GUEST POST: “This university is a fake one. The more I read about it, the more alarm bells go off.”

Sent in by Matthew S:

Announcements, press releases, contract signings and photo opportunities— the flurry of activity was such that it is perhaps understandable that the press, the Opposition, the University of Malta and the public stood in awe as Joseph Muscat concluded yet another wonderful deal.

That over, it is now time to dig further.

Any university can call itself American, in the same way that any restaurant selling pizza and pasta can call itself Italian.

The owner might be Maltese, the chef might be Maltese, the waiters might be Maltese and the cuisine might be suited to Maltese tastes more than Italian ones, but there is no law barring a restaurateur from using the word ‘Italian’.

The same goes for ‘American’.

In our hypothetical restaurant, the restaurateur could not be bothered hiring a world class chef to design an innovative menu so what he did instead was ask (and pay) for a copy of their own menu. This is the curriculum.

That is all well and good, of course. A Maltese person can run a perfectly good Italian restaurant with an unoriginal menu. But there are two main problems:

1) The lies. Trying to pass off your ersatz restaurant as a Michelin-starred one is disingenuous at best and plain fraudulent at worst.

2) Running a university is far more complicated than running a restaurant. You can’t just copy a curriculum and hire a random bunch of people to run it while hoping for the best. It requires the right people, years of expertise and, very importantly, accreditation.

As far as I can tell, this university is a fake one. The more I read about it, the more alarm bells go off. Here are some indicators.

a) No university was a signatory to the agreement. The government signed that contract with a Jordanian construction company and hotel operator. This is, to put it mildly, bizarre.

No genuine university is going to set up shop anywhere without having a formal agreement with the authorities where it is setting up shop.

b) There has been absolutely no mention of the university’s accrediation. All genuine universities need accrediation to be able to offer degrees. American universities are accredited by an American accreditation body (there are several) and overseen by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA).

The Sadeen Group university is not American, so it will not be accredited by one of these bodies. Probably, no serious accrediation agency in the world would accredit it but I’m sure that Evarist Bartolo might be accomodating, thereby bringing the University of Malta down to the level of the Sadeen Group university, which would be an absolute disaster.

c) The university does not even have a website yet. How does it plan to enrol students by next year without informing prospective students what its courses are? To say that this does not inspire confidence is a massive understatement.

Moreover, its prospective website is going to be called Aumalta.com

.COM? Really? Genuine educational institutions always use .edu. Indeed, since 2001, .edu in the United States has been reserved solely for accredited higher educational institutions.

d) It has happened before. In 2012, the American University of London, an unaccredited insitution, was caught selling Masters degrees in Business Administration (MBAs) to people who never even took the course.

The American University of Hawaii has been blacklisted in several countries from India to Iran for offering fake American degrees.

Several other universities with American-sounding names, some with physical premises and some which exist only on paper, are also highly suspicious or have been found to be fraudulent.

To understand the fake university phenomenon, you only need to look at China. In spite of the country’s jingoism, an American education is much more highly prized than a Communist one (don’t tell Mario Vella of East Berlin).

In super-competitive China, wealthy Chinese will do anything to give their children an American education and getting them onto the first ladder of their career, and if that means buying a fake degree, so be it.

In 2012, a (real) Chinese academic told The Economist “Chinese people pay more attention to having a diploma than they do to having a real education. A diploma is worth actual money, whereas an education is not.”

So should we be worried about this whole thing even if money is coming in?

Of course we should. This is the biggest scandal of Muscat’s Labour government, yet. The Prime Minister’s vision for Malta is finally being revealed, and it’s scary as hell.

First, invite wealthy Chinese and Libyans to Malta and gift them Maltese assets for peanuts.

Secondly, sell them and their families a European passport so that they can travel more easily.

Thirdly, sell an “American degree” to their children in the hope that their eventual employers will be impressed by the word ‘American’ while overlooking their (lack of) knowledge and skills

This is such a catastrophic strategy, it is hard to get to grips with it. You can only sell fairy dust for so long before it blows up in your face.

It takes little to ruin the reputation of a country which does not have much of a reputation to start with. It took us years to get rid of the bad name we had for being the stool pigeon and puppet of Communist dictators the world over, and a satellite state of Gaddafi’s Libya.

Then we had to struggle to convince the financial services world that we were not a tax haven in the order of the British Virgin Islands.

Now we’re going to be the country where you can buy a passport and a degree, just like Nigeria is known for internet scams and Caribbean islands are known for dodgy offshore finance.

Incidentally, the American University of London (that fake university which sells MBAs) is incorporated in St Kitts and Nevis, whose prime minister often hobnobs with ours at Henley and Partners events, where they both hawk their passports.

The University of Malta should be raising a stink about all this. The Opposition should start asking questions in parliament. The press needs to investigate further. Accreditation is a good place for everyone to start with.

If Malta’s education system becomes a joke, academics, students, employers and the whole population will suffer.

Apart from Malta’s reputation, there is also a moral issue here. Young people might spend a number of years here supposedly getting a degree while wasting thousands of euros and years of their lives only to end up with some useless piece of parchment in the end.

Does Malta feel comfortable cheating them like this?

This is not a minor detail which should be left for Daphne only to deal with. This is Malta’s future we are talking about, and we should all be up in arms. Daphne is the one who noticed immediately that the government’s deal is with a Jordanian contractor and hotel operator and not with a university, American or otherwise, who said it first and began asking questions.

But now the Opposition and the press should blow the whole thing out of the water. This is a frightening scandal not only in and of itself, but because of the insight it gives us into the way Muscat and his cronies – and not all those cronies are in politics – are dealing beneath the surface.

Muscat’s plan for Malta is to come up with ever more schemes to sell fairy dust, snake oil and ambrosia to foreigners from the undemocratic, non-free world. Eventually, someone is going to catch onto us and God help us then.