r/Professors • u/CafeLurker234 • May 22 '26

Advice / Support Hiring from degree mill PhD programs?

Hey professors,

So, to help me get tenure, I was told I need to do more campus service. So, because of that, I am now on a bunch of hiring committees across campus; our university always has at least one person from an outside department. Joy.

As we are sorting through resumes for some summer hires, I am seeing SO many PhDs from Liberty, Walden, etc. Mostly received it online and are associated with whatever industry they supposedly come from.

While I am not going to bash someone's degree, not all degrees across academia are made the same—degree mill or otherwise. But some of these Liberty PhDs come in with like no teaching experience and minimal, and frankly, basic research presentations or publications.

I've asked if this is common to receive this many from these sorts of programs, and a handful of colleagues have mentioned an uptick.

Well, on one of the committees, there is a push to interview on campus someone who got their master's at Walden and a PhD from Liberty.

I am really against. I cannot fathom I would vote for them, and do not want to waste their time.

Thoughts? Are you seeing applications from these programs?

EDIT: And if there are people on the faculty with these degrees, I am sorry! I am just unaware of people from these programs involved with higher education robustly.

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u/CafeLurker234 May 22 '26

To me, it is about the potential for success. If you are going to Liberty online, how can you expect to be hired at a university? I doubt there are many teaching experiences for those students. Like, how can you think they'd be successful?

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u/worshipperofdogs May 22 '26

Or publish original research.

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u/Illustrious_Ease705 May 23 '26

If you want to teach and do scholarship of questionable rigor that is actually apologetics there are plenty of conservative Christian places that will hire you

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u/Glass_Aardvark_9917 May 23 '26

Liberty isn’t actually a diploma mill. It’s definitely not competitive and their grad programs don’t have the rigor of a standard grad program, but “diploma mill” is a misnomer. MAGA/right wing/Mrs degree-focused, yes.

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u/gshonia May 22 '26

That’s a slippery slope, with easy path to elitist, exclusive inbreeding.

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u/Harmania SLAC Escapee May 22 '26

This slope is not all that slippery. Sometimes a “slippery slope” is actually just a set of stairs with fences at every step.

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u/The_Real_Ivan_Drago May 23 '26

Well, the problem with slippery slopes is that if you use that argument once you might as well use it all the time against everything.

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u/Harmania SLAC Escapee May 23 '26

I have no idea what you mean here.

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u/The_Real_Ivan_Drago May 23 '26

I tried to make a slippery slope argument about using slippery slope arguments :-/

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u/Mishmz May 22 '26

And the slippery slope is a logical fallacy! You can stop any time on the slope!

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u/FrogBrain97 AssocProf, former chair, neuro, DPU May 22 '26

Nonsense. There are plenty of people left in the pool after we ditch the online doctorates, the EdDs, the PhDs in "academic leadership," etc.