How Real is that PhD?

How Real is that PhD?

 

 

          We live in a world where a person’s expertise is judged by the level of their education and experience. Employers and universities evaluate prospective personnel based on degree subjects, research topics and publications. Education, after all, is for the training and grooming of experts that keep societies around the world functioning, now and in the future. But how accurate is education as a gage for expertise?

          Like many people in the past few years, I have found working one job does not allow for much financial comfort, so I have also been self employed as a freelance translator and a ghostwriter.  When I first looked into ghostwriting I had the notion it was mostly autobiographies, but soon discovered that most writing projects would be academic works for PhD candidates. Of course, there were also many jobs for high school assignments and undergraduate degrees, in addition to both master’s and doctorial dissertations.

          Though cheating is unethical, one could almost overlook the struggling high school or undergrad student paying for some difficult writing assignment. However, advanced degrees are indicators that the owners know what they are doing and their skills can be trusted. Okay, not everyone is a good writer, so you could still be a master in your field and not be able to put together a high quality thesis or dissertation without professional help, but there is simply no excuse for those studying for doctorates to hire writers.

          People holding PhDs are expected to write and publish in academic journals. They are called, Doctor, and held in high regard; their research is scrutinized and quoted by other professionals.  But how many well respected individuals with PhDs really know their subjects or did their own work to earn that respect? I know of at least twenty people running around with the title of doctor based on work that I did for them. I don’t know their names as that is always confidential, but at around $700 a paper it did not concern me at the time. 

          After two years of hard work I recently earned my Master’s in Law. I know that I am knowledgeable in the law because I studied and did all my own writing. I am also very learned in risk management for international investing, cancer research, biometrics, airport planning, forensic pathology, railroad systems in Saudi Arabia and juvenile delinquency in the UK.  I cannot call myself, Dr. Chadwick, because I was not the one enrolled in those PhD programs.  I cannot claim to be an expert in the above topics, but those who can did not earn the right to do so.

          I could still use the extra cash, but cannot bring myself to do work that other people should be doing if they want that degree. Education used to mean something, and I will no longer contribute to helping those that do not have the capability of doing academic work earn that distinction.

          There is no shortage of companies willing to write dissertations for a price. How long this practice has gone on is anybody’s guess, but there are more of these ghostwriting businesses on-line all the time.  So the next time you hire an expert based on PhD qualifications spend a moment wondering if that person actually did their own work.

D.A. Chadwick  MSL

 

Conspiracy Theorists

    The Conspiracy Theorists May Be Right. The Chimera Project Background

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 70s my father worked in US Army intelligence at the Pentagon. He used to tell us the scariest stories you could imagine about underground alien bases and warned us about playing in the woods near an old Air Force installation. If we heard something like air brakes while in the woods we were to run like hell for home as the government had an arrangement with the aliens that involved allowing them to have humans for experimentation. This was long before the Commander X books were published and the hundreds of web sites and television shows on aliens inundated the public.

I didn’t think much about these stories except that Dad was a good storyteller. It was not until I read the “Commander X” books  that a chill ran down my spine.  I had heard all of this information two decades earlier when my father also told us about a “shadow government” that President George Bush admitted to not long ago. Many of the things he told us have turned out to be true or have come true recently, so now that he has passed away there is no  reason to not share the hair-raising tales about Hangar 18, our sudden technological advances and the truth behind AIDS and resistant cancers.

My novel “The Chimera Project” is inspired by what I now know to be factual information relayed to us in the form of bedtime tales of horror. The Chimera Project contains more fact than fiction and should scare the hell out of anybody.

Was Joan of Arc a Peasant Girl? The Evidence Says No!

Was Joan of Arc a Peasant Girl? The Evidence Says No!

Questioning the tale of the Maid of Lorraine.

The story of a passionate, religiously devout nineteen year old woman saving France has long been a favorite of school girls (myself included), but how realistic is it?

As the story goes, Joan was born in 1412 in Domremy, France to Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romee who also had a number of other children. At age 13 she began to have visions of angels while tending the animals in the fields. These visions were of the saints, Michael, Marguerite and Catherine. They told her that she was the maid who would save France. These conversations went on for several years. The young girl spent a great deal of time in church talking with the priest and praying. When she heard church bells ringing Joan would drop to her knees where ever she happened to be. She told the voices, her “counselors” that she was just a girl and could not do as they demanded. She did not even know how to go about saving France.
In her late teens the voices rather aggressively insisted that Joan do as commanded, it was God’s wish. This was no easy task, but turned out to be much easier than it should have been for an illiterate peasant girl. She began by talking her cousin into escorting her to see Robert Baudricourt, captain of Vaulcoulers. At first Baudricourt blew Joan off and sent her back home insisting that she needed a good spanking. He finally relented after some months and took her to see the dauphin (prince) Charles. Placing Charles on the throne was the vehicle required by the voices for saving France.
The first clue that things were not quite as they seemed was the fact that Charles, instead of just officially meeting the girl, hid among his courtiers to see if she would recognize him. Recognize him? How would a peasant’s daughter know someone she had not seen or had any interest in before? This has been viewed as a miracle, proof that God guided her as Joan went right to him. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that perhaps Charles already knew Joan and her parentage and feared the consequences of the meeting. He also did not trust her until she told him a secret in private, which was probably what he wanted to hear-that Charles VI was his father. It must ever have occurred to him that maybe Isabeau was not his mother, even though they had formed no bond whatsoever.
Charles was eventually convinced of her mission with much influence from his guardian, Yolande of Aragon who was married to Louis II of Anjou, her father- in-law was Charles V of France and her son, Rene d’Anjou, who would ride with Joan throughout her military career. Joan was eventually given an army by the dauphin Charles and the opportunity to oust the English, so that he might be crowned.
Joan displayed an extraordinary ability to led men and an uncanny knowledge of artillery, not to mention that she could ride as well as any of the combat veterans. She often had her own methods of accomplishing military objectives as her voices disagreed with the strategies of the commanders. They were victorious and the dauphin Charles was crowned, but not in Paris as Joan had hoped. That great city was still held by the English.
This is the point where things begin to go wrong for the passionate young woman. Charles no longer wished to keep up military campaigns as they were expensive (and he was a bit of a sniveling wimp) and he was now King of France, Charles VII. Joan was becoming an inconvenience. If Joan had just gone back home she probably would have lived out her life uneventfully, but she truly believed in a united France and could not see that diplomacy would accomplish that goal. She continued the fight.
Joan was captured at Compiegne on May 30, 1430 when the town folk closed the draw bridge and would not let it down for fear of losing the city to the English. She was held prisoner and moved several times until her Condemnation trial. Joan’s ransom could have been paid by Charles VII, but instead she was sold to the English. The Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, went to great efforts to be appointed her judge even though the case was out of his jurisdiction. She was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake May 31, 1431.  Or perhaps it truly was Claude des Armois, the impostor who burned instead?
It was with Cauchon that the mother of Charles VII, Isabeau of Bavaria, drew up the Treaty of Troyes, which knocked him out of the line of succession, thus requiring the intervention of Joan of Arc in the first place. Her grandson, Henry VI of England would rule when old enough and until then his father, Henry V would rule as regent. The problem with this arrangement was that both Charles VI and Henry V died within a few months of each other leaving the infant Henry and Charles de Ponthieu to vie for the French throne.
Is it really such a mystery why Isabeau of Bavaria would team up with the Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, in the Treaty of Troyes to side step the dauphin Charles when it became clear that he was not king material, and make her grandson, Henry VI the next heir to the French throne? Isabeau’s daughter was Catherine de Valois, queen of England. The power would have stayed in the family with young Henry on the throne. Isabeau has been painted in a very bad light thoughout history, perhaps without just cause.
There had always been rumors about the parentage of Charles VII; most gossip consisted of Charles being the illegitimate son of Isabeau of Bavaria and Louis II, his uncle. He was very self conscious and defensive of such ideas and the talk continued well after the Maid of Lorraine burned at the stake.
Twenty-five years after Joan’s death a Rehabilitation Trial was ordered by Charles VII, which determined that the first trial was unfair and the reputation of Joan the Maid was restored. There was a great effort made to establish her roots in Lorraine as the daughter of the two lower class residents of Domremy, Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romee.
This is a very condensed version of the life of Joan of Arc, but will allow us to examine a few of the alleged “facts” of the case.
When I first began writing my novel, Rennes le Chateau: The Road to Sion, I didn’t really believe that Joan was illegitimate aristocracy or that she could have escaped the stake, however, I began to look at her story like the law student that  I was then and asked what I considered obvious questions. I also found surprising, but entirely logical answers.
In villages like Domremy it was unlikely that a family would have lived so exposed with marauding, unemployed knights running about raping, pillaging and setting people on fire. As the story goes, the inhabitants of Domremy would run to the fortified town of Greux for safety. Such a scenario is not very reasonable. There simply would have not been enough time or warning for entire families, which would have included the elderly and infants, to even run the short distance to Greux. Villages like Domremy were most likely occupied by healthy male farm laborers who could have defended themselves. Families lived in more secure walled towns.
There are other problems with the Joan growing up in Domremy story. The first being, which town called Domremy was it? In the fifteenth century there were four other villages on the Meuse River called Domremy and others called Greux. If it were indeed the village now in the department of the Vosges, there is a question about the house reputed to have belonged to her parents, Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romee. The house now shown to tourists was built in 1481, long after she allegedly died in 1431, by the son of Charles VII, Louis XI.
Even the identity of Jacques is questionable as I point out in the book,
“The man who was supposed to be Joan’s father had several names throughout the time period; Jacques Tart, Jakes Delarch and Jacques d’Arc, so his identity is questionable. There was a man named Arc who was the tax collector for the Duke of Lorraine, but he did not live in Domremy.”
The fact that people attacked Isabelle Romee at the beginning of the Rehabilitation Trial is perhaps a good sign that people knew that she was not Joan’s mother. The Rehabilitation Trial is amazing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is used to declare that the life of Joan of Arc is the most well documented of all medieval historical figures.
Indeed, there were a great many witnesses claiming to know her and at first this is impressive, until you consider that we are talking about fifteenth century France when a person was considered old at age 40 and lucky to see age 50. Twenty-five years later, we have nearly everyone who knew Joan as a girl still alive and their memories crystal clear. Not just clear, they also tell the exact same stories with the same details and this should catch the attention of any first year law student.
So who was Joan of Arc really? In a nutshell, since it took an entire book to develop this theory, she was the legitimate daughter of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria. Charles was indeed the illegitimate one and he knew it. Why would the king and queen of France wish to switch babies? The first motive would the most obvious in that they wanted a male heir. The Salic Laws prevented females from inheriting titles, thus putting France at the mercy of whomever Joan married.

When Joan began hearing voices and dropping to her knees at the sound of church bells, her parents would have thought their fears justified  that Joan had inherited the same mental illness as her father, Charles VI. The political risk of Joan being queen of France would have been enormous since  Isabeau had to often take the reins of the kingdom when the king would gallop down the palace halls howling like dog. The political landscape of fifteenth century France was volatile and fractured at best. France could not afford another weak ruler.
A thorough reading of the Condemnation Trial transcript sheds a different light on the questions asked of Joan and her responses when you consider that she was royalty. It would also explain why a nineteen year old woman (though she was probably closer to age 24) would speak to men as equals or inferiors and order nobility around without a second thought. A royal upbringing would also explain why Joan seemed to know so much about military strategy, particularly artillery, and her excellent horsemanship skills. If Joan were really the true queen of France, it would explain the hatred displayed by some of the English and the obsessive need of Charles VII to use the whole Maid of Lorraine story to convince people she was a disillusioned nobody.
The real truth of the Joan of Arc story will probably never be known, but it is not the set in stone tale that historians declare it to be. There are far too many unanswered questions and more than enough reasonable doubt that Joan was not an ignorant peasant girl.
D.A. Chadwick

Copyright 2009 by D.A. Chadwick

The Stolen Archives of The Singing Nun-Soeur Sourire (Jeannine Deckers)

There seems to be a renewed interest in the Singing Nun or Soeur Sourire of 1960s fame with the release of the new movie this April, Soeur Sourire starring the actress Cecile de France. Like the movie by MGM in 1966, The Singing Nun, the Belgian film is a fictionalized account of the life of Jeannine Deckers who joined the Dominican order at Fichermont convent at Waterloo, Belgium in 1959 and became Sr. Luc Gabriel.

Writing a biography on Deckers was a long and difficult process that I hope will be much easier for biographers in the future, that is, perhaps now her private journals and photograph albums will be archived by the Belgian government and made available for research. If not, Loyola University has expressed an interest in housing them for an exhibit on influential women. Dr. Susan Ross, Director of The Gannon Center for Women & Leadership is quite interested in honoring Jeannine and will certainly do an excellent job of preserving them.

There would have been many biographies of Deckers but for the unfortunate death of her manager and executor, Jean Berlier, who had kept her private papers and journals at his office where writers such as Florence Delaporte could access them.  Prior to Berlier’s death a businessman named Luc Maddelein “borrowed” the documents that included her vast number of photo albums for a supposed book.  Berlier died while Maddelein still was in possession of the documents.  Since that time, Maddelein has controlled who could view them and use them for research. He could do this because, sadly, no one in Belgium cared enough to do anything about it.  He claims to have nothing but honoring Jeannine as a goal, but his actions have indicated otherwise. I and an associate of mine, Mary Donnelly, of Loyola University wrote to the King and Queen of Belgium to ask that they take possession of Deckers documents for archiving, but we never received a response.

When first contacted by Maddelein he wanted to co-author a book with me in English with himself as the lead writer. Since he does not write English well, I was not really interested as it meant that I would have to translate his writing from Flemish to English-a good deal of work on my part.  He also wanted to write a fictionalized novel, which I had no interest in doing. Before I could even view a page of Jeannine’s journals he wanted me to sign a business contract.

Luc Maddelein claims to be the pre-eminent expert on a woman he never knew-that is easy to do when you steal, then hoard her personal archives for yourself. He will allow access if you completely agree with his assessment of Deckers and you will collaborate with him.  He is no professional and tells only the story he wishes to tell.

About this time I began to have serious doubts about his legal rights to documents belonging to a nonrelative that he essentially stole in the first place. To make a long, horrid story short, Maddelein refused me any access to her documents, including the journals I was particularly interested in.  Further evidence that he has no right to own the Deckers papers is in the fact that he hid them at an associates apartment building for six weeks.  This same associate recently tried selling a postcard of Jeannine’s for $500 on eBay.

Maddelein has written a picture book with Leen van de Berg and the present film on Deckers, Soeur Sourire, was suggested to the Belgian director Stijn Coninx by Maddelein and his co-author. The actress,Cecile de France also worked for three years to ensure the film was produced. The film is in French and currently available in limited regions.  From what I have seen so far, it is closer to reality than the MGM film of 1966 and covers the entire life span of Deckers.

Yet, it is another fictionalized account of her life and is based on the assumption that Deckers and her companion of 25 years, Annie Pecher, were lovers.  The beauty of writing fiction is that one does not have to be burdoned by the facts.  In Music from the Soul: The Singing Nun Story we tried to present a clear picture without too much speculation.  The only two people who know the reality of their relationship are dead.  I certainly do not argue that the two women loved each other and were very devoted, but they cannot speak for themselves and it is not up to any of us to “out” either one of them.  As far as Jeannine was concerned, she never really stopped being a nun even after leaving Fichermont. It should be remembered that Jeannine and Annie took vows of celibacy not required by the laity, so in my view it is disrespectful to assume that they broke those vows.

In the end, I wrote a biography on Jeannine Deckers with Florence Delaporte and in the process learned to translate French well enough that I do it for a living, so in that respect Maddelein did some good in refusing me access to the journals.  My concern with yet another fictionalized movie is that people will take it heart as they did the Debbie Reynolds film. Deckers had real problems that need to be addressed, not the least of which was the total lack of support for women leaving religious orders. When she tried to get help for psychological problems it lead to a dependency on prescription drugs and her intense struggle with her sexuality is one in which many can identify.

There should be many more books on the life of Soeur Sourire, in which different writers can discover new angles in viewing the tragic life of Jeannine Deckers. And there are many unanswered questions. No one person should control access to the documents of a celebrity, especially someone with no right to possess them.  I do not believe that Deckers would approve of this situation  since she was taken advantage of her entire life and duped by those claiming to represent her best interests.  It seems that she has not escaped this phenomon even in death.

Hopefully, since Americans essentially created the phenomenal success of Soeur Sourire, there will be a movie based on her life made here for her many English speaking fans.

Jeannine Deckers

Annie Pecher