Low Marks : Summit University Under Fire by State and Some Students

Like many busy adults, Sue Simmons of Ventura and Robin Golden of Port Hueneme were searching for ways to stretch their limited time to gain college degrees.

So they were elated when New Age bookstore owner Gertie Horek told them about Summit University of Louisiana.

Horek met the women at her Telegraph Road bookstore in Ventura, The Monad Center. (Monad is a Greek word expressing “oneness,” she said.) She told them Summit was “a university without walls.” There, learners designed their own study programs and met with tutor/advisers on schedules tailored to their personal timetables.

What’s more, Horek said, their “life experiences” would count significantly toward their degrees. Simmons, 45, could get a doctorate in transpersonal psychology, and Golden, 37, a bachelor’s degree in nutrition science in a scant eight months, Horek said. Their tuition price tag: $2,500.

This was no flimflam operation, the women were assured. Summit’s brochure contained glowing endorsements from respected professionals who had accelerated their academic careers. In fact, one of Summit’s graduates, Charlotte McElroy, is principal of the nearby Anacapa Middle School.

“My experience during the pursuit of my Ph.D. was the most worthwhile educational experience in my entire career,” declared McElroy’s endorsement.

That was two years ago. Since then, Simmons and Golden claimed in a successful Small Claims Court lawsuit that they were lured into a scam by a school operating illegally in California.

“It was a bogus degree,” Golden said recently. “I felt ripped off.”

State officials, too, declare that Summit has been breaking the law, recruiting instructors and students without a permit to operate in the state. A law that went into effect in January was designed, in part, to rid the state of illegal diploma mills. Under it, schools must limit the credits a student can receive for work experience, set faculty standards and establish a curriculum.

Sheila M. Hawkins, a consultant with a watchdog agency in Sacramento spawned by the new law, said the people running Summit are engaged in questionable activities orchestrated through a New Orleans mail drop designed to circumvent the statute.

“They have told us they wouldn’t provide educational services in California,” said Hawkins, a consultant with the Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education. “But we continue to receive information to the contrary.”

The next student complaint against Summit, Hawkins said in a recent interview, would trigger a referral to the state attorney general or a county district attorney.

Melvin Suhd, who helped pioneer the Summit educational concept, accuses Hawkins of trying him in the media.

“She’s making statements without due process,” said Suhd, 66, a resident of the Northern California community of Rohnert Park. Suhd suggested that bureaucrats--such as Hawkins--are firing broadsides at Summit because the school doesn’t fit most people’s perception of a college education.

Summit board Chairman Frank A. Johnson, 62, of Newbury Park said Summit is not a diploma mill. Instead, he said, “it’s a different type of educational experience.” Furthermore, said Johnson, minister of Church of the Oaks in Thousand Oaks, “I don’t know anyone getting rich off it.”

But Suhd sees a potentially huge market for Summit abroad. With this in mind, he said in an interview last week, he wants to train provosts to recruit students worldwide. Asked if his new concept was akin to franchising education, Suhd pondered. “Franchise?” he said. “It’s a dirty word. But it’s OK.”

A professor at a Bay Area university who requested anonymity said he was contacted by a Summit official this month to be a provost and had been making plans to conduct interviews in Taiwan. “There’s a huge market there,” he said. But the professor said he backed out of the deal last week after learning of Summit’s problems.

Suhd’s resume says he is a Michigan native who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Wayne State University in Detroit. He has been an administrator, teacher and lecturer at a number of schools, including Eastern Michigan University, it says.

By 1974, Suhd helped found University Without Walls/Berkeley, Summit’s forerunner. And the next year, he established an umbrella organization for the school, the Assn. for the Integration of the Whole Person, which has tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. That same year, the school moved to Los Angeles and, eight years later, changed its name to Sierra University, A University Without Walls.

Sierra is now located in Costa Mesa in Orange County and has no ties to Summit. It is one of 134 degree-granting institutions in California that are not accredited, but are licensed to do business here. Their credits and degrees, however, cannot automatically be transferred to accredited institutions.

Confident he was carving a unique niche, Suhd and five other trustees then founded Summit University of Louisiana in 1988. Under the Summit system, about 70% of its $2,500 tuition fee goes to the trustees, all of whom live in California, the balance to the school’s bank account in Louisiana. The trustees, then, had the option of acting as tutor/advisers or farming out the job. Horek of the Monad bookstore, for example, said she received $1,500 from trustee Johnson for each student she tutored.

Up to 200 students, about 90% of them California residents, enrolled at Summit between 1988 and 1990, according to internal Summit data provided to The Times. This translated into revenues of about $500,000, the records indicate. But Suhd provided more modest figures, estimating that fewer than 100 California students have paid the school’s $2,500 tuition fee since 1988.

There was no way Summit could have been licensed in California because it couldn’t meet state criteria, such as offering a course list, Suhd said. “To avoid any harassment from the state of California, we need to have an office and a phone number in Louisiana,” he wrote a colleague in 1988.

Suhd located Summit in a strip mall in New Orleans, between a military surplus store and a video rental shop. Recently, it moved to a one-story house facing Lake Pontchartrain, purchased by a limited partnership in which Suhd has an equity interest. Until this year, when it enacted a new law, Louisiana had lax school policing regulations.

Simmons and Golden said they heard about Summit and enrolled in the fall of 1989. Their tutor, Horek, 55, has a doctorate from Sierra and also teaches adult extension courses in numerology and psychic awareness at Ventura College.

The smell of incense wafts through her bookstore, located in a small office building. Titles such as “Crystal Enlightenment,” “Creative Dreaming” and “Vibrational Medicine” stand on the shelves. In the back is a small, Spartanly furnished classroom for students such as McElroy. “She was an excellent student,” Horek said.

However, McElroy, 51, the Anacapa Middle School principal for the past seven years, didn’t receive a pay increase after receiving her doctorate two years ago because Summit is not accredited, said a Ventura Unified School District source.

Reached last week in Washington, D.C., McElroy said she attended Summit “for personal development. It was not my intent to make more money.”

Thwarted in their requests for tuition refunds, the women said they had to file their lawsuit, which alleges that Summit was granting illegal degrees in California.

In an effort to counter the litigation, Suhd wrote the court last February that Summit “does not offer instruction in the state of California . . . does not contract with faculty in California or any other state.”

The Ventura court didn’t buy Suhd’s story. In May, a judge ordered Summit to refund tuition to both Simmons and Golden.

On May 9, the same day Golden and Simmons won their case, Hawkins sent a letter to Summit’s trustees notifying them “you are operating in violation” of state law.

Then came what Suhd called “the confrontation,” in July in the office of Assemblyman Sam Farr (D-Carmel), a lawmaker who chaired an accreditation panel. The panel’s mission, recalled Farr, was to “clean up diploma mills.” Among those attending was Hawkins, her agency boss, Kenneth Miller, and trustees Suhd, Johnson and David L. Schwartz of San Francisco.

“They were told they needed a state agent’s permit, as required by law, if they recruited students in California,” Hawkins said. “They said they wouldn’t provide educational services in California.”

Suhd said last week he concluded after the meeting that Summit was not completely conforming to California law. But, he said, it has since the meeting.

Following the meeting, Summit’s trustees resigned and became directors, Suhd said.

“This is the word game we play with them,” Hawkins said last week. “At the meeting they also called themselves advisers. They keep renaming themselves. Not only are they a ‘university without walls,’ they’re chameleons.”