Top-down stinkery

Scenes from "senior day" event today at Irvine Valley College.

YESTERDAY, I wrote about a certain dean at Irvine Valley College who promotes Argosy University in particular. That's odd. What's odder is that she works for that institution as an instructor. Tsk, tsk.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. I'm reminded that Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur has on occasion invited the Argosy crowd to make presentations regarding their programs during district leadership council meetings. No other universities have been invited.

Mathur works for Argosy. According to his district bio, “Dr. Mathur serves as an Advisory Board Member for the School of Education at Argosy University where he also teaches courses in educational leadership to doctoral students.”

By promoting Argosy, doesn’t Mathur have a conflict of interest? If administrators (who attend leadership council meetings) choose to pursue a degree at Argosy, Mathur stands to gain, for he teaches in the graduate program there (in the School of Education).

The rise of for-profit organizations such as Argosy is, of course, a trend in higher education, one that has caused much grumbling and consternation among educators who believe in honest education, without short-cuts, half-assery, and all manner of fly-by-nightery.

I've never seen so many people at IVC!

A year ago, I wrote about Argosy and the embarrassing deeds of some of its personnel. Here’s an abbreviated and edited version of that post:

As you know, the Chancellor is proud of his association with Argosy University.

I decided to do a little research on that organization. The for-profit university has 18 locations in 12 states. It seems to specialize in teaching Psychology, Business, and Education.

According to Wikipedia, one or two years ago, one of Argosy’s faculty and its Director of Training (at its psychology campus in Chicago) screwed up bigtime. The incident was fully reported by the Chicago Sun-Times. (See Chicago Sun-Times.)

Psychologist Bindu Ganga, who received her doctorate from Argosy, was accused of plagiarism by one of her students! According to the student, Ganga had quoted verbatim from Charles Ford's Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!—without attribution—in her Psych dissertation!


I guess that means that Ganga passed around her dissertation to students. Well, whatever.

Says Wiki, “Initially, the school found ‘no merit’ in the accusations, and scolded the accuser, noting her accusation in her academic record.”

My, my, my. That doesn’t sound good. What kind of organization would do that?

What happened next was very odd. Eventually, Argosy “recanted” and fired Professor Ganga. I guess they finally checked. Argosy also took back her doctorate.

According to Wiki, such actions are unprecedented in academia. Not so sure about that.

So far, I’m not too scandalized. But it gets worse. According to Wiki, “One year later, Argosy reinstated Ganga's Doctoral degree, but required the plagiarist to do a completely original Doctoral thesis.”

Boy, they sure do have high standards at Argosy.

No doubt that's why they hired our Raghu!

Darryl Cox gave away fabulous non-cash prizes!