🚀 go-pugleaf

Hundreds of netters were outraged and disgusted to find out that a cerain
Pyotr Vorobiev, a "tenured" graduate student at Lehigh University, has misled
them by falsely claiming to be a professor at his "University. Such fraud is
not appreciated on the Internet. Recall that impersonating a sysop is grounds
for immediate termination on America Online. If a student at a reputable school
were caught impersonating a professor, he's be subject to severe disciplinary
sanctions. But Lehigh "University" is a very special case. Its reputation is
already so bad that it can't be further harmed by Peter Vorobieff's antics.

Consider, for example, the December 1995 issue of the _Notices of the American
Mathematical Society_. Pages 1538 and 1539 contain the table ranking U.S.
institutions of higher learning by their scholarly quality and educational
excellence, based on the study by the National Research Council. I took the
liberty to type in a few entries from this table:

School:                                           Ranking:

Ohio State University                             29
  (home of Sergey Viznyuk)

City University of New York
  (where I've earned by doctorate)                30.5 (tie)
Johns Hopkins University
  (home of Sasha Kaplan)

Boston University                                 51
  (home of Lzheravvin Strel'tsov)

University of Kentucky                            71
  (home of Marina Nikolayevna Sorokina)

Lehigh University                                 97
  (home of "Prof." Pyotr Vorobiev)

That's right -- Lehigh "University" ranked 97th out of 101 schools!

You might be curious to know what other schools have been ranked close to
Lehigh "University". I've never heard of these schools:

Wayne State University                  94.5 (tie)
University of Missouri-Columbia
Colorado State University               96

Only 4 schools out of the 101 managed to rank _below_ Lehigh. They are:

University of Hawaii at Manoa           98
Polytechnic University                  99.5 (tie)
University of Oklahoma
University of Connecticut               101

I've never heard of these schools either. In fact, most people on Internet have
never heard of Lehigh "University", except in connection with Pyotr Vorobiev's
Usenet forgeries. Apparently, letting the notorious net-abuser loose is Lehigh
"University"'s perverse way of putting itself on the world map. Their marketing
people must think that lousy publicity is better than no publicity at all.

The graduate student Pyotr Vorobiev qualifies to be a "professor" at this mail-
order diploma mill. Probably none of their real "professors" have Ph.D.'s.

The entire report can be found at URL http://www.nas.edu.

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<a href="mailto:dlv@bwalk.dm.com">Dr. Dimitri Vulis</a>
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps