Professor Elam

The Sunday DMN reports that Donovan Collins the second ranking officer in the DISD police department has a questionable college degree on his resume.  He applied for the top job in the dept and listed a Bach Degree from Canyon College in Idaho.  Well guess what Canyon is not accredited by anyone recognized by the US Dept of Education. 

Mr. Collins story was that he paid $2500, took half a dozen courses on line and presto, got a degree, only later did he discover Canyon was not accredited.  Gee, a policeman fell for that scheme?  Worse, Collins claims 20 years experience with DISD police starting in 1986. But the DISD Police Dept did not exist until 2003.  Now Collins may be charged with falsifying a resume, a Class B misdemeanor.

Regular readers will recall that last fall the DISD discovered that their Ethics Czar claimed to be a CPA yet he did not possess a current CPA certificate.  And of course this is the same DISD that had the massive credit card scandals.  There are several points to be made here.

Auditing requires professional skepticism.  Basically this is the show me philosophy associated with folks from Missouri.  This is why my job required submission of my transcript directly from UT Austin to the Provost at UNT, as do all state university jobs.  Misrepresenting degrees is so widespread this is now required, the person submitting is not allowed to touch the transcript.

There will of course me much more of this with Canyon Colleges appearing daily on the internet and a confusing array of so called accrediting bodies. 

It looks as bad or worse in this instance for the DISD police to suffer such an incident.  Clearly their lack of investigative procedure is in serious question.  How can we trust them to do internal investigations of the school when they cannot police themselves?

Be glad you are pursuing a real degree at one of the top universities in Texas!