Friday, 16 May 2008

On the morality of bullshit degrees

Margaret Soltan is on the case of yet another diploma mill fraud, this time the head of Jackson Academy in one of my former hometowns.

All involved apparently recognize that Pat Taylor’s doctorate is garbage. Yet I am forced to wonder how much we should really be bothered when Taylor could easily have gotten his degree from an accredited and moderately-well-respected institution such as, say, SIU Carbondale, where the standards for doctorates in educational leadership don’t seem to be significantly higher at least in some individuals’ cases. If the credentials in an entire field are deeply suspect to begin with, whether the degree was bought from Uncle Bob’s House of Academia and Animal Husbandry or “earned” at Harvard really doesn’t seem to make that much difference.

4 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.
[Permalink] 1. Steven Taylor wrote @ Fri, 16 May 2008, 12:17 pm CDT:

Are you suggesting that doctorates in Educational Leadership are crap?

I am shocked! shocked! I say!

 

I’m saying no such thing, particularly if you’re a higher education administrator with a doctorate in higher education leadership (instead of, say, a Doctor of Philosophy in some crusty academic field with no relevance to higher education administration whatsoever, only being of use to mere faculty who are expected to participate in shared governance of the institution) reading this blog.

My academic career is so over.

 
[Permalink] 3. hey chris lawrence wrote @ Wed, 4 Jun 2008, 1:13 pm CDT:

hey chris, is that your avatar? is so..

of course,

your Ph.D. would be Pretty Hefty Dickhead.

 

Beats erectile dysfunctional dickhead.

 
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