Children are our future [journalists]

April 5, 2017 8:42 AM

High school journalism students uncovered some questions about their soon-to-be principal, after said principal had been hired by the school district. Days later, the principal resigned.

On March 6, 2017, Amy Robertson was hired by the Pittsburg Community Schools district, in Pittsburg, Kansas, to be the new principal of Pittsburg High School.

Journalism students from the school's newspaper, the Booster Redux, started looking into their new principal and soon had more questions than answers.

On April 4, 2017, the school board accepted Ms. Robertson's resignation.

Not surprisingly, one of the Booster Redux staff who helped cover this story, Trina Paul, won a second place Editorial Writing award at the Kansas Scholastic Press Association Regional contest.

posted by cooker girl (54 comments total)

“They were at a loss that something that was so easy for them to see was waiting to be noticed by adults,”

Welcome to the rest of your life....
posted by photoslob at 8:47 AM on April 5, 2017 [83 favorites]

"Corllins University" didn't strike anyone in the hiring process as obviously fake? I assumed it was a typo in the WaPo story until the third or fourth time they spelled it that way.

Good on these kids.
posted by Etrigan at 8:48 AM on April 5, 2017 [7 favorites]

This is delightful.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:49 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

And she would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:49 AM on April 5, 2017 [148 favorites]

Haha, I just posted this in the thread underneath. Good minds think a like. :) And yes, these kids are great.
posted by Fizz at 8:51 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

"Corllins University" didn't strike anyone in the hiring process as obviously fake? I assumed it was a typo in the WaPo story until the third or fourth time they spelled it that way.

I'm guessing Pittsburg KS, pop 20k, doesn't get a lot of applicants with degrees from places you've heard of. And as long as the candidate doesn't misrepresent the credential, they might even be willing to look the other way on a degree mill Master's. It sounds like the more dire problem was when the would-be principal failed to produce even undergraduate transcripts upon request.
posted by pwnguin at 8:54 AM on April 5, 2017

Too bad very few "adult" reporters have this level of gumption and willingness to push against authority figures.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 8:54 AM on April 5, 2017 [13 favorites]

Too bad very few "adult" reporters have this level of gumption and willingness to push against authority figures.

I hope that this resistance to that kind of "adult" complacency or capitulation to the status quo or "that's just how the real world is", I hope that they keep on pushing back and that this carries on as they mature.

Too often we grow into adulthood and just accept things because others tell us that we have to accept them. It's a good reminder that children/teenagers/young people, they're not stupid, that they do notice these things.
posted by Fizz at 8:58 AM on April 5, 2017 [12 favorites]

Fuck yeah.
posted by Artw at 9:09 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

Never mind "Corllins." It didn't strike anyone as odd that Robertson would want to move directly to small town KS after living in Dubai for 20 years? Then again, maybe that's just the ticket.
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 9:11 AM on April 5, 2017 [10 favorites]

There's a whole lot of nothing in that second statement from the school district on why Ms. Robertson decided to resign.

I just want to say their purple dragon mascot rocks!
posted by lagomorphius at 9:13 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

Their adviser, Smith, had to recuse herself from the story because she was on the committee that hired Robertson.

this committee, do its members still have their jobs?
posted by chavenet at 9:19 AM on April 5, 2017 [6 favorites]

It didn't strike anyone as odd that Robertson would want to move directly to small town KS after living in Dubai for 20 years?

There are a lot of people who assume that wherever they live is the best place in the world and therefore anyone would obviously want to live there too, so it makes perfect sense that someone would rather live in their nice town than a big crazy city in some other country.
posted by Etrigan at 9:27 AM on April 5, 2017 [11 favorites]

There are a lot of people who assume that wherever they live is the best place in the world

I don't know whether that's mathematically relevant, but in my experience hiring into college town Kansas, we absolutely consider turnover risk, to the point of asking about why accept a job in a small remote town during the interview process. You take them at their word, still, but if they don't seem to know what they're getting in to, that's a red flag. If they do, and they seem overqualified, well, you count your blessings and move on.

But maybe like, still spend the money on a background check?
posted by pwnguin at 9:42 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

this committee, do its members still have their jobs?

You assume the hiring committee had a deciding role in this lady's hiring. If they did, they have some 'splaining to do. Also, it wouldn't surprise me if we learn the advising teacher voted against hiring this particular individual.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:51 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

Ooooh, I didn't see this when I was putting the post together:

Maddie Baden, a 17-year-old Pittsburg High junior, said the student news staff began looking into Robertson’s background after an electronic search of her name turned up several articles published by Gulf News about an English language school connected to Robertson in Dubai.

The 2012 articles said Dubai’s education authority had suspended the license for Dubai American Scientific School and accused Robertson of not being authorized to serve as principal of that school. The private, for-profit school received an “unsatisfactory” rating on Dubai education authority inspection reports every year from 2008 to 2012 and was closed in September 2013.

“That raised a red flag,” Baden said. “If students could uncover all of this, I want to know why the adults couldn’t find this..”
posted by cooker girl at 10:02 AM on April 5, 2017 [27 favorites]

Too bad very few "adult" reporters have this level of gumption and willingness to push against authority figures.

It's easy to say that if you've never worked in journalism. Maybe you have, I don't know. I worked in daily journalism from 1997-2007 and still produce the occasional story for magazines and websites. I've known/ know so many tenacious, inquisitive and downright relentless journalists in the US and across the globe. I've known pulitzer-prize winning bulldogs who speak truth-to-power and take no prisoners. One of my closest friends on this earth spent the last 15 years of her life traveling to places like Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq, Nepal, etc working on stories about child marriage. She literally gave up being a mother in order to tell the stories of girls who have been married off as young as 7 years old. She has told me stories that have literally made me cry.

There's no shortage of great journalists pushing back against authority. There is a lack of outlets who care to PAY and PUBLISH hard hitting investigative journalism. Reporting is a thankless job that damn near means taking an oath of poverty. It's a job that means you will be second guessed and painted a fraud anytime the facts you've uncovered are inconvenient to people in power. And if you make even the smallest mistake it could possibly ruin your career. Most of the time you're just pissing into the wind and no one gives a damn. Most of the really amazing reporters I've known have quit the business by their 40's because it was making them mentally or financially unstable.

It's honestly disappointing to regularly read these kind of comments about journalists here on the blue.
posted by photoslob at 10:05 AM on April 5, 2017 [175 favorites]

But with the encouragement of the superintendent, the students persisted.

I just wanted to highlight how important it is to have adults who encourage and support students. These kids are great and I'm so glad that an adult in a position of authority had their backs.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:15 AM on April 5, 2017 [33 favorites]

But with that freedom came a major responsibility to get the story right, Smith said. It also meant overcoming a natural hesitancy many students have to question authority

Hold up, teenagers these days hesitate to question authority?
posted by janey47 at 10:56 AM on April 5, 2017 [10 favorites]

“Everybody kept telling them, ‘stop poking your nose where it doesn’t belong,'” newspaper adviser Emily Smith told The Post. But with the encouragement of the superintendent, the students persisted.

The superintendent must have wanted this principal gone if they let them run this story. I can't imagine this would have had the same ending if this principal were the superintendent's nephew.
posted by dr_dank at 10:58 AM on April 5, 2017 [4 favorites]

The Corllins University web page is a masterwork of poorly written text, fairly obvious stock photos, and not working links. I haven't made a web page from scratch in 10+ years, and I could probably create a more believable one this afternoon.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:01 AM on April 5, 2017 [11 favorites]

Dr. Dank: Kansas Law says that student newspapers can't be censored in that way. But I sitll wonder about this superintendent as well as this Think Chalkdusty Line who was protecting the principle from those meddling kids.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:04 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

This is my favorite thing from the Corllins website:

Keep in Tough

Sign up for our emails and get Exclusive offers! The latest news! Inspiration & styling tips!

[NOT FAKE]
posted by cooker girl at 11:05 AM on April 5, 2017 [33 favorites]

I just want to say their purple dragon mascot rocks!

I’ve always liked the red and yellow logo of Pittsburg State University, in the same town, where the sports teams are called the Gorillas.
posted by LeLiLo at 11:10 AM on April 5, 2017

It's honestly disappointing to regularly read these kind of comments about journalists here on the blue.

Agree. The journalists I know working for small-town operations are so overworked they barely have time to rewrite a press release, much less do a lot of fact-checking and investigative work. Try doing a lot of digging when you have to produce four or five stories a day.

Print advertising is drying up, online ads don't bring in as much, and newspaper owners are more focused on the shareholders than the staff. Which means, in our modern world, that the stock price goes up when they cut back on reporters, and for the owners, that's a good thing. For the rest of us, it means government and a lot of other essential things just don't get covered.
posted by merrill at 11:18 AM on April 5, 2017 [13 favorites]

Further evidence that Corllins University, where the principal allegedly got her Masters and PhD, is not a real university:
• According to a whois search, corluni.org, the top result for the university in Google, was first registered on Sept. 1, 2015 to a "Mr. Joe" with a fake phone number.
• corllinsuniversity.org, the only other site for university, was first registered on October 1, 2016.
• No .edu domains exist for the university; only accredited schools can use the .edu domain, and it's extremely unusual for a school not to have an official .edu website.
• Corluni.org doesn't list accreditations, but on corllinsuniversity.org the two accrediting bodies listed are both associated with for-profit "diploma mills," and the websites for both are no longer functioning.

These students did the work their school administrators should have done, and should be applauded for it. If they don't each have journalism scholarships piling up in their mailboxes, I'll be disappointed.
posted by me3dia at 11:21 AM on April 5, 2017 [8 favorites]

I just found the principal's LinkedIn profile. It still lists a PhD and MA, but the institution name is marked "N/A".
posted by sevenyearlurk at 11:25 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

• Universities are made up of multiple colleges, not a "University of Business", "University of Law", etc.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:37 AM on April 5, 2017 [8 favorites]

Universities are made up of multiple colleges, not a "University of Business", "University of Law", etc.

So, it really should be Corllins Multiversity. That sounds super impressive.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 11:45 AM on April 5, 2017 [30 favorites]

that Corllins University site is low-key the funniest thing I've seen all day

Hold up, teenagers these days hesitate to question authority?

I have in fact seen educators say that students are more passive these days since the internet came along and fixed everything for them. Whether this is a matter of confirmation bias or not I cannot say.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:46 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

I wonder if Amy Robertson actually bought the domain for her fake college?

I've had Stephen King on the brain all week, so naturally I immediately started imagining that Robertson is actually from the year 2048, having stepped through her diner time portal, and is now trying to make a living until the future date of the disaster she came back in time to prevent. What could it be?! But she fucked up and forgot that even kids from small-town Kansas would look up her diploma-mill credentials. Jimla!
posted by Autumnheart at 11:50 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]

It's honestly disappointing to regularly read these kind of comments about journalists here on the blue.


Thank you for writing that. The journalist-bashing that happens on media-related FPPs is so depressing.
posted by not_the_water at 12:20 PM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

"32 Years of Academic Excellence 1984 - 2014"

I was hoping the "Admission" page would say "OK, ya got us."
posted by pracowity at 12:29 PM on April 5, 2017 [11 favorites]

I just love the "eat shit, 'Doctor'" grins that the kids have on their faces in the first link.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:51 PM on April 5, 2017

Excellent of Theory and Practice! - Corllins University
posted by Benway at 1:04 PM on April 5, 2017 [4 favorites]

Universities are made up of multiple colleges, not a "University of Business", "University of Law", etc.

That web site is so bad that I wonder if it's resorting to the old Nigerian email trick: be so incredibly, incredibly unbelievable that only the most gullible people would fall for it.
posted by Melismata at 1:12 PM on April 5, 2017 [4 favorites]

At least somebody listened!

The city within whose limits I used to live needed a new police chief and council decided on someone. I was part of an ornery local forum and we dug into this person because the last chief had been terrible and we easily saw no reason the new one would be any better. Both a journalist and a noted local blogger stole all of our research, published it as their own for many more eyes and still council voted the asshat in. Forum got shut down.

Bewildered council later had to bring in the Fire Chief. Yup. To run the police department. There's an awful lot that Gannet article doesn't get into cause spooking the tourists is a big no-no.

Kudos to the kids.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 1:51 PM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]

People on Twitter were speculating that Corllins University is run by Axact, a diploma mill empire covered in this NY Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/world/asia/fake-diplomas-real-cash-pakistani-company-axact-reaps-millions-columbiana-barkley.html

I noticed the NY Times article mentions Axact sells you a (phony) US state dept. certificate, which the principal mentions having in one of the newspaper articles.
posted by interplanetjanet at 2:32 PM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

My high school principal had a fake PhD too!

It took him 3 years to get fired though. He also embezzled money and slept (consensually) with students in his school office.

I was managing editor of the school paper and everyone knew. But we weren't allowed to print anything.

Yay, Kansas!
posted by miyabo at 4:02 PM on April 5, 2017 [11 favorites]

EXCELLENT OF THEORY AND PRACTICE

My University had a President who had mail order degrees (PDF), exposed by the student newspaper, a fact they have never really lived down...... and note the deflection/obfuscation in this page, for example (hint: he's the President without the "Dr."), to this day.
posted by Rumple at 4:15 PM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

Good on them! Can we have those students look into the credentials and legitimacy of a different figurehead in power who was installed with potentially dubious ties to external sources? Maybe the press would do some actual digging to then...
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:24 PM on April 5, 2017 [4 favorites]

HEY MODS, PLEASE DELETE
posted by The Gooch at 4:35 PM on April 5, 2017 [8 favorites]

Hold up, teenagers these days hesitate to question authority?
The threat of retribution is high when the rights and privileges are so few.
posted by MidSouthern Mouth at 5:35 PM on April 5, 2017

Gooch, 99.9% of the time I feel your comment is true. But, this instance is so far out of the norm I applaud and commend the students just for stepping so far outside the comfort zones of people around then that they got push back, and still found the truth. They will be more capable people for this experience, regardless of what they choose to do.
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 5:38 PM on April 5, 2017

I wonder if the adults on the search committee were told not to google the potential hires. I was on a hiring committee at my workplace, and I was told not to google candidates or search for them on social media. I think I even had to sign something saying that I wouldn't. My hunch is that they're concerned that you'll come across information about something like religion that could be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit, but for whatever reason, we were only allowed to consider the information in the applicant's file.

Anyway, good for these kids. This is the second recent story about high-school journalists doing real journalism!
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:27 PM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

I got curious about the fake university's website. Even if it was a diploma mill, it's doing a pretty crappy job: there's no way to contact the "university" or give it money on the website.

Anyways, on to the website itself. The WHOIS data says it's registered by "Mr. Joe" at standard.enginering [at] gmail.com. Bogus address and phone number. Lovely. It's a real Gmail by the way (you can start the password recovery on it, which means it's real).

Now, let's see where it's hosted. The name servers (they are the DNS directory that tells you what server the content is hosted on, roughly) are on AMZ2CONNECT.COM, which is a site with no content. However, that site is owned by a guy from Karachi. Both amz2connect and the fake uni are hosted on the same IP address: 69.167.136.160. This is owned by LiquidWeb, a commodity shared hosting provider. A quick reverse IP check shows a lot of Pakistani domains on the same IP.

My guess is they outsourced a quick web design job to some dude in Pakistan who uses shared/semi-dedicated hosting for all of his websites. It's also fun to note that Axact, the diploma mill parent mentioned above, is based in Pakistan. Maybe there's a thriving cottage industry!

Hold up—we aren't done yet. The uni's name was used back in 2011 in a very diploma mill-like press release. They quote a phone number at the bottom: 1-866-268-5446. This phone number shows up on this page, linked with the totally-legit-sounding americancollegeus.com. (Just click on that link, the site is a travesty.)

Here's the kicker: click on any of the home page links. The URL to the about page, per chance? It's http://www.americancollegeus.com/corllins/aboutus.html. Pop open the source of the page and there's a comment at the top: "Mirrored from www.corllinsuniversity.com/corllins/aboutus.asp by HTTrack Website Copier/3.x [XR&CO'2014], Wed, 27 Aug 2014 14:10:43 GMT". We've got some lazy mofos here recycling their names.

Anyways, I wish I could close the loop, but it looks like "American College US" is registered to some poor guy in Colombo, Sri Lanka and is hosted on a different set of servers. Still though, the data is all out there if anyone fancies mapping out the lovely world of diploma mill websites.
posted by redct at 8:33 PM on April 5, 2017 [7 favorites]

“That raised a red flag,” Baden said. “If students could uncover all of this, I want to know why the adults couldn’t find this..”

Maybe they did find this. Maybe they were fully aware of who they are dealing with and she just was the most qualified person who applied for the job.

Also, I am having trouble to see the scandal here.
She said on the CV that she went to Corlliss or whatever it's called, so that's not a lie. And she didn't claim that it's not a diploma mill. What exactly is the supposed misrepresentation here? Granted, there is that bit that she claimed that Corliss was accredited before when it possibly never was, but it's not even clear that that was a lie. Just looking at the facts, it seems that the worst thing that can be said is that she gave "inconstent answers" to some kids of a highschool newspaper on the phone.

But hey, they are kids and she's an authority figure, so the story writes itself, no digging or critical questions required.
posted by sour cream at 6:29 AM on April 6, 2017

Maybe they did find this. Maybe they were fully aware of who they are dealing with and she just was the most qualified person who applied for the job.

Then you appoint an interim principal and re-open the search.

She said on the CV that she went to Corlliss or whatever it's called, so that's not a lie.

She didn't go to Corlliss, because Corlliss doesn't exist as a place where you can go.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:31 AM on April 6, 2017 [9 favorites]

FAKE NEWS! THANKS OBAMA! DeVos WILL SAVE US!
posted by blue_beetle at 6:40 AM on April 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

Also, I am having trouble to see the scandal here.

1. Robertson was not authorized to be the principal of a school in Dubai that she said she was principal of. That same school also received unsatisfactory ratings for the entire time she said she was in charge of it. That alone would give me pause if I was on the hiring committee for the job at PHS.

2. From TFA: In an emergency faculty meeting Tuesday, the superintendent said Robertson was unable to produce a transcript confirming her undergraduate degree from the University of Tulsa, Smith said. Sketchy as hell.

3. From the student newspaper: When asked by Brown if she took classes in Stockton, Calif., during two different summers, Robertson replied that she had. However, a check of the records at the City of Stockton’s Community Development Department indicated that no business license or building permit existed for Corllins University, as stated by City of Stockton permit technician Carmen Davila.
posted by cooker girl at 7:56 AM on April 6, 2017 [5 favorites]

Maybe they were fully aware of who they are dealing with and she just was the most qualified person who applied for the job.

Then why did she resign? If she didn't want to take a job as a high-school principal because she got criticized by teenagers, then she wasn't remotely qualified.
posted by Etrigan at 8:09 AM on April 6, 2017 [8 favorites]

A lot of my time in college, including the journalism class I took, was pretty much a study in learning how to be worn down and complacent because of the incompetency of adults, who wanted 'safe' and 'easy' problems to solve. (I mean, I went to Pepper Spray University, which has a 55% 4-year graduation rate at this point) Sadly, because we age, we often become those 'adults' and if we are not careful, we also become complicit.

It's a terrible treadmill. We must always support those who are willing to do the work and challenge it, that sharpness, perception, and zeal can get eroded so easily.
posted by yueliang at 12:26 PM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

I always find it distressing when women achieve a level of career or political prominence and then are taken down – especially in a field that is dominated by women (teaching and education) but strangely the leadership and top positions are held overwhelmingly by men. And then I think, even more cynically, if it had been Adam Robertson probably no one would have even bothered to look into it. Because I bet there are unqualified Adam Robertsons in many positions of leadership who failed upward if not out and out conned. But then I just have to sigh and go, well, whatever.

Good on the kids, though! I was an authority-questioning young journalist throughout my high school and college career and ran into problems with authority on the types and tenor of stories we wanted to run all the time. We even did an "underground paper" -- ooh! -- that got rather viciously shut-down because the principal didn't like us calling her out for going into long-established classrooms and dictating what books we were and were not allowed to read and what monologues the drama class was and was not allowed to produce. Ahhhh...those were the days. I also learned, at that time, that students under the oversight of the school system did not actually enjoy much "freedom of the press." Rats!
posted by amanda at 5:20 PM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

If she hadn't listed Corllins on her LinkedIn, she'd probably still have a job. She could have not listed a school, or put a believable lie. The problem is that she had such poor judgement that she paid the degree mill, and then bragged about it.

As of right now, 752 people on LinkedIn list degrees from Corllins.
posted by miyabo at 9:11 PM on April 8, 2017