What Do Professors Have to Do to Get Fired? A remarkable indictment from the Department of Justice. By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-do-professors-have-to-do-to-get-fired-1507155109
The headline on this story is usually a rhetorical question, perhaps posed by parents wondering why they keep paying for the daily assaults on constitutional liberty and good sense that define the modern college campus. But there may soon be a definitive answer to this question, given recent charges filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Last Friday morning Mamdouh Abdel-Sayed, a a full-time lecturer at the City University of New York’s Medgar Evers College, was arrested and charged in Manhattan federal court with fraud, corruption, and obstruction.
According to acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim, the allegation is that Mr. Abdel-Sayed “abused his position to enrich himself by creating and selling fake certificates stating students had completed health care programs at the college.”
In a release from the U.S. Department of Justice, New York State Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott alleges that the defendant “brazenly abused the name and resources of his college employer to operate what amounted to his own fraudulent trade school on the grounds of the City University of New York. He allegedly traded on the reputation of Medgar Evers College and pocketed all the fees students paid while undercutting legitimate schooling being performed by his colleagues across the campus.”
The New York Times reports that the biology instructor “offered classes on medical techniques, such as CPR and administering EKGs, that he was not authorized to teach, investigators said. They said he pocketed the fees and printed certificates on college letterhead from his computer. He encouraged students to use the certificates when applying for jobs — sometimes successfully — at hospitals and elsewhere, investigators said. He often held the classes at Medgar Evers on evenings or weekends when the college was less crowded, officials said.”
And the allegation gets worse, according to the Times. Quoting investigators, the paper reports that “Mr. Abdel-Sayed also engaged in ‘unsanitary and risky procedures’ in his class in drawing blood when he handed out needles and ‘suggested that students could attempt to draw blood from each other.’” This column can only guess how patients might have been affected when treated by people who have only bogus credentials rather than legitimate medical training.
But perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is New York IG Scott’s comment that the “defendant ignored repeated warnings.” When the university believes it has caught a professor defrauding both students and the university while putting lives in danger, it lets him off with a warning? “Medgar Evers officials first heard about Mr. Abdel-Sayed’s classes in 2015, and ordered him to cease and desist. But he continued teaching them,” reports the Times.CONTINUE AT SITE
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