Cut-Rate Diplomas

How doubts about the government's own "Dr. Laura" exposed a résumé fraud scandal.

Paul Sperry from the January 2005 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

"I do have available for you, if you like, a list of those accomplishments, because I think it helps you understand who I am, because those accomplishments number over 40, and they include recognition from not only [military] commands and agencies for which I worked for, but they also include recognition from outside entities," she continued in a soft, demure voice. "What I mean by that, to give you an idea of who I am, the outside awards include the 1995 Supervisor of the Year award—"

"Excuse me, Ms. Callahan," committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) mercifully interrupted. "I don't mean to be impolite, but your entire record of accomplishments is not necessary at this time. We really want to get on with the questions pertinent to the hearing."

At no time in the long hearing did Callahan bring up the Hamilton degrees—just a two-year associate's degree in liberal arts from Thomas Edison State that she got in 1992. That degree is no longer on her bio sheet, replaced by the three Hamilton diplomas. It's not clear whether the OPM or Homeland Security ever tried to obtain the canceled checks Callahan wrote to Hamilton for the degrees to see if the dates on the checks correspond with the dates on the diplomas.

But investigators with the General Accounting Office (GAO) were able to solve the mystery after several lawmakers asked the watchdog agency to probe Callahan and other diploma mill graduates employed by the federal government. In a May 11 report, the GAO said Callahan received her bachelor's and master's degrees in rapid succession between March 2000 and June 2000. Since her Ph.D. arrived in March 2001, that means she got all three degrees within a year.

What the report doesn't say is that Callahan went shopping for her phony bachelor's and master's degrees right after her embarrassing House testimony in March 2000 and as she was bucking for another Labor Department promotion that required such degrees. The degrees were backdated to make it appear as if she got them in 1993 and 1995, which would look more plausible on her résumé. The Ph.D.—also backdated, to 2000—closed out the academic package: a three-for-one deal at Diplomas 'R' Us.

Faithful Correspondent

But at least give Callahan credit for getting her associate's degree; she did some legitimate schooling after high school, right? Actually, even that is debatable. Much like Hamilton, Thomas Edison administers an external degree program for older students that gives course credits for life and work experience, with no required attendance. It has no resident faculty, no classrooms or library. The SAT is not required, and all applicants are accepted. It's a noncompetitive correspondence school.

Which raises the question: Was Callahan even qualified for her White House job, which she got in 1996—just before the problems with the computer system for archiving and retrieving e-mails sent to key Clinton appointees? (To this day, none of the "lost" e-mails relevant to the investigations have been recovered, despite a federal court order demanding them.) Amazingly, Callahan, with just an associate's degree and a few years of computer experience, had direct oversight of the network infrastructure and desktop computing environment used to support the offices of the president and vice president.

Howard "Chip" Sparks, a career White House employee who worked with Callahan (who at the time went by the name Laura Crabtree) did not think she was qualified at all. Sparks, a networking specialist, questioned a technical decision she made in 1997 and practically pulled back a bloody stump. Callahan later warned him in a memo not to question her qualifications again. "Please be advised I will not tolerate any further derogatory comments from you about my knowledge, qualifications and/or professional competence," she snapped in the March 3, 1997, memo.

At Labor, Callahan eventually got more power (despite being pushed out of the Clinton White House over the negative Project X publicity) and became less tolerant of those who didn't agree with her. "She had a style where she was right and you were wrong," Wainwright says, "and if you ever questioned her knowledge, if you were a contractor, you were fired, and if you were a fed [employee], you were banished."

Then she got the Ph.D. and threw it in all their faces, Wainwright and others say. "She insisted we call her Dr. Callahan," he says. "And she would belittle people with her technospeak to make them look stupid. In fact, she said most people [at Labor] were basically stupid." They got the last laugh.

Mill Work Ain't Hard

After Callahan's phony degrees were exposed, Congress asked its investigative arm, the GAO (recently renamed the Government Accountability Office), to audit other federal agencies to find out how widespread the problem of bogus academic credentials is inside the government. Congress also wanted to get a sense of how much, if any, federal money pays for tuitions at diploma mills.

Looking at the personnel of eight federal agencies chosen at random, the GAO found that 463 employees showed up on the enrollment records of just three unaccredited schools. (It actually looked at four colleges, but only three responded to its request for information and only two fully cooperated.) This was merely a sampling of the dozens of mills operating nationwide, not an exhaustive audit; given the limited nature of the GAO's investigation, the true number of federal employees who are academically unqualified to fill the positions they hold could be in the thousands.

Agencies tasked with defending America from terrorism were among the top employers of workers with phony diplomas identified by the GAO. The Department of Defense employs 257 of them. Transportation has 17. Justice has 13; Homeland Security, 12; Treasury, eight.