University of Illinois physicist George Gollin has done the world a great service. Annoyed by those pop-up ads that promise to sell you the degree of your choice for cheap, Gollin decided to look into the institutions that are selling such degrees and the people who are buying them. He put together a massive onlive archive of "schools" that are actually fronts for fake degrees, along with an overview of his research, detailing how he locates a diploma mill; showing how these mills lift their course catalogs, web content, and promotional photography from the sites of legitimate schools; showing how they clone one another; and, finally, showing how some incredibly stupid people actually post their fake educational pedigrees online, for all the world--or at least all fake diploma-hunters--to see. Some of these fraudulent folks are working in the education and health care industries. The employees of businesses that failed to do decent background checks, they are lawsuits--and tragedies--in the making. Don't miss Gollin's overview--among other things, it is a breathtaking display of the beauty of Google.

Gollin's findings are so striking and so authoritative that he was featured last summer in a CBS news special report. You'd think the University of Illinois would be proud to have Gollin on its faculty, and would hold him up as an example of the sort of level-headed, judicious engagement with issues in higher education to which all university faculty should aspire. In an era when faculty are frequently accused of living with their heads in the sand, and when their attempts to address questions of policy frequently come off as shrill, manipulative, and ideologically-driven (remember Nicholas De Genova?), work such as Gollin's should be recognized for what it is: solid, scrupulous, and undeniably worthwhile, a true instance of the "service" that is part of every professor's job description.

That wasn't how administrators at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana saw things, however. When some of these fake universities threatened to sue the school, the school's response was not to defend Gollin's academic freedom and to stand by his right to publish the results of his research, but to tell Gollin to get the problem material off the university's server and to rationalize their decision to do so by describing the work he had done as outside of his area of professional expertise, and therefore as undeserving of the protection academic freedom otherwise provides. There was no attempt to verify the accuracy of Gollin's work or to determine whether the legal threats had any basis in fact. There was simply a desire to get the controversial material Gollin had posted off the university's server in order to deflect a potentially unpleasant wrangle with people who appear, by all accounts, to have absolutely no case. Fear of a lawsuit--even a scurrilous one--was enough to make administrators censor the work of one of its faculty. It was also enough to make them come up with an absurd justification for that censorship, one that insults the mission of higher education and that chills the academic freedom of everyone on campus.

Gollin's work--which does stand up to careful scrutiny--is now housed at the Oregon Student Assistance Commission Office of Degree Authorization. Alan Contreras, who is an administrator there, says Gollin's work is "superb," and adds, "We think it's a very helpful consumer-protection tool."

You can read more about Gollin's case in The Chronicle of Higher Education and in the Daily Illini, and you can read some excellent commentary on it at Eric Rasmusen's site and at the Volokh Conspiracy.