http://cbs2chicago.com/local/chicago.sta...08596.html

Think may be the first time, to my knowledge that a publicly funded State University ever lost accreditation. If so it would be the first state run "Diploma Mill."

For the sake of the students and graduates, I hope this will not happen but I think it shows how accreditation really works.

Why does radical Marxist college professor George Gollin (George D. Gollin, George Dana Gollin) think he can abridge free speech and free discussion??

Another board reported that Gollin has been threatening the Chicago Tribune, the Chronicle of Higher Education and others to get them to remove negative discussions and comments about him and his inept "Conflict of Interest Officer" wife, Melanie Loots. I'd post a link but for some reason all the posts have disappeared.

Well why the hell not? That's exactly what the Obamunist regime is doing. If it's good enough for Our Dear Leader, muslim Barry Soetoro, it's good enough for Self-Appointed Expert, anti-Christian bigot George Gollin.

Threats and scare tactics to abridge free speech are apparently what's in vogue among Marxists this year. Bogus G-Man Gollum is just marching in step with his fellow brown shirts.

What First Amendment?

Quote:September 22, 2009

Joseph Ashby

Yesterday Kentucky's Courier Journal newspaper reported that the fight against political free speech has reached new levels.

Louisville-based Humana is under federal investigation for a mailing that asks seniors to protest proposed cuts in funding for the Medicare plans sold by the company and other health insurers.

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, launched its investigation Friday at the urging of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who accused Humana of "scare tactics."

The mailing from Humana, the second-largest seller of Medicare Advantage plans, warned that if Congress cuts funding, "millions of seniors and disabled individuals could lose many...important benefits" while possibly facing higher costs.

If speech rights have become so diluted that shareholders cannot communicate their views on legislation to their customers without the fear of federal investigation, what speech is not in danger?

The slow train to despotism continues to pick up speed.

Quote:September 22, 2009 3:11 PM

ABC's Z. Byron Wolf reports: Democrats announced yesterday that HHS was investigating whether the insurer Humana was misleading seniors about health reform legislation. And CMS, the government entity within HHS that administers Medicare told Humana, in no uncertain terms, to cease and desist lobbying its customers on health reform legislation.

But today Republicans accused the White House and CMS of trying to implement a “gag order” on insurance companies that provide Medicare Advantage programs.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does not normally get riled up, but he just gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor about the gag order, Humana, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, who initiated the HHS investigation. McConnell referred to Baucus only as "a colleague."

"Using the full weight of the federal government's enforcement powers to stifle free speech should trouble all Americans -- and all of us -- even more," McConnell said. "We cannot allow government officials to target individuals or companies because they do not like what they have to say."

"Shut up! the government says," said McConnell on the Senate floor of the CMS letter to Humana. "Don't communicate with your customers. Be quiet and get in line," he said facetiously.

There are two points to remember here. Humana is based in Kentucky, so McConnell is quick to protect them. And second, he is a staunch defender of the first amendment. For instance, McConnell is the often the only Republican to vote against a flag burning amendment when it periodically arises.

In a written statement, House Minority Leader John Boehner calls a letter of rebuke from CMS Humana "outrageous" and accuses the White House of "trying to keep seniors in the dark about the consequences of congressional Democrats' costly government-run health care bills."

"Would the Administration impose this sort of gag order if seniors were being given information promoting the Obama health care plan? I don't think so," says Boehner in the statement. "Seniors have a right to know about the cost and consequences of the Democrats' health care bills, and Republicans will continue to tell the American people the facts about the nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts that Democrats are proposing." ...

Quote:The Obama administration is continuing its strategy of attacking the first amendment rights of anyone who disagrees with the Obamacare bills making their way through the congress. The latest victim is the Humana Corporation. Humana created a mailing for seniors that talked about the $500 billion dollar Medicare and Medicaid cuts in the Baucus version of the Obamacare bill suggesting that it would lead to service cuts. Baucus contends that the "efficiency fairy" will swoop down and sprinkle dust on the Medicare/Medicaid budgets and make the programs work just the same despite the budget cuts.

Humana doesn't believe in an efficiency fairy, and in its mailing suggested that the budget cuts will lead to service cuts, so the secretary of Health and Human Services is now investigating Humana with the sole purpose of intimidating the insurer to stop sending the mailing...

Just curious here.

It seems that there are few out there willing to stand up for Non-Traditional education. I mean specifically that the cause of academic freedom is under attack from all sides. Most recently I read how the State of Oregon is passing even more laws to punish holders of unaccredited degrees. We already saw how the powers-that-be have used their heavy hand to drive out various institutions in Wyoming. Now many of these schools are actual Diploma Mills, which I would describe any pseudo-institution which takes money to confer unearned degrees. But some are simply schools which do require effort to graduate but for whatever reason do not conform to other someone's expectation of what should constitute a "college" or "University."

I would add that my own personal experience has been that some accredited colleges and programs are significantly less challenging than some of these institutions under attack.

Of course there is this board and I stand by the sidelines here and read all these attacks on individual liberty. My jaw drops at some of the activities of the academic elitists who try to dictate what and what cannot be legitimately called a college or university.

My question is this, now that we have identified our enemies, just who are our friends?

I did read the list that the Administrator gave and while I find these groups to be admirable, they do not seem to have much to say in defense of non-traditional education. I also tried contacting the Libertarian Party, a party which I have had some contact with in the past, but they really do not have a stand on this issue.

While I like this board immensely, and I respect all the people here, I want to do more than just whine. I want to have an active role in supporting the freedom of individuals whose academic careers may include study at institutions that do not conform to what others believe. I see this as a basic issue of freedom. Nothing more and nothing less.

Can someone steer me in the right direction?

Thanks

I keep hearing Martha & the Vandellas doing a little "Nowhere to run to baby, no where to hide." No place is safe for CHEA director and public laughingstock George Gollin (George D. Gollin, George Dana Gollin) to make his obtuse pronouncements, not even DD.

When Dr. Dumbass emitted his most recent public flatulence at DD he thought that (assuming anyone bothered to read it at all) he would receive the obligatory token words of agreement and approval from the one or two mouth-breathers who still post there.

(Notice that the physics genius erroneously calls the school "Ashford" and not the name that appears in all the links and the logo, "Ashwood.")

Dr. Dumbass Wrote:Yar har, look at this: http://ashwooduniv.blogspot.com/.

Quote:Friday, September 18, 2009
Calling Ashwood University a degree mill is it justified ?

Research shows that it is safe to take degree from Ashwood University. Though there were negative feedback but satisfied people won the argument. Myths surface when you are don't know something and believe rumors. Therefore calling Ashwood a degree mill is totally unjustified as it is a genuine world class university.

Posted by Ashwood University at 5:02 AM

Here's the Ashford site: http://www.ashwooduniversity.net/. Looks like Belford, doesn't it?

Here's the Lo-goat:

'Symbolic shift' as DeVry replaces GM in S&P 500

Quote:Private School; Many former GM workers now retrain at DeVry

Eric Lam, Financial Post  
Published: Wednesday, June 03, 2009

DeVry has always said it is Serious about Success. Yesterday, Standard & Poor's bought in to the company slogan by dropping GM and tapping DeVry as its replacement on the benchmark S&P 500 index.

Canadians will remember the DeVry Institute of Technology as the 1980s school of last resort for any student unlucky enough not to have been accepted anywhere else.

However in the United States DeVry Inc. (DV/NYSE), with more than 90 locations across 26 states, has enjoyed consistent success in the less-regulated U. S. post-secondary education sector.

"We're not looking for a colossal company. DeVry is close to US$3-billion in value, which assures [a smooth transition]," S&P index chair David Blitzer said.

The index maker had picked DeVry out of a pre-reviewed list of five to 15 candidates, in part because its swap with GM would not cause too much disruption for index fund managers.

The fact that it has had several quarters of profitability and doubled in value in the past five years also helped.

Shares in DeVry, which will join the index on June 8, have shot up more than 6% since market open on Monday, closing yesterday at US$46.59.

"It is a symbolic shift," said Trace Urdan, managing director and education analyst at Signal Hill. "They are helping to transition the workforce from one type of skill to another."

Mr. Urdan, who is based in San Francisco, said he is aware of the irony that many workers who have lost their jobs due to GM plant closures will be looking to community colleges and private universities such as DeVry for a new career, often in the medical or auto repair fields.

"People will borrow US$10,000 to US$13,000 to go to school," he said. "Placing people into jobs making upwards of US$60,000 a year is not a bad thing for laid off GM workers to do."

"We consider a lot of aspects, but poetic replacements are not high on that list," Mr. Blitzer said.

DeVry will become the third private school company listed on the index. It joins market leader Apollo Group Inc. (APOL/NASDAQ), which owns the University of Phoenix, and the Washington Post Co. (WPO/ NYSE) which owns Kaplan Inc.

Shares in Apollo have jumped almost 10% since Monday to close at US$64.18 yesterday.

This will put pressure on the White House to support the for-profit education sector, Mr. Urdan said.

"[President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner] seem almost oblivious right now to what investors feel," he said. "So the more education stocks there are on the S&P the more they'll pay attention to how it's doing."

Investors are worried that the Obama administration will introduce additional regulations to the sector, but the companies' strong financials make them attractive, he said.

While DeVry and others have enjoyed recent 10% to 20% average enrollment increases in the growing US$310-billion a year American post-secondary education business, they have had very little luck in Canada.

The most memorable is DeVry, which once had several campuses in Toronto. But it fled for Calgary in 2003 after dealing with a class-action lawsuit from students in 1996 alleging the company did not adequately prepare them for work in the tech industry.

Since then, other U. S.-based colleges and universities have tried satellite campuses, the latest being Apollo's Meritus University in New Brunswick last May.

For now, Canada's for-profit education sector remains steady if unspectacular. One bright spot is Lingo Media Corp., a Toronto-based company that produces Englishlanguage books and audio tapes in China for students from kindergarten to post-secondary.

That Obama is a gosh dang marvel of modern science.  He runs GM, he runs AIG, he wants to run your health care, and now he's going to design your online curriculum.  

Another Obama First: Uncle Sam to Create Education Curriculum

Quote:Posted by Brian Faughnan (Profile)

Tuesday, September 15th at 11:56AM EDT

Millions of Americans are marching, blogging, calling Congress, E-mailing friends, and writing to newspapers to say that President Obama and Congress are expanding government too far, too fast. We need to do more, because it’s clear that they’re not getting the message. The latest example: the House of Representatives is preparing to put the Department of Education into the business of creating educational curriculum for American students.

This week the House is scheduled to approve H.R. 3221, an education lending bill that CBO reports will increase the deficit by $50 billion. The bill includes a little-known provision to give the Secretary of Education $500 million - to be provided to any entity he deems “appropriate” - to develop and disseminate free and “freely available” online courses.

This is unprecedented.

Federal curriculum is contrary to longstanding government policy - and it’s unnecessary. For decades, Federal law has prohibited the U.S. Department of Education from exercising control over the “curriculum, program of instruction . . . or over the selection or content of library resources, text books, or other educational materials by any educational institution or school system.”

Now the Obama Administration and Congress are poised to provide the Secretary of the Education half a billion dollars, and give him the authority to enter into contracts with any entity he deems “appropriate” to “develop, evaluate and disseminate” “freely available” “education courses.”

Why?

This provision comes under ‘open online education’ in the bill. But if the only goal is to expand online education, why not encourage states and districts to do that? They are already in the business of creating course curriculum. Why break decades (actually, centuries) of precedent, and allow the federal government to design course curriculum for the first time? And lastly, why give that authority with no guidelines whatsoever as to what groups qualify for the money?

A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

Quote:By Zephyr Teachout
Sunday, September 13, 2009

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which 'going to college' means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we'll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a "University of Phoenix" joke.

This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters' pay is vanishing. Colleges also sell information, with a slightly different promise -- a degree, a better job and access to brilliant minds. As with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere. A student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other "students," and links to free academic literature.

But the demand for college isn't just about the yearning to learn -- it's also about the hope of getting a degree. Online qualifications cost a college less to provide. Schools don't need to rent the space, and the glut of doctoral students means they can pay instructors a fraction of the salary for a tenured professor, and assume that they will rely on shared syllabuses. Those savings translate into cheaper tuition, and even before the recession, there was substantial evidence of unmet demand for cheaper college degrees. Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.

You can already see significant innovation in online education at some community colleges and for-profit institutions. The community colleges are working with limited resources to maximize their offerings through Internet aggregation. For-profit institutions appear to be capitalizing on the high demand for low-cost degrees and the fact that few public schools do much traditional marketing.

These entrepreneurs are a little like the early online news sharers -- bloggers, contributors to mailing lists and bulletin boards, profit seekers, tinkerers. Just as the new model of news separated "the article" from "the newspaper," the new model of college will separate "the class" from "the college." Classes are increasingly taken credit by credit, instead of in bulk -- just as news is now read article by article.

Of course, a cultural shift will be required before employers greet online degrees without skepticism. But all the elements are in place for that shift. Major universities are teaching a few of their courses online. And the young students of tomorrow will be growing up in an on-demand, personalized world, in which the notion of a set-term, offline, prepackaged education will seem anachronistic.

Taking the newspaper analogy one step further, college aggregators will be the hub of the new school experience. In the world of news, the aggregators have taken over from the newspaper as the entry point for news consumption. Already, half of college graduates attend more than one school before graduation. Soon you'll see more Web sites that make it easy to take classes from a blend of different universities.

Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. Every major paper once had a bureau in, say, Sarajevo -- now, a few foreign correspondents' pieces are used in dozens of papers. Similarly, at noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States.

When this happens -- be it in 10 years or 20 -- we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

Not all colleges will be similarly affected. Like the New York Times, the elite schools play a unique role in our society, and so they can probably persist with elements of their old revenue model longer than their lesser-known competitors. Schools with state funding will be as immune as their budgets. But within the next 40 years, the majority of brick-and-mortar universities will probably find partnerships with other kinds of services, or close their doors.

So how should we think about this? Students who would never have had access to great courses or minds are already able to find learning online that was unimaginable in the last century. But unless we make a strong commitment to even greater funding of higher education, the institutions that have allowed for academic freedom, communal learning, unpressured research and intellectual risk-taking are themselves at risk.

If the mainstream of "college teaching" becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts, we'll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced.

Morgan attacks planned online Ph.D. program

Here in a nutshell we have the fundamental battle of distance learning. A government protected special interest entity fighting against modern, innovative education.

In one corner we have the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), one of the leaders in providing distance learning throughout the world, with online programs as well as live extension courses taught at military bases overseas.

Quote:But Kirwan said UMUC created its program at the request of the American Association for Community Colleges, which forecasts a growing need for administrators because of booming enrollment and the impending retirement of many current campus leaders.

UMUC, based in Adelphi, is a perfect candidate to meet the need because of its flexible course schedules and worldwide reach, the chancellor said.

Quote:Morgan President Earl S. Richardson has used civil rights arguments to block more than a dozen proposed programs at area colleges in his 25 years at the university, including history and education programs at Towson and an electrical engineering major at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His effort to block the Towson/UB MBA program was unsuccessful, though the battle spread to the state legislature and local courts.

Quote:One of the odder moments in the world of forums occurred a few months before uncle janko died. janko phoned me in the middle of the night to say that Gregg DesElms had appeared, unannounced and uninvited, at his front door earlier that day, to discuss certain things that janko had written on this forum. janko said it was quite a surreal several hours, and DesElms left, and that was that. (DesElms lives in northern California; janko lived in rural southern Michigan.)

From Degreediscussion:

http://www.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?t=31880

Quote:AuditGuy  
Registered User   Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 385  

They violated their own policy which is the most interesting part.

"According to a 1994 ordinance regarding education pay increases for city employees, any full-time employee who has received a four-year degree in a job-related area from an accredited college, university or professional school is eligible for the incentive."

"have some schools allowed KW graduates into graduate programs but a couple actually are employees at regionally accredited schools."

I'm not aware of instances of acceptance into grad school.

I do recall instances where a faculty listed a KWU "degree", but mention of the degree on their bios generally disappear quickly.