Can Doctorate be Unaccredited?

This is the basic argument why I questioned the possibility. Bill Dayson brought up at least one example of an unaccredited university that has a very narrow focus. It appears to have the required visibility, at least within that narrow focus, for the ideas to be shared in the larger academic community.

What I still have not seen is any examples of unaccredited distance learning programs that appear credible from this perspective of being a part of the academic community. Also it appears unlikely that a small unaccredited school can have a wide focus and still expect to be able to reasonably share ideas in the larger academic community. Therefore it seems reasonable to me that it can be argued that doctorates from these types of institutions are not really able to satisify the requirement that the doctorate make a significant contribution to the knowledge of mankind.

 

Bill Huffman: "Therefore it seems reasonable to me that it can be argued that doctorates from these types of institutions are not really able to satisify the requirement that the doctorate make a significant contribution to the knowledge of mankind."


Cehi: I agree that there are lots of reasonableness in your assumptions if they are viewed the way you have presented your data.

I believe that dissertations from universities are percieved to contribute to mankind knowledge because the doctoral committee says so regardless of the sources.

I remain convinced by experience that the majority (99%) of citations in dissertations come from textbooks, journals, newspapers, and other sources. Most scholars do not cite other dissertations in their dissertations because the data in the other dissertations are still in the infancy stages of reliability.

Most published articles that are the embodiment of dissertations have a better chance of being cited and recognized as contributing to the knowledge of mankind than a mere dissertation in itself regardless of whether the dissertation is from un/accreditted school.

Hence, there are possible articles out there that came from unaccredited dissertations that have been published and cited and recognized by other scholars as contributing to mankind knowledge. Likewise, there are dissertations from accredited universities that have not been transitioned into articles nor been read by anybody, and may not have contributed to the larger maknind knowledge.

Besides, you do not need a doctorate to contribute to mankind knowledge. There are many articles written by non-doctoral degree holders that have been peer-reviewed, published, and cited by other researchers.

I hope I have not missed your point. In any way, thank you for sharing your views.

 

Long answer: drawing this conclusion by classifying doctoral research contributions from the unaccredited schools as acceptable or unacceptable requires a discriminant function based on data that is normal, linear, lacking in multicollinearity and nearly free from outliers.

Short answer: you could be wrong because you are trying to a hang a multi-purpose label on a broad range of institutions, some inferior, some grouped around a measure of central tendency and some superior.

The only generality that might be true for unaccredited doctoral granting institutions is that the method of supervision of doctoral research is frequently non-standard. Inferiority or superiority would have to be investigated on a case-by-case basis. Even accredited institutions have issues with supervising doctoral research: check out some of the doctoral research produced by the "home economics" department at Virginia Tech sometime...

Cheers,

Dave

 

Rich Douglas: That UMI/Proquest doesn't accept them for publication says a lot.

Nosborne: I find this a most telling observation. I have never (yet) done a dissertation but I am vaguely familiar with UMI. As I understand it, UMI does not actually EVALUATE a dissertation; they must rely on the fact that the University conferring the doctorate reviewed it and found it to be a valid piece of scholarly research.

In short, if I understand aright, they have declared that dissertations from unaccredited schools are scholastically untrustworthy.

This is a most damning determination for the very utility of the dissertation and publication system rests upon its being a source of reliable information to other scholars in a given field.

 

I believe that you're correct. I agree that it is very telling that the unaccredited dissertations are not easily available for reference. I talked to UMI about this years ago as they were phasing out the listing of unaccredited dissertations. (I note that although they accepted them for publishing at one time, they never did call them dissertations, they called them research abstracts, IIRC.) The person on the phone said that they made the decision to discontinue listing unaccredited dissertations because their customers wanted it that way. Their customers didn't consider them "scholastically trustworthy". I note that their customers are primarily the accredited schools. (This last sentence was added in simply to egg on the RA conspiracy folks. )

 

Readers of this thread may be interested to know that my unaccredited dissertation, in published form, continues to achieve widespread acclaim. So much so that a considerable amount of the published material has been included in the new NZ Brown Teal website - www.brownteal.com (I have had no involvement at all in the preparation of this website)
The good news is that the brown teal recovery programme is slowly turning around from one of almost total negativity to becoming one with a very positive outlook. And whilst I would never claim to having played a major part in this turn-around, there is little doubt that my published dissertation is having an impact on the recovery programme.
Dr Duck

 

From the horse's mouth

Used their on-line response form. In effect asking 'why doesn't UMI/Proquest accept submissions from institutions not accredited/similar?'. Received this response:


"Thank you for your enquiry. The UMI Dissertation Publishing staff receives more than 55,000 manuscripts per year. The number of disciplines included in that number is significant and would require more staff than is economically feasible to make choices. Therefore, we make no editorial distinction. Rather, we trust in the decisions made at accredited institutions to maintain the integrity of our database."


In other words, resource considerations.


Henrik

 

Re: From the horse's mouth

I read it and reread it. It seems perfectly clear to me that it is a question of trust and integrity. Resources only become a issue if you accept the premise (as UMI obviously has) that unaccredited institutions cannot be trusted.

 

Re: From the horse's mouth

That's right! No one has the resources worth wasting on trying to pick out such a small percentage of unaccredited dissertations that might have value.

Henrik, if you have an alternative interpretation, I'd be interested in hearing it. You yourself said that Knightsbridge doesn't even bother trying to catalog their own dissertations!

 

Could you explain the difference, if any, between the doctoral dissertation you submitted to Trinity College and University and your manual? I assume the manual is what you term the published form, but what precisely are the differences between the two documents? Which of the two documents did you make available to the members of this forum?

 

Kill the messenger

Simply trying to add to the discussion. A lot of speculation back and forth. Yet nobody seemed to have recently asked directly at UMI what their views were. So I thought I'd try that. As Bill points out, it makes no difference to me either way.

I think it is distorting the issue a little bit to pick out the final sentence of all, and add emphasis, to make what they sent me support one point of view only, the notion that it's a quality issue. The writer specifically states resource elements, and says that they 'make no editorial distinction'.

I am quite happy to concede that it might be also a quality issue. This is not actually mentioned, but I'm not going to fight you in the trenches over the idea. This, however, does not diminish the gist of the bulk of the message, namely, the talk of resources.

As nobody else here seemed to have this information to share, I thought it possible to join in without having to duck flailing hatchets.


Henrik

 

Re: Kill the messenger

Your summation was self-serving in that your implication was that the only reason UMI does not accept unaccredited dissertations was due to insufficient resources. The writer makes a statement concerning the number of (accredited) dissertations UMI receives. He or she also states that there are a myriad of disciplines in those submissions and the statement concerning staff (resources) relates directly to making choices or specific selections from the pool of (accredited) submissions. The following statements concerning editorial distinction also relate to the fact that they make no choices of what to publish (from the pool of accredited submissions); instead, they are willing to trust the judgment accredited institutions. The entire message leads up to the goal of maintaining the integrity of the database.

In other words, UMI freely admits that it lacks the staff (resources) to scrutinize the accredited dissertations but are willing to trust the accredited institutions. The question then remains; why don't they trust the unaccredited institutions?

The talk of resources only pertains to the fact that they don’t have the staff to scrutinize and pick and choose or make editorial distinction between the dissertations they already receive (which are all from accredited institutions). Therefore, I agree that resources are an important part of the message. However, the real gist of the message, and more importantly, the answer to the question you posed, is that due to the lack of resources, they have made the decision to trust accredited schools to make the editorial distinctions and conduct due diligence while they don’t trust unaccredited schools to do the same.

I am all for polite and civil discussion, Henrik. However, characterizing any disagreement with your opinions as a personal attack does not bolster your arguments There’s no need to mention terms like “kill the messenger” or “duck flailing hatchets.” I simply pointed out that, in light of the precise wording of the message you received, your conclusion had no basis in fact and was conveniently self-serving.

 

A small note of context, I did not start up this thread as a back-door method of bad-mouthing Knightsbridge. My understanding of the doctorate degree has always been that what was supposed to characterize it was that it was supposed to involve a significant advancement in the academic knowledge of mankind. I had seen some off-hand comments in some threads that seemed to assume this but I'd never seen anyone argue that an unaccredited degree was invalid because this aspect of the doctorate was not satisfied. I had never seen a thread that actually discussed this. Hence I started up this thread.

Looking back on the discussion, the first thing I find interesting is that no one seemed to disagree with the basic premise that a doctorate included the contribution of a significant advancement to the academic knowledge of mankind. Although it was argued (a reasonable argument IMHO) that this was not generally a practical contribution.

The second thing I found interesting was Bill's examples of some unaccredited schools that are very focused did seem to contribute at least within their area of focus. This went a long way in convincing me that dissertations from these schools likely did satisfy the doctoral requirement of a significant contribution to the academic knowledge of mankind.

The third thing that was not nearly as interesting (I guess because I expected it) was that it seems there's a lack of evidence of unaccredited schools, that don't specialize, really participate in the greater academic community in any significant way (besides BJU).

I note here that I've ignored the issue of religious degrees. Mainly because it is beyond my interest but also because I accept the reasonable possibility that the conclusions would be different.

 

Hi Gus
The main differences between the TCU dissertation and the published result were the inclusion of one coloured photograph and 56 black and white photographs; together with a far more detailed section on the captive management of brown teal, a section on the need for a higher level of advocacy, and a section on waterfowl diseases. And a personally embarrassing FOREWORD in the published document, written by NZ's only professional waterfowl biologist.
There are many important sections in the manual, but I believe the primary feature is the section covering the natural history of the species - in particular the species unique features/values and the fact that it was present in NZ over 10,000 years ago. In researching the species natural history I determined that the
species had no relationship with any other species of duck and that there is increasing evidence to show that brown teal evolved from the very forming of New Zealand close to 100,000,000 years ago.
The final product is available by email, on CD and in hard copy.
Dr Duck

 

I see. Brownteal.com appears to credit Kevin Evans as co-author of the manual. What role did he play in the original research and the writing of the manual? He seems to be a major player in the efforts to save the NZ Brown Teal.

 

I believe Dr. Charles Stanley received his doctorate from Luther Rice Seminary while it was not yet TRACS accredited. Perhaps someone can scout for his doctoral thesis, if he was required to write one.

 

There's a picture at right-hand side at http://www.brownteal.com/site/ that I believe is Dr. Duck himself!

 

Gus, Good to see you doing some research on brown teal. Kevin Evans is indeed the inspiration behind www.brownteal.com
Kevin is also co-trustee of the Brown Teal Conservation Trust. A registered charitable trust that Kevin and I founded nearly two years ago, and which is dedicated to saving brown teal from extinction. It was under the banner of the BTCT that my brown teal manual was published.
The Trust has so far raised $13,000NZ from two other charitable trusts - $10,000 to establish two major brown teal captive breeding facilities and $3,000 towards publication costs of the brown teal manual. (My family & I have just completed one of the major breeding facilities)
Kevin is also the brown teal captive breeding co-ordinator and receives a modest income from the NZ Dept of Conservation for his work in this area.
From an 'educational' perspective several secondary schools are now using the brown teal manual in their conservation studies and we have received a number of requests for the manual from university students. Currently one group at Auckland University is working on a major brown teal advocacy proposal, using the manual for much of their background info.
The BTCT is also currently working at finding a major private sponsor for the whole recovery programme - with the manual providing essential data on the species.
Why not read the manual Gus?
Dr Duck

 

Well done oxpecker. The way we are going the whole of DegreeInfo will be 'save the brown teal' supporters.
Dr Duck

 

Why not answer my questions, Dr. Hayes?

Brownteal.com appears to credit Kevin Evans as co-author of the manual. What role did Kevin Evans play in the original research and the writing of the manual? I will be asing Kevin the exact same questions.