I have been thinking seriously as to why some people would teach at offshore medical schools that are not registered locally as medical schools or never meet their students face to face i.e. UHSA-Antigua,IUHS-St. Kitts,Medical College of St. Lucia. Other than the money,what could be one's motivation to not see the students and assess them face to face?
Ran across the following article on a school (not medical) and its' teachers (who are like many of the schools I have discussed on valuemd who may be teaching elsewhere but 'supervisor' students,etc for pay on the side at less reputable schools). Recently I have seen some articles where some of the Carib. schools are trying to pay PHD's/MD's $2000/month to teach full time,often not in their actual subjects they are prepared in. Many of the schools are importing 'professors' from 3rd world countries where that kind of money may be of interest..the actual island doctors can make more money than what the schools are offering.
az skeptic
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i31/31a03501.htm
Moonlighting for an Unaccredited University
Many professors who work for Kennedy-Western are proud to do so, but some hide it
By ANDREA L. FOSTER
Slade Gellin teaches three courses in engineering technology at the State
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALSO SEE:
Regulating Kennedy-Western -- or Not
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
University of New York College at Buffalo, spending 15 hours a week in class. His office hours are late Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
On Sunday, the assistant professor moonlights as part of an academic underground that many of his peers would not consider joining. He spends one to two hours grading papers and composing examinations for Kennedy-Western University, an unaccredited distance-learning institution that is spurned by Idaho, Oregon, and even its home state, California.
Mr. Gellin, who earned his doctorate in applied mathematics and mechanics from Harvard University, recalls how he once received a "snobbish" letter from a fellow Harvard alumnus he did not know. The man excoriated him for working for Kennedy-Western and suggested that he was tarnishing his academic reputation. But Mr. Gellin, who has earned as much as $2,000 a year from Kennedy-Western, is not ashamed of his work.
"There's no such thing as lowering yourself to do this job," he says.
Mr. Gellin is hardly the only full-time professor who moonlights for Kennedy-Western. Lured by money, the prospect of what they say is interesting work, or both, at least 22 professors at 21 colleges work for the institution, developing courses, grading papers, writing exams, and responding to students' questions. Most are associate or assistant professors in business, computer science, or engineering at state universities who were recruited by Kennedy-Western through mass mailings and fliers. They earn from a few hundred to several thousand dollars a year, receiving $25 to grade a paper, a couple of hundred dollars to develop a course, and $40 an hour to answer students' questions.
While Mr. Gellin and some of his peers are proud of their work for Kennedy-Western, others decline to talk about it for fear that their full-time employers will frown on their second jobs, or that their colleagues will scoff at them.
That's not surprising, given that many educators hold Kennedy-Western in low regard, troubled by the institution's secrecy and slick marketing, decision to avoid oversight by accrediting agencies, awarding of academic credit for work experience, and attempted moves to different states. The institution is barred from enrolling California residents, because it lacks a license from the state agency that certifies private colleges, and people can be criminally prosecuted in Oregon if they attempt to use a Kennedy-Western degree to apply for a job. The Idaho State Board of Education rejected the university's effort, in 1998, to renew its license to operate there because it lacked accreditation. Kennedy-Western then turned its attention to Wyoming.
"Do you want to be part of a university that cannot accept students from the state they're based in?" asks John Bear, an expert on distance-learning institutions and diploma mills who is a co-author of the Bears' Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning.
The American Association of University Professors has taken no formal position on professors who moonlight at unaccredited institutions. "We're disappointed when faculty make decisions that we think might undermine the profession as a whole," says Mary Burgan, general secretary of the association. "But it's their choice, and we certainly believe in freedom."
Kennedy-Western officials decline to discuss the university over the telephone and say they receive and answer questions only in writing. They decline to say how the university compensates faculty members, who owns the institution, or how many students it enrolls. They also won't say how many full-time professors they employ, but assert that half of their faculty members are full-time professors elsewhere. Kennedy-Western's Web site lists a "sample" of 112 faculty members.
Disappearing Ties
Kennedy-Western is not the only unaccredited distance-learning institution that attracts full-time professors, but few other institutions are as successful in recruiting so many moonlighters, or as aggressive in highlighting them to attract students.
"Our faculty members teach at classroom universities nationwide," reads one advertisement from Kennedy-Western. And on the university's Web site, an unidentified student exclaims in an audio clip, "I was impressed at the level of counseling and support that I received."
The institution also appears to have a worldwide reach. It says it has offices in Moscow, Singapore, and Jakarta, Indonesia, and offers to pay for students to fly out and visit its headquarters, in Thousand Oaks, Calif. One education official in Idaho estimates Kennedy-Western's revenue at as much as $10-million a year.
The shareholders of the privately held university are **** S. Saltman of Westlake Village, Calif., who is also the institution's president, and Joseph Benjoya, according to documents filed in California and Wyoming.
Among the professors who refuse to talk about their work for Kennedy-Western is Barbara J. Limbach, an associate professor of business and economics at Chadron State College, who recently won a teaching award from the Nebraska State Colleges.
"I'm a consultant for them," says Ms. Limbach of Kennedy-Western. "I read final papers." Asked to elaborate on her work, she hangs up the telephone.
As of last month, Kennedy-Western's Web site listed Vani V. Kotcherlakota of the University of Nebraska at Kearney as one of its professors, too. But when questioned about her ties to the institution, Ms. Kotcherlakota, chairwoman of Kearney's economics department, said, "I don't want a story on that at this moment." She added, "I'm resigning that position." Within days, her name was removed from the Web site.
Administrators on the Kearney campus were unaware of Ms. Kotcherlakota's second job. Dale G. Zikmund, faculty assistant to the senior vice chancellor for academic affairs at Kearney, says the University of Nebraska's Board of Regents requires faculty members to receive permission to conduct outside work.
"At least for our campus, I know of nobody actually doing this," he says.
Aside from Mr. Gellin, other Kennedy-Western faculty members who are willing to talk about their work say they are not embarrassed to be affiliated with an unaccredited distance-learning institution. Kennedy-Western students, they say, often use the same textbooks and take exams as rigorous as those offered in professors' traditional classes.
The faculty members say most Kennedy-Western students are midcareer professionals who chose the university because their busy schedules can't accommodate in-class instruction. They learn through self-paced study and occasionally contact professors by e-mail if they want help on course material. The students' employers typically want them to acquire academic skills or credentials to support their work.
The university's course catalog tells prospective students that Kennedy-Western will "grant credit for what you have already learned, whether in the classroom or on the job."
Kennedy-Western officials say students spend $5,150 to $7,400 each to receive a degree. Their ability to pass a course depends entirely on whether they pass exams, and they must provide evidence that the exams they take are administered by proctors, who could be professional supervisors, librarians, or religious leaders.
Kennedy-Western's catalog also lists two pages of companies that it says will reimburse all or a portion of students' tuition fees. The list includes Fortune 500 companies like 3M and Hewlett-Packard, along with a smattering of federal agencies, such as the Department of Justice's Bureau of Prisons. Still, Kennedy-Western students are ineligible for federal student aid because of Education Department regulations that make it difficult for exclusively online institutions to offer federal aid to their students.
"I don't think students understand the concept of accreditation, and I don't think the employers of Kennedy-Western students are aware of that concept," says Mr. Gellin of SUNY's College at Buffalo. "If the employer is happy and the student is happy, why shouldn't I be happy?"
A colleague of Mr. Gellin's in the Buffalo technology department, Anthony Hotchkiss, also works for Kennedy-Western. "I'll do anything for a buck," says Mr. Hotchkiss, an associate professor who coordinates Buffalo's industrial-technology program.
He says he spends less than two hours a week working for Kennedy-Western and earned $4,000 last year, primarily grading exams and updating courses in mechanical engineering, computer software, and programming.
The two professors have not told administrators at Buffalo about the outside work, but the college can't stop them anyway. The college has no policy on professors who work for educational institutions outside the State University of New York System, says Gary Marotta, its provost and vice president for academic affairs.
No Scoffing
Other professors are drawn to Kennedy-Western because they want more variety in their work, or because they think it will help their careers.
John F. Affisco, a professor and chairman of the department of business computer-information systems and quantitative methods at Hofstra University, says working for Kennedy-Western earns him extra money for supervising doctoral and master's-degree candidates in quality management and quality control. "These are areas," he says, that "I don't get involved in at Hofstra," where he primarily teaches statistics and information technology. He says Kennedy-Western pays him $3,000 to $5,000 a year.
Dana E. Madison, an associate professor in the computer-and-information-science department at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, says he believes his work for Kennedy-Western will improve his chances of getting promoted to full professor at Clarion. He supervises graduate students at Kennedy-Western but not at Clarion.
Although he was rejected for promotion last year, he is trying again this year. The dossier he presented last year in support of his bid for promotion included a description of what he does at Kennedy-Western, as well as a letter from the distance-learning institution attesting to his work.
"Four of my colleagues in my department read my promotion packet, and they never scoffed at me for doing this," he says. "And it's probably because they value my judgment, because there are definitely schools I wouldn't do this for." (He declines to name them.)
Mr. Madison says he earns $5,000 to $6,000 a year from Kennedy-Western, for grading exams, tutoring students, helping them choose thesis or dissertation topics, and then reading their final papers. "You don't have a constant work flow," he says. "One month you can grade 20 or 30 exams; the next month you might grade two."
Still other professors say they are drawn to Kennedy-Western because they want to participate in distance learning.
"Online education is the thing of the future," says Mayuresh Kelkar, an assistant professor of marketing at Salem State College, in Massachusetts. He develops courses and grades exams in international and strategic marketing for Kennedy-Western, earning $1,200 a year for about an hour's work a week. "The money is not that great, but I enjoy it," he says.
Some moonlighting professors sound surprised to learn that Kennedy-Western lacks accreditation. A private-school operating license that Wyoming issued to Kennedy-Western, and that the university displays on its Web site and in its catalog, apparently misled at least one professor into thinking that the university is accredited.
"They give the indication on their Web site that they're accredited, but I didn't check into it," says the associate professor, asking to remain anonymous. "I hope they're not deceiving anyone."
The university was once certified by the California agency that oversees private colleges, but then decided not to renew its license. And it considered but ultimately rejected the idea of seeking accreditation from a nationally recognized group that certifies distance-learning institutions.
But most Kennedy-Western professors interviewed say the institution's lack of accreditation doesn't concern them.
"My job is to educate people, however they choose to do it," says Kambiz Farahmand, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Texas A&M University at Kingsville. "It's someone else's job to legitimize their diploma. Whatever they get from me is good."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Page: A35