Throughout his career with Alabama’s two-year college system, James Lowe has been a fix-it man, sent to turn around troubled institutions, including Bishop State in Mobile.

Lowe, who became Bishop State president in 2008, is now dealing with questions about his own academic credentials. His résumé lists a doctorate from San Francisco Technical University, a non-accredited school with a website that no longer is active.

Bishop’s dean of instructional services, Latitia McCane — who served on the Project Phoenix Team charged with preserving the school’s accreditation — also has been a focus of questions because of her doctorate from Lacrosse University.

Neither San Francisco Tech nor Lacrosse — both online schools — have ever had a seal of approval from the U.S. Department of Education.

“We just don’t see where either San Francisco Technical University or Lacrosse University have been or are accredited by a recognized accrediting agency,” said Tim Willard, a spokesman for the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

Lacrosse awarded degrees based on “life experience,” according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office report.

Lowe and McCane both said in interviews that they completed rigorous programs to earn their doctorates.

The degrees of Lowe and McCane have drawn complaints from at least one parent, and led to an inquiry by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

Last month, SACS issued a letter clearing Lowe and McCane of any violations that could threaten Bishop State’s accreditation.

The parent, Angela Goudreault of Grand Bay, continues to express concerns about Lowe’s qualifications and what she described as an inadequate response from the state two-year college system.

“He just doesn’t have the proper credentials to be called ‘doctor,’” said Goudreault, whose high-school-aged son earns college credits through a Bishop State program. “How many people have these credentials hanging on the wall who we expect to be properly credentialed?”

MBA for a dog

Vicky Phillips, who runs a website called GetEducated.com, which tracks so-called “diploma mills,” said that hundreds of fly-by-night operations advertise as institutions of higher learning but sell degrees of all kinds while requiring little or no academic work.

Many, Phillips said, award advanced degrees based on “life experience,” provided the student’s check clears.

“They change names frequently, which is a common tactic,” she said. “They’re very popular in the U.S. They’re very lucrative. ... The Internet has made it so much easier.”

Phillips said that advanced degrees often land people promotions or pay raises in their fields, and she added that most employers do not check educational degrees.

She said she enrolled her dog in a master’s of business administration program, at an online school called Roshville University, for $499. “And it took 14 days for him to get a degree,” she said.

Phillips’ website contains alerts identifying San Francisco Technical and Lacrosse as possible diploma mills.

Ironically, it was an effort to shut down diploma mills in Alabama that led to the adoption of a state policy in March 2008 that prohibits two-year system employees from using honorific titles or touting degrees from schools like the ones from which Lowe and McCane attained their doctorates.

The state Board of Education now restricts use of such degrees only to institutions that have been given a seal of approval by one of the nation’s six regional accrediting agencies recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

Freida Hill, the chancellor of the Department of Postsecondary Education, wrote in a letter to SACS that Lowe and McCane were “grandfathered” in because they attained their degrees prior to March 27, 2008.

“The policy’s guidelines address, in detail, the prospective nature of the application of this policy, thereby rendering it inapplicable to Dr. Lowe prior to the policy’s effective date,” she wrote in a letter last month.

Also, Lynne Thrower, interim vice chancellor of legal and human resources for the two-year system, noted that the president position at Bishop State did not require a doctorate.

“You can take that off the table, and he (Lowe) could meet the minimum requirements,” she said.

Bradley Byrne, the former chancellor of the system who tapped Lowe to lead Bishop State, said doctoral degrees may give applicants an edge in some instances, but would have made no difference in this case.

He said that Lowe would not have been able to hold the job if a degree required for the position had come from an unaccredited institution.

“If it was his terminal degree, I guarantee you, we would have taken action,” he said.

Byrne said that the new policy set a consistent standard for the use of academic titles. He said, for instance, that some people in the system wanted to call him “Dr. Byrne” because he had a law degree — a juris doctorate.

“We tried to get some uniformity in the system about who could be called doctor and who couldn’t,” he said.

Lowe’s degree vs. performance

Lowe, a Phenix City native, worked for the state Department of Education for more than 21 years, and eight years in the two-year college system. Administrators named him interim president of Northwest-Shoals Community College in Muscle Shoals in 2003, and interim dean of instruction at Phenix City’s Chattahoochee Valley Community College in 2004.

In 2007, when he was vice chancellor of the system, he got perhaps his most challenging assignment: restoring Bishop State at a time when it was stricken by financial aid scandals.

As interim president, he shouldered the task of saving the school when the U.S. Department of Education restricted the flow of federal aid. He was named president on a permanent basis in May 2008.

Lowe holds a 2003 doctorate in education administration from San Francisco Technical. The institution, which appears to be out of business, was never accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, according to an association representative.

Lowe, who uses the title “doctor,” said he enrolled in the online university because his job would have made it impossible to travel to a university to attend classes. He said he performed six quarters of coursework and completed a book-length dissertation on administrative supervision of higher education and community colleges.

“I was looking for what I thought was a good program,” he said. “It appeared I could get through it pretty smoothly.”

Lowe said he did not have to appear before a panel to defend the dissertation as doctoral candidates often do. Since he has moved several times, he said, he does not recall where he put his copy of the dissertation.

Lowe said he paid $7,000 to $8,000 in program costs.

Such an amount would be unusually low for a reputable university and should serve as a red flag, according to Gregory Scholtz, the associate secretary of the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at the American Association of University Professors.

Scholtz said that advanced degrees from reputable universities can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“If I had known it was so easy to get a doctorate, I wouldn’t have gone to the University of Chicago,” he said.

Scholtz said he found it surprising that a state college system would allow a president to claim a degree from an unaccredited school. He wondered how the system would view a rank-and-file instructor listing a similar qualification.

He said that accreditation helps ensure that a school enjoys academic integrity.

“The real question is the quality of the instruction,” Scholtz said. “Usually, some baseline for quality is whether an institution has been accredited.”

Lowe said he is proud of his record at Bishop State, noting that the college had solved its accreditation issues under his watch.

“When I first came here, there were all kinds of turbulence. ... Changing the culture was very difficult,” he said.

Lowe also pointed to enrollment, which has increased from 2,812 in fall 2007 to 3,952 today.

“I’m not a person who’s caught up in the titles,” he said. “My career speaks for itself.”

Byrne also praised Lowe’s performance.

“Jim Lowe has just done such a superlative job bringing that institution back from almost death,” Byrne said.

Lacrosse: Home was a strip mall

McCane came to Bishop State from Jefferson Davis Community College in Brewton, where she served as associate dean of instruction.

At Bishop State, the 1986 Citronelle High School graduate is the college’s second in command and earns $105,702 a year, according to spokesman Herb Jordan. That amount includes a $2,000 bonus for having an “earned doctorate degree,” Jordan said.

McCane attained the doctorate by going through the online program at Lacrosse University from 2001 to 2003. When she started, the school was based in Louisiana, but that state’s Board of Regents refused to renew the institution’s license.

Lacrosse then set up shop in Mississippi.

McCane said she did all of her work online and did not visit the campus.

In Mississippi, Lacrosse was operating in a strip mall in Bay St. Louis. It had no classrooms, labs or other facilities, according to an account in the Biloxi Sun-Herald.

In January 2004, according to the newspaper, Lacrosse’s website cautioned students to determine whether their degree program would meet admissions requirements of other schools, should they seek to enroll: “The university makes no representations, promises or guarantees of acceptability of transfer credit to any other public or private educational institution.”

McCane said she does not recall how much the program cost because it was nearly a decade ago. According to a 2004 story in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, the school’s website advertised tuition rates of $1,950 for a bachelor’s degree and $2,000 to $3,800 for various postgraduate degrees.

A 2004 GAO report stated that Lacrosse awarded academic credits based on life experience and required no classroom instruction. The school quoted a flat fee for a degree to an undercover investigator posing as a prospective student, according to the report.

Lacrosse shut down after the 2006-07 school year, following a review by the Mississippi Commission on College Accreditation.

The commission, according to its executive director, Menia Dykes, moved to force Lacrosse to gain accreditation with the state.

“They were advised of what the standards or requirements were, and I can’t speak for them, but they did not apply,” she said.

Dykes said that the commission never got into the details of the school’s offerings.

McCane said it would have taken four years to complete the doctoral degree under normal circumstances. She said she was able to finish in two years because Lacrosse accepted credits for post-graduate work she did at the University of Alabama.

“I did not know they had fallen on hard times since all this surfaced,” McCane said.

McCane said Lacrosse required legitimate work. She showed a reporter a copy of the degree requirements, which included 45 hours of online coursework beyond a master’s dissertation. She also showed a reporter a 158-page, hardbound book that she authored: “Past, Present and Future Trends in Alabama’s Two-Year College System as it Related to Education and Administration.”

McCane said she continues to use that work in her current job.

“They were very specific about the dissertation,” she said. “It took me over a year to do that. It’s excellent work, if I do say so. It’s the blueprint for how I do my job.”

McCane said that while Lacrosse did not have accreditation from a regional body, it did have national accreditation from the World Association of Universities and Colleges.

Willard, of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, said that the World Association is not among the 80 accrediting bodies that appear on lists approved by the council or the Department of Education.

“I can speak fairly comfortably that it has never been a recognized accrediting organization,” he said.

Faulkner State counselor also has Ph.D. from unaccredited school

Bishop State Community College President James Lowe and his second in command, Latitia McCane, are not the only local community college officials who have doctorates from unaccredited universities.

Vanessa Murphy, a counselor at Faulkner State Community College in Bay Minette, lists a doctorate from Lacrosse University. That is the same online institution from which McCane got her doctorate in 2003.

Murphy rejected any suggestion that she got her degree from a “diploma mill” that sells academic credentials for little or no work.

“Mine is legitimate,” she said in a recent interview.

Murphy said she began working on her doctorate in 2001-02, finishing in the 2005-06 term. She said she completed 40 to 50 hours of coursework online and wrote a dissertation focusing on trends involving nontraditional students.

Lacrosse University never has been accredited by an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. It shut down following the 2006-07 academic year after Mississippi authorities insisted that it apply for state accreditation.

Murphy acknowledged that proper accreditation is important in academia, a fact she stresses to students at Faulkner State. “I’m a counselor. I try to make sure they attend accredited institutions,” she said.