University of the Holy Land??

And the school is going to be situate in the not due process Michigan - ODA listing in …

 

Re: but...

I doubt that Oregon is very relevant. It's probably just the location of the friends of Pfann who are handling the donations thing.

I'm curious about Israeli education law, though. What kind of government recognition do Israeli universities typically receive? Is it legal for a non-recognized institution to offer degrees?

I gather that Israel takes kind of a hands-off policy with regard to their religious communities, so is it possible for the Christian community there to operate their own schools by using some Israeli equivalent of a religious exemption?

But I will say that I differ from most of Degreeinfo by not caring very much about government-bestowed degree-granting authority. I mean, who cares? (Oh Jeez... I'm starting to sound like Henrik.)

What interests me is the education, more than the legal technicalities. My interest in government approvals is first and foremost in the quality-assurance component. If I have some other reason to think that the education that a school offers might be valuable, I'm going to keep thinking that it's valuable until I have some reason to think that it isn't.

I'm not sure what I think about Pfann taking it upon himself to grant degrees.

I'm very skeptical about all of these peculiar non-accredited one-man universities that infest the shadowy corners of higher education like spiders. They often seem like vanity vehicles to me.

But Pfann seems to be a legitimate scholar. He does real work and receives recognition for it. His UHL offers a modest lineup of masters degree specializations in subjects where he's done real work, published and clearly has a personal interest. He and his associates aren't just rent-a-professors, they actually list UHL as their institutional affiliation.

That might actually be part of Pfann's personal motivation: If he couldn't find a faculty position after earning his recent doctorate, perhaps he decided to create his own. He's probably not in it for the money, since this thing doesn't seem to be configured as a revenue-generator.

Would he be better advised to operate this as a non-degree-granting scholarly institute? Perhaps. That would probably raise fewer eyebrows and would present less risk of Israeli legal problems. Pfann could continue offering 'spend a summer studying archaeology in Israel' opportunities and individual university-level courses by arrangement with universities that agree to accept them. He could groom his students and give them opportunities to publish and present.

But I don't see his masters degrees as particularly damaging. To my eyes, they seem to have some undetermined amount of academic credibility, deriving in large part from Pfann himself. If Pfann and his people are reasonably well known around the Biblical archaeology world, perhaps his degrees might acquire some kind of niche utility among those insiders who recognize them. Of course, you could accomplish a lot of that by just saying that you had worked with Pfann, by publishing something with him and by getting his recommendation. But what the hell, why not give the students a degree too? They don't have to use it if they don't want to.

 

an analogy, not an equation

Donald Grunewald is a real scholar, too. Which shows that ASU is...what?