Other Public Service
The University of Illinois is a public university and "land grant school"; as such, Gollin's responsibilities include faculty public service in addition to his teaching and research obligations. Since 2003, Gollin has been documenting the practices of alleged diploma mills, businesses which are believed to sell meaningless academic degrees without providing education or assessment to/of their customers. In this capacity, he has worked with a number of state and federal agencies, including the State of Washington Office of the Attorney General, the U.S. Dept. of Education, the U.S. Secret Service, and the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education. It was reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education that "Alan Contreras, administrator for the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization, called the professor's work 'superb'." He has, for example, assisted with the federal investigation of the operation of an alleged diploma mill, Saint Regis University. This investigation resulted in closing down the large operation and the conviction on federal criminal charges of eight individuals who were involved.
In 2006 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation for a three year term. He was reelected to a second term in 2009. Also in 2009 Gollin was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. George Gollin said of the fellowship, "I will use the term of the Fellowship to write a book about the nine-year trajectory and spectacular immolation of St. Regis, and the resulting increase in international attention to the problem of diploma mills."
Read more about this topic: George Gollin
Famous quotes containing the words public and/or service:
“I’ll sing you a new ballad, and I’ll warrant it first-rate,
Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate;
When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate
On ev’ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev’ry noble gate,
In the fine old English Tory times;”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1890)
“Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)