How to Get The Degree
You Want,
OR Are You A Fake?
June 6, 2003
by Thor May
Are you a fake? This was the engaging header on an e-mail which
recently arrived in my mailbox. Well, I admit to a fake tooth, but
I think the rest of me is as real as real can be. Truth to tell,
the odds are good that the world in general doesn't give a damn
if I'm plastic, ivory or Martian rock. Still, the writer had in
mind a qualification from my resumé,
a Masters
degree in Formal and Applied Linguistics, granted by the august
institution of Greenwich
University, Hawaii. Therein lies a tale, and regardless of my
hapless fate, perhaps a lesson for other hopefuls. After all, many
of the people who read these pages are engaged in that quest for
the holy grail of our age, the marketable degree, and probably need
as much advice as they can get.
Most people think they know what a university is. Close study however
reveals a moveable feast. For employers now universities are essentially
brand labels which trade on their reputation in exactly the same
way as Rolex watches and and expensive automobiles. Grotesquely
overpriced brand labels too. The actual innards of the places, and
especially the innards of your courses or thesis, don't interest
a whole lot of people. In the real world, that word 'university'
refers to an ever multiplying variety of institutions, few of which
have anything to do with the seminaries, then the gentlemen's study
retreats of Medieval Europe where it mostly began (at least the
Occidental variety). Even the bulk of state universities now are
business enterprises for whom "knowledge transmission"
is an industrial product.
For several decades a class of 'non-traditional' universities has
been trying to emerge with varying success. The class includes places
that genuinely attempt to widen the paths to knowledge for more
kinds of people by evaluating their prior learning, by being flexible
about subjects and delivery modes, and so on. Those are fine aims,
but they don't go down well with your average 25 year-old personnel
clerk who is sorting through a stack of job applications. Nevertheless
the flexibility battle is slowly being won through the back door
as the big established institutions, hungry for dollars, bend their
own rules at the edges. The Internet is affecting this equation
dramatically as online courses become commonplace. At the outer
edges of this money game of course are the degree mills, who will
send you a diploma by return post instead of making you suck their
milkshakes for four years.
Now to my particular stake in the name game. Greenwich University
(the Californian, not the English one) has certainly had a mixed
history and I'd think twice about engaging it in 2003. The hazy
image creates some job-getting problems for me, but at 57 I'm reluctant
to invest more time and scarce cash in academic nonsense-games when
there is so much else to do (in my case, to write) in a very short
life. No, even now I think Greenwich is not into "selling degrees"
for jam, (though god knows, after a lifetime in and around academia,
I've decided that most so-called accredited universities do just
that with the huge number of students who graduate knowing sweet
damn-all..). For what it is worth, here is the link to the Greenwich
academic requirements page: http://www.greenwich.edu/gudegreq1.htm
Greenwich University was located in Hawaii when I found it. Later
it moved to Norfolk Island, which is a self-governing Australian
territory, specifically of the state of New South Wales. The Norfolk
Island parliament granted Greenwich University an official charter
of recognition, which the NSW parliament was sort of obliged to
ratify. This infuriated the regular Australian universities, and
there followed a protracted period of bureaucratic civil war. Evidently
things finally became unpleasant enough for Greenwich to pack up
and move to California,where it began but aborted a move to seek
accreditation there, and at last report had moved back to Hawaii.
A recent personal note from Dr. John Bear (attached)
suggests that all this has taken its toll on Greenwich leadership.
Let's hope they get their act together again soon.
What follows is a cautionary tale, a brief history of my tangle
with Greenwich University. It is actually in the form of a criticism
I shot off to an Internet site called The
Millennium Project a few months ago (they haven't replied).
The Millennium Project claims to identify and expose humbug.
--------------------
I stumbled on your site by accident. You have done a nice hatchet
job on Greenwich University (http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/greenwich.htm).
I have no particular brief for the place... except that I hold a
Masters from it, issued in 1994 when it was still Hawaii based.
At least at that time it seemed like a reasonable option.
Why did I choose Greenwich? Well I had walked away from a Ph.D.
candidacy at the University
of Newcastle, NSW, after doing a lot of work on it, and publishing
a couple of long papers (one 40 pages) in the Australian
Journal of Linguistics. I was also cheesed off, because with
knowledge and experience well beyond a normal MA (particularly so-called
coursework MAs) I could still only lay claim to a BA.
In fact, after my preliminary postgrad' year at Newcastle, when
the indigenes got Honours degrees, the university had said their
regulations (at that time, 1978) had no provision for offering any
scrap of paper to outsiders (I'd come from Victoria
University of Wellington, NZ). The head of department gave me
a nice letter saying my work was "equivalent
to first class Honours standard". Personal letters don't
hack a lot of kudos on the mean streets.
I went hunting for a way to get my work accredited for an MA in
some manner that had a modicum of credibility, didn't cost the earth
(I was nearly broke), and wouldn't involve pointless time serving
in some university so they could add another postgraduate name to
their books.. (most of the bastards play a game that says you come
to their institution innocent of prior knowledge and can't possibly
use whatever you've done before).
Bear's Guide
( http://www.degree.net/) pointed me at Greenwich as about the best
available non-traditional university which could be talked into
assessing my work as it stood. I assembled a portfolio. There was
no additional coursework. They hired my old supervisor from the
University of Newcastle as adjunct faculty. He knew me as well as
anyone. He was Head of Department, and I had also taught the department's
courses part-time for several years. The Greenwich system required
30 credits for an MA. His approval
gave me 43 credits (47 needed for a Ph.D.).
Now you are right that Greenwich doesn't have great brand name
recognition. On the other hand, it does you no honour to smear by
implication everyone who might be carrying a piece of paper from
the place. I'm not ashamed of anything I've written, and it is all
still on my very large website, The
Passionate Skeptic, http://thormay.net .
The role and status of modern universities is a vexed question.
Most real research, especially in the humanities, can now be done
with a good Internet connection from anywhere. Universities should
be open colloquiums of active minds. Those of us who have spent
years around the places know that by and large this is not the case.
What of their products, the graduates? Some of course are impressive.
But sadly most don't have an original idea to bless themselves with.
Those shoals of 51% pass graduates, and even the plodding postgraduates
who cauterize their brains with endless quotations, toddle out into
the world anointed with the titles of their lofty institutions.
They even believe that their knowledge is special. Certainly, employers
buy the brand name, and rarely inquire after the substance of real
achievement. In fact, most of those graduates understood a fraction
of what they read, and quickly forget most of that. If you probe
their insight, too often there is little to find. (See my little
essay "Pissing
On Every Lamp Post : the paradox of scholarship" at http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/scholarship.html
).
So what are we to make of the vendetta between the Australian educational
establishment and Greenwich? I think this is best separated from
that class of events related to sports matches (your side/my side)
and tribal warfare. Greenwich is an institution; so are the Australian
universities. Each are composed of imperfect individuals, some of
whom are well meaning and capable, others dubious. It may be that
the principals of Greenwich fall into the dubious category nowadays.
I don't know. But institutions have a constant stream of clients
passing through their doors, and those clients when mutated into
graduates (or whatever) deserve to be taken on their individual
merits.
-----------------------------------------------
Well what about YOUR prospects? How do you get that ridiculous
diploma, which you need for the employers, for the least cost in
the shortest time? Bear's
Guide (in spite of my unhappy experience) is still a good starting
point. As with fashion everywhere, the best option is all a matter
of taste and the company you want to keep. If you wish to sign onto
the industrial academic treadmills of the 'great' universities as
a lecturer, then you'll need a nice brand name degree, and one done
by research, not by coursework. If you want to settle into the mosh
pit of the teaching profession, coursework degrees are fine. The
bureaucrats usually want 'accredited' degrees (though 'accredited'
itself conceals a multitude of sins). In either case, the lecturer
and the teacher, what you actually understand (let alone create)
won't matter much. If you just want to impress the manager of Jones'
Pickle Factory, there's a reputed suburb in Beijing where shady
gents will sell you a degree from any place you fancy, and a passport
too if you need that; (at one stage 80% of the immigrant applications
from Shanghai to Australia featured fake qualifications..).
There is a chance of course that you are completely crazy, and
want to do real research; (I still have a second, half-written Ph.D.
tucked away that will take at least 500 years to properly develop..).
In this case, you probably don't need to pay a university any bribe
at all, or waste your life groveling to their irrelevancies. Google
is one of the most awesome research tools ever invented. If you
still want direct access to some very clever people, MIT
(the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is in the process of
putting all their coursework
on the Internet -- for free. And MIT is a very fancy brand name
indeed.
.
All opinions expressed
in Thor's Unwise Ideas and The Passionate Skeptic are entirely those
of the author, who has no aim to influence, proselytize or persuade
others to a point of view. He is pleased if his writing generates
reflection in readers, either for or against the sentiment of the
argument.
"How
to Get The Degree You Want OR Are You A Fake?"...
copyrighted to Thor May 2003; all rights reserved
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