Oh goody: Bruce R. Booker's Degrees and Affiliations

So, a few days ago I received an email from Rabbi(?) Booker. It seems he had been trying to get in contact to let me know he was unhappy with my two paragraph review of his education, and that he had composed a stunning (29 page) refutation, "Bruce R. Booker's Degrees and Affiliations." Most of it is a cut-n-paste job, and I cannot help but wonder if this follows a pattern of Booker's early scholarship. I have no idea. If one of my students passed this in for credit, I would have flunked them.

Some weeks ago, I posted a short comment about Mail order theology degrees. The focus was on the educational qualifications of a creationist pastor, Graham Lovelady, of Ogden Utah. I wondered at what sort of education this genius must have received to be able to reject the work of thousands of dedicated scientists, and millions of pages of scientific results. I found that Lovelady had his "graduate degree" from a mail-order house called "Biblical Life College and Seminary." It turned out that the Biblical Life gang has their own in-house psychotherapy, which made it all the more interesting.

In my post, I reviewed the qualifications of some of the faculty members of Biblical Life College, based on their website vita. One of these was Bruce R. Booker.

Here is what the mail-order house has to say about "dr" Bruce R. Booker, Associate Professor of Hebraic Heritage Studies (retrieved Feb. 7, 2012):

B.B.S.—Biblical Life College & Seminary | M.A.—Columbia Pacific University | Ph.D.—Columbia Pacific University | Th.D. - Biblical Life College & Seminary.

Dr. Booker received s’micha (ordination) as a Messianic Rabbi through United Messianic Jewish Alliance. He currently serves as the Messianic Rabbi of Beth Yeshua Messianic Fellowship, Priest River, Idaho. Bruce has led several Messianic fellowships and congregations since 1989, including Beth Shalom Messianic Congregation, Sandpoint, Idaho, and Beth Shalom Messianic Congregation, formerly of Colton, CA - currently in Rancho Cucamonga, CA.

He is the author of several books including: THE LIE Exposing the Satanic Plot Behind Anti-Semitism, A Merciful Severity - A Study of Christian Anti-Semitism through the Centuries, God, Give me Patience NOW!, A Call to Holiness, and What If?

So, what do have here?

Four degrees from unaccredited mail-order schools, two of them supposedly "doctorates." As I wrote earlier;

Colombia Pacific University (CPU) was closed by court order in 2000, but the court did not review degrees awarded between 1978 and mid-1997. The first implementation of the 1989 Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education Reform Act was in 1991. Columbia Pacific University was given a provisional "grandfather" status until its degree programs, and faculty qualifications were reviewed. When this was done in 1996, this so-called school was found to fail minimal standards for a degree-granting institution.

So, “Doctor” Booker has quite a distinguished academic pedigree, one degree from an unaccredited correspondence school, two more from another unaccredited correspondence school that was ordered to cease and desist by the State of California for unethical, and unprofessional practices (i.e. awarding fake degrees), then back to the first correspondence “college” for another ‘doctorate,’ and then joining the faculty of his unaccredited alma mater.

There really is nothing to add. Rabbi(?) Booker's 29 page screed adopted the view that my post was all about himself, and not "pastor" Lovelady, or so-called "teleios therapy." For some additional fun, you might look over Booker's C.V.