DL Truth: Distance Learning Truth

(03-11-2015, 10:47 AM)JohnBear Wrote: [ -> ]Saying, yes, for 41 years . . . and actually selling for 16 years: 4 years consulting with Columbia Pacific, 3 dreadful months with Fairfax, 3 years running International Institute/Greenwich University, and nine years doing US/Canada marketing for the Royal Chartered Heriot-Watt University/Edinburgh Business School.

Hey Bear Guy

Always wondered about Columbia Pacific.  It seemed like it was it was the best of the bunch and its success attracted the attention of some seriously disturbed California bureaucrats and the school took it up the wazooh like Chip on a Saturday night.

I remember reading the criticism of the school at the time and it all seemed pretty lame.  What's your take on it.

Felterbush: "Apparently some of us still remember when he was relevant."

Bear: Thank you for this kind remark.

I’m not saying this story reminds me of anyone in particular….



…but it’s interesting to see what happens to two-faced cows in Australia.

Quote:‘Two-faced’ cow sold at auction set for slaughterhouse
A bullock named Two Face has been sold at an auction in Australia


'Two Face' was sold at an auction  Photo: Mareeba Saleyards

By Mark Molloy
9:51AM GMT 12 Mar 2015

A cow that appears to have two faces looks set for the slaughterhouse after being sold at an auction in Australia.

The deformed bullock attracted a lot of attention at an auction in Mareeba, North Queensland, where it was reportedly sold to an abattoir.

Named Two Face, the 440kg double-headed bullock was sold for $537AUD (£270) this week.

While the animal’s genetic deformity may have caused a stir amongst cattle buyers, its former owners say he is in “great condition”.


'Two Face' Photo: Mareeba Saleyards

“Here's an interesting bullock from today's sale. Just happened to have two faces,” Mareeba Saleyards explained in a Facebook post.

“Second face has an eye, one tooth and working nostrils, and in great condition.”


The animal was born with a genetic deformity Photo: Mareeba Saleyards

Yard chairman Gerry Collins told AAP: “Sometimes the genetic engineering doesn't quite work according to plan.

“There was a fair bit of curiosity and interest, but I don't know whether there was a lot of interest in a commercial sense.

“There's nothing wrong with it as far as the animal is concerned.”

The bullock was sold to an abattoir, according to several reports, however Mr Collins did not confirm who had bought the bull.

"It was an absolute prime condition animal, he just had two faces," said Mark Peters, a livestock sales manager. “He’s as fat as a fool.”

Last year, the world’s oldest two-faced cat died in Massachusetts.

(03-12-2015, 06:12 AM)Ben Johnson Wrote: [ -> ]Hey Bear Guy

Always wondered about Columbia Pacific.  It seemed like it was it was the best of the bunch and its success attracted the attention of some seriously disturbed California bureaucrats and the school took it up the wazooh like Chip on a Saturday night.

I remember reading the criticism of the school at the time and it all seemed pretty lame.  What's your take on it.

I agree with all that you write. I met Les Carr when he was President of the regionally-accredited New College in San Francisco, having previously been President of the large traditional Catholic school, Lewis University in Illinois. He said that his long-time dream was to start an innovative non-traditional university, and that his friend Richard Crews (Harvard MD and Army psychiatrist) was willing to retire from his psychiatric practice to run the new enterprise. They asked me to consult in the design of the school, and in lieu of money, offered me 5% of the stock in the new corporation they would establish. I agreed.

Following several long and cordial meetings with the regional accreditor, WASC, it was abundantly clear that WASC would probably never accredit a non-resident Master's school, much less Doctoral. (They made the same point to John Sperling, who thereupon moved his little school from California to Arizona and changed its name to University of Phoenix.) Carr and Crews had homes and families in the Bay Area, and no wish to move, so going with California Authorization, soon to morph into State Approval, seemed the only available path.

Things went well for quite a few years, and many people with terrific credentials became involved. At one time, the former presidents of two other regionally-accredited universities (Western Illinois and Point Park) were on staff full time. Relations with Sacramento were generally cordial, and the State Approval was renewed without dissent several times. One year, the recently retired Prime Minister of England spoke at the graduation ceremony. 

My involvement ended in the early 80s, when I sold my 5% back to Carr and Crews, and had no further involvement. It was a cordial parting of the ways. CPU seemed to be running smoothly, and my first book on computers had become a national bestseller, which looked like a new career direction for me, and the family was planning a move to Nashville for my wife to do a residential doctorate at Vanderbilt, and it seemed a good time to move on. While I saw Carr once more in 1986, and exchanged letters with Crews once or twice a year until his death a few years ago, I knew nothing about what was going on with the state other than what I read in the papers and, occasionally, court documents, and, for a while the columbiapacificuniversity.org website, which had a lot of information and opinions, but is no longer there. Much of it can still be read through the Wayback Machine at archive.org -- for instance: http://tinyurl.com/mu2t6wt.


It seemed to me as if there was one lawyer in particular with the state of California who had a vendetta going. Some of the charges seemed to have merit, and some of the schools responses also seemed to have merit. One biggie was the student who submitted his thesis in Spanish and none of his four committee members was fluent in Spanish. OK, that wasn't too bright, but not mentioned was the fact that he also supplied a professionally-done English translation of his work. 


Bottom line seems to be that there are thousands of people who earned their CPU degrees between the late 70s and the mid 90s, whose degrees are not just legal, but certified as valid and legitimate by the California courts. And there are still plenty of critics who call it a degree mill and worse.


Postscript: I recommended a strategy to CPU at one point that I thought was darned clever, but they never went for it. I still recommend it to any unaccredited school. Consider this: take five randomly-chosen doctoral dissertations from the shelf of the unaccredited school, and five in comparable subjects randomly from the shelf at Harvard. Remove all identifying marks, and submit the ten works to a panel of senior academics in those fields. Their task is to identify which five are from CPU and which five are from Harvard. Wouldn't that be fun.


I have rambled on. But you asked a reasonable question, and it seemed worth addressing. I'll be glad to respond to further questions and comments, as time permits, but I'm leaving shortly for a month of hiking and vagabonding in Europe and will be off the grid a lot of the time. 


--John Bear, who started out as John Klempner, but when my first book
was accepted by a big publisher (Harcourt), the publishers recommended
a different name, since there already was a bestselling author (well, he had
one bestseller) named John Klempner, and they felt one was enough.

(03-13-2015, 05:04 PM)JohnBear Wrote: [ -> ]--John Bear, who started out as John Klempner, but when my first book
was accepted by a big publisher (Harcourt), the publishers recommended
a different name, since there already was a bestselling author (well, he had
one bestseller) named John Klempner, and they felt one was enough.

Except that isn't quite the way you told it here in 1998...

John Bear Wrote:When Marina and I were married, we decided not to keep either my birth name (Klempner) nor hers (Dobrolubova), nor, heaven forbid, to hyphenate. After much deliberation, we chose a new name for the two of us, Bear, and trudged into Circuit Court in the Chicago area, where we then lived, where our petition for legal name change was signed on December 12, 1969 by Judge Minard C. Hulse.

...or here in 2001:

John Bear Wrote:As I have explained here, as often as necessary, when Marina (Doibrolubova) and John (Klempner) got married thirty-something years ago, the decision was made to choose a new name for us, rather than take either of those or, heaven forfend, go for hyphenation.

So which is it, the publisher wanting no more Klempners or the Klempners wanting no more unwieldy, ethnic-sounding names?  Or was it really because your father was blacklisted in Hollywood for his Communist activities and since you were marrying a Russian ("My wife, Marina Constantinovna Dobrolubova, whose family is from St. Petersburg...."), you wanted to fly under the radar of those who might raise an eyebrow about such things?

Quote:Except that isn't quite the way you told it here in 1998...

Come on! Cut the guy some slack...he's what, 86?
And do you remember when we had a flurry of supposed "authentic John Bear" posts right at the beginning, then the entire board here imploded and lots of posts were lost, including all of Bear's...synchronicity...

(03-16-2015, 04:42 PM)ham Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:Except that isn't quite the way you told it here in 1998...

Come on! Cut the guy some slack...he's what, 86?

Klempner supposedly was born in 1938, which would make him about 77.  But I'm sure there are many who would prefer to see him 86'ed.

Speaking of psychology degrees (as we were before Klempner derailed the thread), here's Klempner's delightful tale of how he switched from physics major to psych major.  Just a sophomoric moment, you know, no worries about innocent people rendered "despondent" by his antics.  Sound familiar?

Quote:KRRC was, in a backhanded way, responsible for changing me from a physics major into a psychology major, thereby refocusing my life. In the summer of 1957, the idea arose to send a letter to all incoming freshmen, telling them about the new campus radio station, and inviting them to participate. I wrote the letter, and invited people to communicate with me during the summer. Four people responded charmingly, and we exchanged many letters over the next two months, becoming true penpals. Then, a week before we’d all be leaving for Portland, in a sophomoric moment (well, I had been a sophomore), I wrote to those four (Bob, Karen, Marjorie, Gwil), thanking them for participating in a psychology experiment, in which a virtual person had been created by the class, to see if we could fool people into thinking he was real. There was no such person as their penpal John, they were told; the entire class had jointly written the letters, and we hoped they didn’t mind. Well, they did mind. One became despondent and nearly did not come to campus; one wrote an angry letter to Dean Shepherd; one went into detective mode and determined the falsity of the letter after several phone calls; and one wrote a charming letter back, saying that he, too, was a theoretical construct, a UNIVAC program. All subsequently became good friends. And I decided that the behavior of humans was more interesting than the behavior of particles. By October, I had declared a psychology major.

http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/nov200...index.html