Monday, February 2, 2009

BRAIN INJURY AND THE SHADOW OF FRAUD

Like any field, the field of brain injury has a wide range of participants. There are those who put their hearts and souls into making sure those of us who live with brain injuries are treated as equals, because we are. Then there are those too who see us as a way of making money and or a way of making a name for themselves.

In the next few weeks I will likely be writing a story about an individual who for more than a decade has claimed to have college degrees that don't exist, unless of course you want to include college degrees issued by a non-accredited college, a diploma mill.

This individual - a contract employee with a state government - has impacted the lives of many brain injury survivors and their families as well as the lives of many health care providers who offer services to survivors, all the while having degrees that are not recognized as valid anywhere in the United States and this writer has been unable thus far to find any place in the world where these degrees are considered valid other than the non-accredited school that issued them.

Diploma mills as they are called are sadly plentiful.

Greenwich University is a case in point. A non-accredited school that was located in Hawaii and California in the 1990s, it moved to Norfolk Island off the Coast of Australia. The Australian Government later issued an alert in the Internet making it clear that Greenwich (not to be confused with the prestigious University of Greenwich in London, England) did not live up to its educational standards.

Greenwich closed its doors in 2003 and, it seems, reopened in Hawaii as Akamai University, also a diploma mill.

Both Greenwich and Akamai are on numerous diploma mill lists.
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