WAOE statement regarding diploma mills

galanga · Aug 22, 2005

Here is a message from the president of the World Association for Online Education (WAOE). Note that there is a James Monroe International University site still up and running, in spite of the searches executed last week. And it includes a (false) claim of WAOE membership!

Thanks to George Brown and colleagues for the whistle-blowing. I've posted the following to the WAOE-VIEWS list and a similar message to DEOS-L, the Distance Education Online Symposium. Feel free to use it:

In another distance education forum, a message archived at http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0508&L=deos-l&T=0&O=D&F=&S=&P=7510 expressed some sympathy for diploma mills in connection with regarding students as customers. My response:

Potemkin village or University of Compromised Academic Standards does represent a phenomenon observable in the discourse often heard even from those with advanced degrees. Sometimes people can only have the ethical standards they can afford. But the academic way of life is an open challenge to all that subjectivity. Any legitimacy given to diploma mills dangerously obscures the difference between the academic and the non-academic, the normatively certified and the bought.

Let me give you an example of what academics are dealing with. You can satirize related phenomena like research papers for sale, but diploma mills are an active force harming individuals, academic organizations, and the search for objective or verifiable truth. Recently there was the good news that one or more operators of diploma mills under various names similar to prestigious universities were raided by U.S. states. However, the bad news is that people continue to be fleeced worldwide. They can lose a job even by unwittingly buying a degree in return for their exquisite experience and "how much" they think they know. Perhaps the impact doesn't affect you until you receive a mail from someone in a developing country who wanted to get out of porverty, found out that they had invested in a diploma mill, wanted their money back in vain, and exclaimed why didn't you distance education practitioners do something to stop this?!

We had tried repeatedly. Diploma mills were using the logo of the World Association for Online Education (WAOE) to imply accreditation or to say that they were members. Never mind that WAOE has no institutional members, just individuals, and that our few affiliates are listed at our Website. All messages demanding that they cease and desist were not answers. The location behind their Web interfaces could not be traced. I did receive an offer from someone that there is money for WAOE in accreditation of outfits with such a need. But as I have stressed here and elsewhere, I flatly refused the offer, saying that WAOE as an academic association for sound online pedagogy is in no position to accredit any entity.

Besides the whistle-blowers who have been hounded by diploma mills, let me give you a further example of the damage they do in obscuring the difference between academic and non-academic. The increasing media attention to raids on diploma mills has expanded some stories into looking for complicit organizations such as the accreditors that diploma mills themselves set up or pay. One such article in a Webzine for registrars and the like wrote unequivocally that WAOE was a bogus accreditor. I don't know if they jumped to conclusions or were fed lies by some interested party. One of the whistle-blowers promised to get the misconception corrected, but articles elsewhere allude to pseudo-academic entities in collusion with diploma mills, so WAOE or other academic organizations involved in distance education could be tarred by such innuendoes.

Longtime readers here should realize how uncompromising WAOE has been about academic standards and ethics. Academia is under assault from various quarters, such as creationism. Now I have given you a stark example of why it is important to keep the distinction clear between the academic and the non-academic, between the truth and the fabricated.
_________________
Collegially,
Steve McCarty
Professor, Osaka Jogakuin College, Japan
President, World Association for Online Education (WAOE)
Online library -> http://www.waoe.org/steve/epublist.html
Spoken library -> Japancasting: http://stevemc.blogmatrix.com
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WAOE statement regarding diploma mills

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