Virginia Commonwealth University Improperly Awarded Degree to Police Chief

In an incident that mirrors the recent scandal at West Virginia University where an executive M.B.A. was improperly awarded to the governor’s daughter, an investigation found that Virginia Commonwealth University awarded the state’s police chief a bachelor’s degree despite his failure to complete certain degree requirements, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Virginia Commonwealth U. Reports to Accreditor on Improper Degree Award,” Sept. 8, 2008).

A report issued to Virginia Commonwealth’s accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, noted that Rodney Monroe, now the chief of police for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, did not meet the commission’s 25-percent rule where 30 credit hours — or 25 percent — of a student’s undergraduate coursework must be completed on the campus of the college granting the degree.

Instead, Monroe was allowed to transfer a full 118 credit hours from the University of Phoenix and the FBI Academy toward the 120-credit requirement for graduation.

The report also found that Monroe had only satisfied 15 of the 28 academic requirements needed to earn a degree in interdisciplinary studies, and that the degree could not have been properly awarded “unless this student had been afforded preferential treatment at the admissions, curriculum, and graduation stages of the student experience.”

After a thorough review of its degree-conferral practices, Virginia Commonwealth University concluded that only two of 15,000 undergraduate degrees were improperly awarded since 2003. Virginia Commonwealth maintains that its degree-conferral standards still meet accreditor requirements, but may still be subject to sanctions if the commission finds that the school has not taken enough steps to prevent a recurring incident.

University officials are allowing Monroe to keep his degree, since they didn’t find any evidence of academic misconduct on his part, however, the dean of Virginia Commonwealth’s University College and the dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences resigned during the course of the investigation.

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