A choice was probably made whether to move to the domain of the North Central Association or to paradise (to a Western Canadian) and paradise won.

    I have no feeling one way or the other about Berne. I just question why a sovereign nation with accreditation procedures in place should be challenged as to the justify their procedures when other countries are not similarly challenged.

    St. Kitts and Nevis is small, black and poor and perhaps certain stereotypical assumptions are being made that should not be made.
     
  10. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    New Hampshire is small, white, and not-so-poor. So what? You're implying that there is prejudice. Okay, prove it. Otherwise, stick to what people say, and not what you think their biases might be (if any).

    Berne is not located in St. Kitts and Nevis. It is located in New Hampshire, where it is unaccredited and unlicensed.

    St. Kitts and Nevis doesn't have an educational system. Whatever standards they publish, they haven't been in the business of applying them. So you'll have to excuse those who do not accept as sufficient never-before applied standards to a school that does not have a presence in that country. (I don't believe any other university offers the academic degrees offered by Berne, but I might be mistaken.)

    This rationalization is intellectually dishonest. It is painfully obvious that what we have in Berne is an unaccredited, unlicensed school approved by a tiny island country with no higher educational system, where said university doesn't exist. Now, if that's okay, fine. But it isn't.

    If Berne was seriously striving to be a university, it would be working with its state agency and regional accrediting association. Or perhaps it could move to St. Kitts and Nevis? Fat chance.:rolleyes:
     
  11. Ohnalee

    Ohnalee New Member

    Berne Open University

    Well, as long as we're discussing Berne's operations ...

    Yaping (Frank) Mo, of the now-defunct Wilson State University out of Hawaii, owns Mos Institute of Technology (www.mosinstitute.com). Under the heading "college credits", Mos claims an affiliation with "Berne University in the U.S." Under "online degree courses", we are referred to Berne Open University.

    The BOU website (http://www.berneopen.org) lists both Mos NJ address and the main one in New Hampshire, but different telephone numbers. I called BOU to ask what its affiliation was with Berne U. The receptionist told me Berne Open is more vocationally-oriented, while Berne U offers academic degrees. I replied that this makes no sense; on the website, Berne Open refers to all the same degrees as Berne U. She offered to send me further info -- maybe just to get me off the phone. Because all I received from her was an enrollment packet for Berne U, signed by provost Charles Kniesley. :confused:
     
  12. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    That doesn't necessarily follow.

    If you look at the California approved list, you find Johns Hopkins University (and Nova Southeastern). You also find Friends International Christian University.

    A lack of standards isn't quite the same thing as enforcing poor standards. It's conceivable that all the St. Kitts schools are great, and it's also conceivable that they aren't. Or perhaps some are and some aren't.

    The point is that if the local accreditation isn't reliable, then you can't rely on it to make that determination for you. You need some other evidence of the school's credibility.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 17, 2002
  13. simon

    simon New Member

    Mr. Ruhl,

    This impasse is not as complex as it may seem to resolve.

    If you wish, contact the licensing agencies in Alberta of various professions in which Bernes offers doctorates and ascertain whether a doctoral degree from this school will enable a graduate to practice within the provence of Alberta or other areas of Canada. This would be a good starting point to assess the viability and acceptability of their degrees.

    Please let us know the results of your exploration of this matter if you should decide to followup as suggested,
     
  14. Dennis Ruhl

    Dennis Ruhl member

    So there is no stereotype of Caribbean universities. St. George's University in Grenada was looked upon as a joke until the performance of their graduates proved them to be one of the better foreign medical schools.

    In former British colonies, the universities established by the colonizers seem to have great respect as in the UWI and UNISA. Everyone else seems to have to struggle for respect.
     
  15. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    I agree that the essence of this isn't Berne so much as it is the possibility of off-shore accreditation havens existing, and being accepted uncritically.

    Accreditation, as it is understood in the US, denotes a process that greatly increases a school's credibility. When a new and unknown accreditor appears on the scene, it isn't automatically accepted with open arms. If that were the case, we would be hugging WAUC and ACI. Accreditors themselves have to be credible.

    Accrediting associations are associations of universities, and the membership knows what's going on. Officers and site visit teams are drawn from the membership. The Department of Education and CHEA monitor what accreditors are doing. And in most cases specialized accreditors operated by professional organizations are also involved. They provide independent corroboration of the institutional accreditors' results. Doctoral level universities produce publicly visible scholarship, and they compete for research funding, which again provides external corroboration.

    In Berne's case you have a school that started out under a cloud, operating with questionable legality out of two rooms in New Hampshire. That raises legitimate questions. Then it claimed accreditation from St. Kitts, where it apparently maintains no permanent presence.

    St. Kitts in turn has no universities of its own, no experience with administering or evaluating higher education, and their accreditation office seems to exist only to accredit the off-shore American schools that wash up there.

    Obvously this doesn't *prove* that Berne is substandard or that St. Kittsian accreditation is without value, But it does raise legitimate questions. St. Kitts is in the same position that any new and unknown accreditor would be in if it appeared overnight and started to accredit questionable schools.

    What Berne and St. Kitts need is the external corroboration that I mentioned above. There are a number of ways that they can do that, but do it they must.

    I don't think color is relevant. Poverty may be. But St. Kitts' size is definitely relevant.

    I have already pointed out that American regional accreditors are associations of hundreds of schools. What is St. Kitts' accreditation office?

    The country has a total population of 40,000. They have no domestic universities. Their Education Ministry sounds grand, but it is essentially equivalent to a medium sized American K-12 district. How many people does St. Kitts have assigned to university accreditation? One person part-time or something?

    If a tiny mom-and-pop American accreditor tried to do that here at home, it wouldn't work. NAPNSC was probably a much more substantial effort than what St. Kitts is doing, but they didn't fly. But because St. Kitts is a soverign nation state, everyone is told to just shut up and accept it.

    My argument is that both Berne and St. Kitts need to demonstrate their credibility first, and the best way to do that is to invite in some external corroboration to verify their claims.
     
  16. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    Yes and if you're a potential student it means that it is much safer to find another school.
     
  17. Ike

    Ike New Member

    The examples you cited are non sequitur because both Nova and John Hopkins are accredited by their respective regional agencies. California approval is more like a permission to operate in the state of California. The two schools I mentioned (IUHS and Ross University) do not hold any other accreditation other than the one issued by St. Kitts and Nevis. If St. Kitts accreditation is a sham, the schools that claim her accreditation are also shams. Unlike John Hopkins (a top-notch university by the way) and Nova (a fully accredited university), neither IUHS nor Ross University holds any other accreditation other than the Kittitian accreditation. I am not defending Berne. I am only trying to be fair and logical. Like I said in my earlier posts, there is still something murky about Berne and I don't know what it is. However, diploma mill it is not. But it may be a degree mill and from my "flawed logic", all other schools that have the same accreditation as Berne are not much different. If St. Kitts accreditation is a sham as many posters have opined and asserted, I wonder why any school that holds only St. Kitts accreditation should not be a sham. Some posters have asserted that higher education system are virtual nonexistent in St. Kitts. If we are to accept the preceding state intoto, it follows that any accreditation by St. Kitts virtually amounts to nothing and any school that holds the accreditation is unaccredited. Berne University, IUHS, and Ross University are unaccredited.
    quod erat demonstrandum
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 18, 2002
  18. Guest

    Guest Guest

    Very good points Ike.

    North
     
  19. Guest

    Guest Guest

    Bill,

    You have made some good points and brought up some appropriate issues.

    The following however is hyperbole:

    I do not know about the legality issue (someone connected with Berne on the other site gave an offical state contact person to verify Berne's legal status as solid in NH). However, the hyperbole about starting *under a cloud* could be said about Capella. Was Dr. Bear not the one who pointed out in one of his guides that Capella (former TGSA) began under the cloud of having the head of the Minn. State University system pleading with the dept of Ed. not to approve TGSA because it was a mail order school (something to that effect). TGSA was probably also operating out of a couple of rooms. The other issue is that according to the Berne site they *do* have a permanent presence and staff from St. Kitts.

    The above as I understand it is inaccurate. According to what Ike posted Berne does accredit and has been accrediting medical/vet schools whose sole accreditation is St. Kitts. Therefore they do have experience and are not int he same position as un unknown accreditor.

    Not a bad idea and would certainly help establish credibility. What I suspect though is that as an independent country they could care less. Berne U may care but have trouble convincing Osmond Petty to bring in external validators. Possibly, a team from the Commonwealth (ACU).

    You say *probably* more substantial which is a good qualifier because you do not necessarily have any more to go one than personal prejudice. I think what the issue for some is that St. Kitts has experience accrediting schools, their ministry of Ed has accredited Berne, they have UNESCO listing, Foreign Credential Evaluation as RA equivalenty, etc. No can make you shut up as anyone has the right to accept or not accept degrees, schools, or the reputation of the countries that issue them. However, we should be honest and realistic. I am prepared for someone to demonstrate that Berne is substandard but that has been done by no one. It is all conjecture up to this point and non fact based expressions that have more to do with prejuidce with Berne than anything else.

    Your external valdiation issue is a good idea. As I mention this could take the form of the ACU sending a team to evaluate the St. Kitts accreditation system. But I suspect that they may no more invite that than the US would ask a team to review the US system which (US system) is seen as not on par with the Australian system (US students need 1st year college to enter as freshman) and causes at least one British institution to consider Canadian 3 year BA's to be the euivalent of a US 4 year degree.

    North
     
  20. Guest

    Guest Guest

    Re: Berne Open University

    Thanks for posting this Ohnalee. Strange indeed. It makes no sense. Berne Open U is Berne U and offers the same programs and Berne Open U refers to Berne U throughout the page????? Even if it is the portion of the school that offers their on-line course it does not make sense to call it Berne Open University.

    One of the things that intrigues me is the issue of the additional NJ office. Assuming as someone posted on the other site that Berne is properly set up in NH with the state (he/she provided a contact for verification) the issue of NJ remains. Are they properly set up with the regulatory authority in NJ?? If not.............not good considering the fine that MIGS got in Tejas.

    If you find an answer to this let us know.

    North
     

Share This Page