Some Professors Are Surprised to Be on a University's Roster

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Call them the phony faculty members. Their names appear on the Web site of Preston University, an unaccredited institution here. But they have never taught a course

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for Preston or supervised any of the university's students.

Preston has a list of 49 faculty members on its Web site (http://www.preston.edu/faculty.html), which includes William Lieberman and Kenneth Dolbeare. But both -- selected at random and contacted by The Chronicle -- say they have nothing to do with Preston.

"I'm not affiliated with Preston and never was," says Mr. Dolbeare, who teaches political science at the University of Colorado at Denver.

Mr. Lieberman says he attended a meeting in California for potential faculty recruits to Preston, but never heard from its administrators again. He has a doctorate in psychology, and advises students at Southern California University for Professional Studies, a distance-learning institution based in Santa Ana. The university is authorized to grant degrees by the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education, but is not regionally accredited.

"I thought that probably the university didn't get started after all, or that they must have modified their plans, and not ultimately offered the kinds of courses I would have been involved with," he says of Preston.

Jerry P. Haenisch, chancellor and chief executive officer of Preston, has a simple, if incomplete, answer. Professors like Mr. Dolbeare and Mr. Lieberman usually end up on Preston's faculty list, he says, because they responded to a university advertisement seeking professors with doctoral degrees to supervise students.

"They send us their transcripts and credentials, and we put them on our faculty list and say, 'You're an adjunct faculty,' " he asserts. If Preston enrolls a student seeking a degree in that professor's field, the student will be paired with the professor, but "for 50 percent of our faculty, that never happens," says Mr. Haenisch. He acknowledges that it is misleading for the university to say Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Dolbeare are Preston professors, and admits that only about 15 of the 49 faculty members listed on the institution's Web site actively teach students or serve as mentors.

But that hasn't stopped the university from continuing to capitalize on their unknowing faculty members. More than three weeks after Mr. Haenisch's acknowledgment that Messrs. Lieberman and Dolbeare have no connection to Preston, they continue to be listed on the institution's Web site.

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