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Head of bogus isle
Associated Press
online university is
apparently at it againOLATHE, Kan. -- A former Olathe resident who was fined $3 million in April in Hawaii and Kansas for misleading students of a now-defunct online university is now claiming that students can get a master's degree in business administration from another, new online university that is cheaper and better than Harvard.
Just who wrote that claim for new "Amherst University" is a bit of a mystery, but authorities say signs point to Leslie Edwin Snell.
Snell was found guilty this spring in Kansas and Hawaii of violating the states' consumer protection laws. A Johnson County district judge fined Snell $1.5 million, and a judge in Hawaii assessed a $1.5 million civil penalty.
With $3 million in judgments against Snell, "for him to start something new that is relatively easily traceable to him just seems astonishing to me," said John Bear, a California author who researches the credibility of nontraditional university degree programs.
In July 1999 the Hawaii Office of Consumer Protection filed a lawsuit in Circuit Court alleging that Snell's Monticello University was not accredited and that its Kailua corporate address belonged to a base house on Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Station where relatives of Snell's and other defendants lived.
The lawsuit also said Thomas Jefferson University's corporate address was in Kailua-Kona, but the address was for Crossroads Shopping Center.
In that lawsuit, defendants also were accused of deceptive representation by implying the schools had staff and faculty when in truth they were operated only by Snell and a handful of his family members.
Amherst University claims to offer MBAs based on the curriculum of the Harvard Business School. It is not affiliated with either Amherst College, which is a liberal-arts school in Massachusetts, or Harvard University, officials of those two institutions told The Kansas City Star.
"You can be sure they will be hearing from us," Amherst College spokesman Paul Statt said.
The new Web site was registered by "LES," with a Johnson County address that proved to be nonexistent. The email address of the company that registered the Web site is one Snell has used in the past.
In addition, the Web site says that Amherst University is accredited by a body formed by Amherst trustees. Snell's defunct online school, Monticello University, made a similar claim.
The Web site states that students can earn an MBA by completing 14 courses for $177 apiece, or $2,478 overall. Textbooks can be purchased from Harvard, Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble, the site says.
To pass a course, a student is supposed to read a textbook and then answer five questions such as, "What is the author's main purpose in writing?" and "How will you apply the information you learned to your current profession?"
The Web site has been registered since April 10, according to NetCorps.com, the company that registered the name. Homestead.com, a company that offers free Web sites, confirmed that it was the site's host but declined to say how long the site had been up. Advertisements for Amherst University appeared last month in USA Today.
Snell's whereabouts were a mystery for much of the last year while the Kansas attorney general's office investigated him, Monticello University and almost a dozen other entities the former Johnson County insurance agent had set up. His location remains uncertain.
Jeffrey Brunton, an attorney for the Hawaii Office of Consumer Protection, said he was shocked when he recently learned of the new Web site. It certainly looks like Snell's work, he said.
"Obviously, monetary fines and injunctions don't faze him in the least," Brunton said.
