An increasing number of federal employees are finding that the path to promotions is adorned with bogus online college degrees, particularly questionable "doctorates."
On July 27, 2007 I read an obituary in the Washington Post about Rhetaugh Dumas, PhD, RN, a nurse who became a deputy director at the Nati
onal Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and a dean at the University of Michigan.
I was genuinely impressed until I discovered that Dumas earned her doctorate in 1975, allegedly from the Union Institute, a distance-learning university based in Cincinnati. Union Institute? I never heard of the place, so I did some investigating.
Union Institute did not exist in 1975. Its predecessor was called the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities. It began to grant degrees in 1971, but did not gain accreditation by the North Central Association (NCA) until 1985. Four years later it was renamed Union Institute.
Today, the institution offers a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, an EdD in Education and a PsyD in clinical psychology. The PsyD diploma, however, is not accredited by the American Psychological Association, the recognized professional accrediting agency in the field.
I did some additional research and came across the name of Laura L. Callahan, a senior federal employee who got not one, but three bogus diplomas from a degree mill called Hamilton University, a "school" that operated out of a Motel 6 in Evanston, Wyoming. Upon receiving her "doctorate," Callahan insisted that subordinates and co-workers refer to her as "Dr. Laura."
Callahan's fraud was discovered in May, 1993, yet she remained on the federal payroll for 10 months at a six-figure Senior Executive Service (SES) salary before she was finally forced to resign. At the request of Congress, GAO did a brief audit of eight federal agencies and identified 463 additional persons with bogus degrees.
Know More Media, Inc., pays me to write about matters of interest to business students--not about psychology degrees or federal employees. However, many parallels can be drawn between the above examples and the academic world of business students. They, too, must deal with bogus universities, worthless diplomas and charlatans parading as "doctors" in the fields of business administration and management.
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